The Palestinian Museum designed by Heneghan Peng Architects opened to the public on May 18, 2016 with opening ceremony. The Palestinian Museum is devoted to celebrating, preserving, and exhibiting the history, culture and society of modern and contemporary Palestine. Nestled among Birzeit’s rolling hills and cascading terraces, the Museum is conceived as a physical and virtual space that brings Palestinians together in a shared exploration of their past, present and future.

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

The landscape of the Palestinian Museum has the ‘worked’ quality of a city; every element of it has been touched and tells a story of intervention, production, culture, environment, commerce. Like a city, the terraced landscape has embedded within it its history. The approach to the Palestinian Museum is to draw on this history of the terraced landscape, embedding the museum into its immediate site and drawing from this site to tell a larger story of a diverse culture.

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

The site is formed through a series of cascading terraces, created by field stone walls which trace the agricultural terraces of the area. The theme of the landscape, from the cultural to the native landscape, unfolds across the terraces with the more cultured and domesticated terraces close to the building, the planting changes gradually as one moves down the terraces to the west.

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

The cascade of terraces tells a diversity of stories, citrus brought in through trade routes, native aromatic herbs, a rich and varied landscape with connections east and west. Terrace themes include: cultural landscapes and themes relating to culture and history, agricultural heritage, relationship of plants to trade routes and commerce, natural landscapes and themes relating to wilderness and native plants, scrub lands, grass lands, nature & culture: incorporation of native plants into domesticated agriculture and food/medicine.

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

The building itself emerges from the landscape to create a strong profile for the hilltop both integrated into the landscape yet creating an assertive form that has a distinctive identity. The building is sited to take maximum advantage of the view to the west and is clad in a local limestone.

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

Image © The Palestinian Museum 

Image © Heneghan Peng Architects

Image © Heneghan Peng Architects

Image © Heneghan Peng Architects

Project Facts

Architect: Heneghan Peng Architects

Client: Welfare Association

Project Managers: Projacs International

Size 3,500 m2

Status: Complete

Location: Birzeit, Palestine

Collaborators:

Landscape and Garden Design: Lara Zureikat

Local Partner (Structures, Civil, MEP, Cost): Arabtech Jardaneh

Structures Civil Concept: Arup

Building Services Concept: Arup

QS: Davis Langdon AECOM

Concept Lighting: Bartenbach Lichlabor

Fire: Arup

Top image: From the opening © Molly Hunter / ABC News

> via The Palestinian Museum/Heneghan Peng Architects