Majed Namous
I live between architecture and waqf media, looking for the mark a person leaves on a place, and for the story worth telling.
About
I was born in Amman, and have moved between different cities and settings. Each of them added something to how I read a place, and to the way my eye was formed.
For years now I have found in Arab and Islamic architecture a language that goes past building: a memory of a place, and an expression of its identity and its culture. Out of that came work and projects spanning more than two decades, drawing on the spirit of that older architecture and presenting it in a contemporary reading that respects where it came from.
Alongside this, my work has been tied to waqf media and to documenting the impact of institutions and their initiatives. In 2021 I founded Athar Foundation for Waqf Media, as a space dedicated to bringing the impact of waqf into view, documenting its stories, and presenting them in a way worthy of what these institutions do for their communities.
Works
Athar Foundation
In 2021 I founded Athar Foundation for Waqf Media, and I run it. It came out of a conviction that the impact of an endowment is not complete in the making of it alone, but in documenting it, keeping its story, and carrying that story to people.
Since then the foundation has worked with a number of endowment institutions, documenting their initiatives and projects and bringing their impact into view — in a media language that gives this work the presence it deserves.
Al Majed Cottages
In 2023 I built Al Majed Cottages on Jordan Street in Amman, designing them and carrying out the work myself, from the first idea through to the last detail.
What mattered to me was that the spaces be considered and close to the person in them — that anyone who walks in feels a familiarity and an ease far from the usual character of short-stay places. I wanted each cottage to carry the feeling and the privacy of a home, and the architecture to be a quiet part of the experience rather than merely a frame around it.
Conversation
Some places are more than a photograph can hold, because they carry a larger meaning in memory. Al-Aqsa is one of them.
That is where the idea of the Al-Aqsa car came from: a different attempt to keep its image alive among people, and present in their memory and their hearts. My conversation with Al Jazeera was about that idea and its story.