New Damascus Room is a winter chamber, or قاعة، stripped of all ornament. Its low-rise, olive leather seating, marble floors, and wenge day system provide the quintessential markings of a late-Ottoman, Syrian home, but without stanzas of Arabic poetry, ‘ajami woodwork or inlaid stone.

 

Split into two areas, an elevated plinth for seating, the tazar (تزر), and an antechamber or entrance (درﻗﺎﻋﺔ), the New Damascus Room maintains the clever spatial distinction typically found in this interior space.

 

Adolf Loos’s minimalist proposition in Ornament and Crime, “Is ornament still organically related to our culture?”, evolves into a parallel question, “can Arab artisanship escape expectations of lyrical and material intricacy?

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