Old Heritage, New Heritage: Building in Sana‘a, Yemen
Michele Lamprakos
In the 1970s, when UNESCO’s interest in Sana‘a began, the “old city” — with its re-
markable tower houses of stone and brick — was the city (Figure 1). Adjacent to it
were the walled palace precincts, several low-rise quarters from the Ottoman period
(also within walls), and beyond these, farmland. Within a decade, new development
had dwarfed the old city, robbing it of the social, economic, and cultural functions that
had made it a legendary place. World Heritage designation has, to some extent, created
a new role for the old city in the popular imagination. This also has had unintended
consequences — such as a new pride in the “Sana’ani style” and its application to new
buildings, especially residential architecture.
Sana’a’s transformation into a me-
tropolis and World Heritage city has
been rapid. Located in the remote and
mountainous north of Yemen, mod-
ernization came suddenly. The first
wave was political, a Nasserist style-
revolution supported by Egypt. The
second was social and economic: en-
trepreneurs and technocrats from the
south arrived to invest in expanding
infrastructure and to staff new institutions. Then, in the early 1970s, the oil boom drew
millions of Yemeni men to the Gulf. Many worked in the construction sector, and their
remittances fueled the largely unplanned expansion of the city. The returning construc-
tion workers experimented with the “villa” house types that they had built in the Gulf,
incorporating elements of local planning and embellishing facades with local flourishes.
Around this time foreigners and some local architects began to argue that the old city of
Sana‘a must be saved and that it qualified as a World Heritage site.
In the industrialized West and in parts of the Middle East, the idea of conserving “tradi-
tional” forms developed gradually, as those societies modernized and building practices
died out. In Yemen, by contrast, modernization and conservation have occurred side
by side. Traditional practices have not died out — and individuals in their 40s and 50s
see the houses they grew up in now exalted as “heritage” (turath). Perhaps because of
this rapid transition, in Yemen the term turath does not necessarily connote the “past.”
Michele Lamprakos holds
a BA in Near Eastern
Studies from Princeton
(1983); an M. Arch. from
the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley (1992); and
a PhD in Architecture
from MIT (History, The-
ory and Criticism/Aga
Khan Program in Islam-
ic Architecture, 2006).
She currently works as
an architect in Washing-
ton, DC with a focus on
historic buildings. Her
research interests include
the link between conser-
vation and sustainability,
and the history of build-
ing construction.Figure 1: View of the old city of Sana‘a, 1995. (Monica
Fritz, courtesy of the Aga Khan Visual Archive, MIT)