Elias and Yousef Anastas
Qamt
15 carved stone pieces
2019
Born into a family of architects in Bethlehem, Elias and Yousef Anastas are partners in AAU Anastas and the founders of Local Industries, a series of sleek, vibrantly coloured turbular steel chairs carrying the names of the artisans who crafted them. Born as a reaction to a systematic misuse of clad stone in Palestine, Stone matters is an ongoing experimentations-based research project examining the potential of including structural stone within the language of contemporary architecture, and which combines traditional craftsmanship with innovative construction techniques. The architecture of Palestine combines disparate architectural elements brought by various civilisations with local elements found in situ. In an attempt to blur the limits between local and global architecture, Stone Matters formalizes into a series of site specific real scale experimentations (a vault, a lintel, a slab, a wall), academic articles and a worldwide online atlas of stone architectural elements. The results of the research have been used in several projects. The commission Qamt, a circular lintel bench is the second experiment presenting systems of lintels inspired by stereotomy found in Jerusalem. It serves as a functional element as well as an illustrative architectural fundamental element. It is an effort to question the local and global exchange of techniques and trace unseen analogies between architectural forms across borders.