“The interaction between place and memory”.. A window on the architecture of Tunisian villages

In his book “The Interactions of Place and Memory: The Traditional Oasis Housing in the South of Tunisia as a Model”, published by the Sharjah Institute for Heritage, Dr. Zainab Kunduz Ghorbal sheds light on the architecture and environment of these oases villages in southern Tunisia, which are considered a living space whose contours and features are drawn. Inherited experiences incorporated into the design of their home.

A “sieve” wandered through the pages of the book, between the homes of the villages and towns which are in the center or adjacent to the oasis, be it desert, sea or mountainous oasis, and each has its own climatic characteristics and its influence is directly on the overall home, which is built from raw materials, and keeps pace with climate and weather factors. As external influences develop and grow its field, so the building itself is a product of this interaction.

The author points out that the oasis residence is an image of traditional urbanism in its forms, methods and tools, especially that the building simulates all this by embracing building materials and tools that are raw materials for its field, and there are models and images. of architectural forms that, before being a work of engineering and classified within the field of architecture, are a product of its environmental field. The chapters in 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 an examination of this spatial space from different angles. Through the chapters and pages of his book, Ghorbal examines the traditional oasis residential building in southern Tunisia with its various details, a facade, openings and outlets, rooms and terminals, and the connotations they have in the meaning of the building.

The book’s chapters register 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 missing from it, other than what you imagine it to be not non-existent, rather it is from the human aid on the grounds that memory is a human act 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 track.

The author of the book draws a detailed picture of the traditional suburban housing in southern Tunisia, as a traditional residential area saturated with symbols, noting that these symbols can be signs of memory or they are a marked memory that stops you, regardless where you look at housing in its smallest details, since it, i.e. housing, is my renewed memory store.

The traditional oasis house in southern Tunisia is a traditional residential area steeped in symbols.