A book issued by the Sharjah Institute for Heritage

“The Interactions of Place and Memory” .. A Window on the Architecture of Tunisian Villages

The book's author paints a detailed picture of traditional oasis dwelling in southern Tunisia.

From the source

In her book “The Interactions of Place and Memory: The Traditional Oasis Housing in the South of Tunisia as a Model”, issued by the Sharjah Institute for Heritage, Dr. Zainab Kunduz Ghorbal sheds light on the architecture and environment of these villages in the oases of southern Tunisia, which are considered a residential space whose outlines and features are drawn. Inherited experiences embodied in the designs of their homes.

A "sieve" wandered through the pages of the book, between the homes of those villages and cities, which are in the middle or adjacent to the oasis, whether desert, sea, or mountainous oasis, and each has its own climatic characteristic, and its impact is direct on the overall housing that is built from raw materials, and keeps pace with climate and weather factors. As external influences, its field develops and grows, so that the building itself is a product of this interaction.

The author points out that the oasis dwelling is a picture of traditional urbanism in its forms, methods and tools, especially that the building simulates all of this by embracing building materials and tools that are raw materials for its field, and there are models and pictures of architectural forms that are, before they are an engineering work and classified in the field of architecture, a product of its environmental field.

The chapters of the book "The Interactions of Place and Memory... The Traditional Oasis Housing in the South of Tunisia is a Model", written by Dr. Zainab Kunduz Ghorbal, to serve as a reading in the interior space of traditional suburban housing, structure and meaning, and a study of this spatial space from different angles.

Through the chapters and pages of her book, Ghorbal examines the traditional oasis housing building in southern Tunisia, with its various details, a facade, openings and outlets, rooms and terminals, and the connotations they carry in the meaning of the building.

The chapters of the book record another presence of place and memory in the oasis dwelling, which may represent an external extension of the individual’s imagination and memory, explaining to the reader that this means that memory represents what is absent from it, except that what you imagine is not non-existent, rather it is from the human aid on the grounds that memory is an act Human, which makes the relationship between the preserver and the preserved necessarily known in existence, in what a person encounters and what happens to him, preserves or imagines after losing his trace.

The author of the book draws a detailed picture of the traditional suburban housing in the south of Tunisia, as a traditional residential space saturated with symbols, noting that these symbols may be signs of memory or they are a marked memory, that stops you wherever you look at housing in its smallest details, as it, that is, housing, is my renewed memory store.

 The traditional oasis house in southern Tunisia is a traditional residential space imbued with symbols.

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