Darat al Funun renovation

From the vicinity of the Nymphaeum, from the site of the Hussein Central Mosque, ran another street northwest. Part of this street was exposed by chance when the eastern side of the Haifa Hotel, an early 20th - century building just to the east of Arab Bank building, was demolished in 1997. In a northeasterly direction, this street had no choice but to split into a fork, at a point from which connecting steps could have led to the site of the Darat al Funun. Today, two millennia later, the situation is not very different.

When the main house of the Darat al Funun complex was built, around 1918, the surroundings had a different atmosphere from what we see today. Then, by the end of the second decade of the 20th century, the small market of Amman started to grow very rapidly, reaching a scale that exerted outward pressure, pushing the new residential construction sites uphill in all directions, to the sloping hillside of Jabal Jofeh, the Citadel. Jabal Weibdeh and Jabal Amman.

These new neighborhoods became fashionable with a construction boom, as is manifested in houses of a status different from those built by the Circassian settlers or the Fellahi houses built by some of the Balqa clans. Unlike that of the rural, peasant houses of the early settlers, the construction boom of Amman of the 20s was characterized by houses of unconventional sophistication, palatial, and in the tradition of the latest style then prevailing in cities east of the Mediterranean. Of the three Darat al Funun houses, the first and the third demonstrate most clearly the prototype then in fashion in cities like Beirut, Haifa, and Jafa. Strongly influenced by Venetian style, the examples found in Amman of the 1920s represent an extension of this Mediterranean architecture to the furthermost point towards the east, the brink of the Arabian desert. In Jabal Weibdeh alone, at least 30 houses were built of this period-style, most of which can still be found among the accumulating housing stock of later periods.