Decoration One Aqaba Boutique / FADAA

Text description provided by the architects. Located in Aqaba, the only coastal city in Jordan, this project’s ultimate goal was to show how the innovation of a new material can play a role in mitigating climate change, create a circular economy, and allow the growth of tradition and culture.

Working alongside Decoration One’s craftspeople, a materiality-driven approach created the concept of a flexible retail store that embraces craft and low-carbon materials. Re-imagining the role of the Mashrabiyya, a bio-based concrete Mashrabiyya not only functions as a sun shade to protect from the harsh south sun in Aqaba but also extends spatially into the boutique to drive the retail experience. As a means of locking the sequestered carbon of the shells of oysters, mussels, and clams from the waste of seafood restaurants in Aqaba, the shells were crushed and used as aggregate to create the bio-based, low-carbon concrete Mashrabiyya.

We have been collaborating with craftspeople in Amman, as well as seafood restaurants in Aqaba and Amman, to collect their waste and use it as one of the main ingredients that make up our sea bricks. The circular nature of the project exemplifies how local circular economies, combined with minimally processed low-carbon materials, can contribute to reducing the carbon emissions associated with the built environment. In order to allow this material to potentially become a new vernacular, we worked with Concrete Masonry Unit workshops, which have existing technologies that we seamlessly adapted to create a new sustainable method of construction.

In order to accommodate the changing collections of Decoration One’s designs, flexibility was integral to the brief. The flexibility was achieved by using modular oak wood tables and curtains that divide the space based on each season’s collection. Contrasting the wood modules, hand chiseled local Basalt and Limestone tables played a spatial role in the boutique and created alternative ways to display the products.