Amman Design Week built 13 guesthouses for migratory birds across Amman

Jordan lies on migration routes between Europe, Asia and Africa, with large numbers of birds of prey, storks and songbirds passing through the Jordan Valley each spring and autumn. Amman Design Week co-director Sarah Hijazin posed the question of whether the city can provide birds with places to land and rest.

Turn Jordan's tradition of welcoming travellers into a city-wide network of guesthouses for migratory birds stopping over on the Europe-Asia-Africa flyway.

Thirteen designers and design teams built birdhouses installed across Jabal Al-Weibdeh and Ras Al-Ain. Omar Darwish's 'Sparrow Building' (Binayat Al-Douri) scales a residential block down to sparrow size; Jessica Aziza and Yasmine Tamas built a pair of houses for Palestine sunbirds modelled on the crevices of Jerusalem stone architecture; Nada Barqawi's 'Sinw' layers mosaic over clay to blend into its host tree, echoing natural hollows. Eleven other designers took part.

Visitors to Amman Design Week (2–17 October 2026) can walk a trail of the birdhouses across the two neighbourhoods and consider their relationship to design, the environment and the urban landscape; no commercial metrics apply.

For Amman Design Week 2026, running 2–17 October, the organisers launched 'Nuzul' — the word for a place where travellers stop to rest. Thirteen designers and design teams created birdhouses installed at locations across the Jabal Al-Weibdeh and Ras Al-Ain neighbourhoods, giving migrating birds safe resting spaces as they pass through the city.

Co-director Sarah Hijazin framed the project as extending a hospitality tradition that is 'deeply rooted in our culture' to the millions of birds crossing Jordan's skies each year during seasonal migrations. The works are species-specific: Omar Darwish's 'Sparrow Building' turns the birdhouse into a miniature residential structure for sparrows, while Jessica Aziza and Yasmine Tamas's 'In the Nectar of the City of Cities' Flower' houses Palestine sunbirds in a pair of dwellings inspired by Jerusalem stone's crevices and openings.

Nada Barqawi's 'Sinw' draws on the natural hollows found in trees, designed to blend into its host tree with a mosaic surface layered over clay. The remaining contributors range from Abdullah Tabaza to Zaid Wahbeh, spreading the birdhouses across the design week's venues so visitors encounter them while moving through the city.

It inverts the usual public-art flow: instead of placing art in the city for people, it builds hospitality infrastructure for the city's non-human passers-through.

The naming does the conceptual work — calling a birdhouse a 'nuzul' recasts it as an act of welcome, not environmental decoration.

Species-specific designs make the ecology legible: you learn what a sunbird needs by looking at what its house imitates.

A cultural tradition can be the brief: 'Nuzul' borrows hospitality — Jordan's most shared value — to make an ecological issue feel native to the city rather than imported.

The birdhouses remain on show across Amman Design Week venues until 17 October 2026; the source records no longer-term plans for the installations.