The Unlikely Ascent of Palestine’s Green Architects

One of the first thoughts Danna Masad had about the importance of architecture occurred to her in early 2002, during the Second Intifada.A period of intense Israeli-Palestinian violence rife with military incursions, daily checkpoints, suicide bombings, anger and political hopelessness, it was a surprising moment for a young Palestinian woman to have a career epiphany. 

At the time Masad volunteered with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, a local arm of the International Red Cross. “Ramallah was under siege and I remember entering cold concrete houses, which were covered in mold, and families living in the most dire conditions,” she recalled in crisp English. “Why were we building in this way?” 

Before that, in late 1990s, Masad studied in Palestine’s most prestigious architecture program, at Birzeit University north of Ramallah. Every day she would drive from Ramallah to Birzeit — a trip that should have taken 10 minutes, but stretched to an hour due to an Israeli checkpoint — weaving through a landscape of informal architecture that is biblical and congested at the same time. The haphazard urban layout situates the buildings in strange ways. Twelve-story apartment buildings cling dangerously to steep hillsides covered in ancient olive trees. The Birzeit campus reflects this tension, sitting like a fortress with lines inspired by Soviet architecture. 

After finishing her bachelor’s degree amid the simmering conflict, Masad moved to California to get her master’s in architecture from California Polytechnic State University. In 2009 she returned in Palestine, somewhat disillusioned but ready to change the way its cities were being built. To her surprise, others had the same idea.

Masad is part of a generation of Palestinians who came of age during the violence, political infighting and restricted movement of the Second Intifada, which began in 2000 and lasted for roughly four years. In 2007, the New York Times called her and her peers “generation lost” in an article about their dim prospects for professional or political opportunity. “To hear these young people talk is to listen in on budding nihilism and a loss of hope,” Times correspondent Steven Erlanger wrote.