Shatha Malhis, " A Delicate Balancing Spatial and Urban Institutional Metaphor: Mamluk Madaress " , "The proceedings of the ISUF2011 New Researchers' Forum.",Vol.,No., , Montreal, Canada, 08/01/2011
:الملخص
Mamluk Empire was a great patron of art and architecture, their monuments came to represent the paradigm of Islamic architecture for subsequent generations. This paper looks at the architectural development of the educational buildings (Madaress) of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria throughout both Mamluk Bahri (1260-1382AD) and Later Mamluk Burji(1382-1517 AD) periods. The investigation operates within the hypothesis that Madaress architecture is not merely an architecture that represents a certain era or location, but a social-cultural manifesto, whose content was dictated by the period’s social and religious needs .In this paper, Madaress architectural language is defined by tracing its evolution in light of the spatial needs that fueled its development. A representative sample of a wide group of educational buildings (Madaress) located in different sections of the empire and built within different contextual and architectural purposes, is reviewed. These examples epitomized the architecture of the period and indicated the different factors that had role in shaping the physical and spatial character of those institutions.
Shatha Malhis, " The Aesthetic Appreciation of Forms in a continuously developing Region: Identification and interpretation. " , "The proceedings of the 40th Edra Annual Meeting of the Environmental Design Research Association.",Vol.,No., EDRA, City, Missouri, USA., 05/31/2009
:الملخص
Whereas the Jordanian local architecture of the 19th and mid 20th centuries has long represented the cherished
inheritance of regional cultural roots and modern architecture, the giant steps in the last two decades to set
pace with the world and join globalization were viewed by many as testimonies of years of cultural
submission to international and foreign models. Despite many studies, which documented the nature of
architecture that systematically wiped out townscape, the symbolic meanings, the current environment
communicates to the public, have not deserved any systematic study. Guided by the belief that architectural
perception is developed in accordance with the accumulation of knowledge generated by socio-cultural
behavior, a comparative environmental experience research is supposed to reveal traces of continuity and/or
change in people’s aesthetic appreciation and reflect their reactions to the current change. A study to examine
the connotative meanings laypeople and architects infer from various design trends overtime, and the
variability of those meanings with socio-demographic characteristics, is expected to clarify myths of
legitimacy surrounding new trends and illuminate the extent of global influence over Jordanian and regional
architecture.
As the subject of this paper is the interaction between people and forms, the paper tries to understand
systematically this dual relationship. By relating inquiries to the work of a group of researchers who focused
on environmental aesthetics paradigms (Canter, 1977, 1993; Nasar, 1992; Groat, 1992; Berleant, 2004), the
paper maps the topics that control the logic of the people as far as their environment is concerned. It tries to
search for a socially based vocabulary that could enable the built environment to be read by the groups.
To this end, and as part of a broad investigation of the continuous evolution of the architecture in Amman
(Malhis, 2008), two experiments were designed in order to assess certain aspects of people’s environmental
experience towards examples of local, popular, modern, late modern, and fashionable projects. While
experiment 1 took place in the year 2002, and involved a diverse sample of 22 architects and 40 adults in
Amman, experiment 2 took place in the year 2008. It involved the same number of architects and 80% of the
earlier adult interviewees of the year 2002, who were available and agreed to participate again and to answer
the same/modified questions. Tasks involved rank ordering of certain designs in terms of desirability, and
recording feelings on bi-polar scales. The relationship between the different measures of affective experience,
as well as how this relationship was altered by examples from different chronological periods was of interest.
Also investigated were the similarities and differences in people’s chronological aesthetic and environmentalresponse
profiles. These similarities and differences at the different stages were related to the
cultural/chronological origin of the investigated examples. The research has shown that while the judgments
of some trends remained stable, change and even reversal were noticed in the judgments of others.
Shatha Malhis, " The visual perception of the façade that might activate the universe of the signified in viewers’ minds. " , "Proceedings of the Fifth Sustainable Urban Environments Conference,",Vol.,No., , Oxford, England, 01/01/2002