Amman Design Week may have been on hiatus since 2019 but when the Jordanian Design Biennial returned earlier in October 2026 for its fourth edition, it was with remarkable verve and confidence, as if the intervening years had almost never happened. Twice as long as the 2019 edition, with almost twice as many participating designers, Amman Design Week consisted of major multi-designer exhibitions in the Ras El Ain, Jabal Al Lweibdeh, Jabal Amman districts of Amman as well as in the beautiful rural setting of Iraq Al Amir, a 45-minute drive west of the city centre.
For the first time the event also had a presence outside Amman with a satellite installation in collaboration with arts organisation Wujud in Aqaba, Jordan’s only coastal city in the south. There was also a vastly expanded talks, tours and workshop programme overseen by architect and curator Khaled Al-Bashir, that ran the gamut from an experimental six-week weaving residency run by Jordanian textile artist, weaver and wool researcher Ishraq Zraikat to guided tours through community-led agroecological projects outside Amman, and talks on the history of printing in Jordan and Palestine to music performances in collaboration with Amman-based Al Balad Theatre.
Amman Design Week 2026: 'Accumulations'
The theme for this year’s event was Accumulations. 'The suggestion here is that the project hasn’t happened for seven years but the practices and designers have been showing up and working hard throughout that time and, to use the word, accumulating knowledge and skills and transferring that knowledge,' says this edition’s exhibitions curator, Faysal Tabbarah. 'So it's an acknowledgement that there has been work in the last seven years but also an acknowledgement that any work that happens here builds on work that came before us,' add the new co-directors of the event, Amman-based architects Bisher Tabbaa and Sarah Hejazin.
Initially, the theme was Accumulation, singular. 'When we added the “s” about three or four months into the work and made it plural, it was a significant moment for us and allowed us to have multiple narratives at the same time,' explains Tabbarah.
The layers and narratives are very evident in the work on display. There is attention to context, to local resources, vernaculars, inherited knowledge and materials, but also to contemporary questions of identity, social issues or geopolitics. A fantastic example of the latter is the research-based video piece by Iraqi and Armenian (respectively) architects and researchers Farah Alkhoury & Tigran Kostandyan that delves into the toxic legacy of US imperialism in the Global South and the environmental violence of poisoning soil, water and air, which has cumulative and devastatingly long-term effects on humans.
There’s also a lot of focus on collaboration, between designers but also between designers and artisans, manufacturers or 'existing regional labour networks' as Tabbaa calls them, who are always explicitly credited. A good example is Syrian-Lebanese graphic designer and visual artist Ranim AlHalaky’s collection of glass vessels in various shades of blue, green and amber whose original forms derive from the fact that the glass was blown into abstracted metal typographic structures representing the designer’s grandmother’s voice.
'It’s a way of translating sound into a visual and spatial language,' explains AlHalaky. The project was made in Damascus in collaboration with one of the last remaining traditional glassblowers, Ahmad AlHalaak. 'He became an essential part of the design and making process and the work developed through our combined presence, knowledge and exchange,' she explains.
The objects and pieces on display in the flagship site of the Ras El Ain Hangar, a beautifully renovated and light-filled 1930s former electricity hangar nestled in a valley surrounded by Amman’s hills, as well as in the more domestic setting of Darat Abu Adnan (see below), cover a range of functionalities, says Tabbarah.
There are the 'explicitly functional' pieces, for example, the highly versatile indoor/outdoor (Dis)Connect 2.0 chairs by local architects Daniel+Qusai that are not only modular but allow the user to select the shape and colour of each component and then assemble them themselves.
There are the 'vaguely functional' pieces, such as the weird and wonderful inflated steel ‘cabinets’ by Studio Sarah Nagawi, which explore ‘concavity’ and create ‘function through deformation’.
Lastly, there are the 'provocatively functional' objects such as Sufra, a tactile ceramic dining table named after the Arabic word for a cloth or table used to serve food. Designed by Raya Shaban, it features 80 ceramic tiles, some of which have been pressed to form receptacles for food. 'It provokes questions about how we eat, how we sit at a table and how we share,' says Tabbarah. 'So there’s a narrative embedded in it.
Outside the Hangar, there are more works both in the courtyard and across the street in Ras El Ain Park. One of the latter is a permanent installation, a colourful 30m-long basketball pitch painted by local graphic designer and illustrator Abeer Anabtawi and adorned with pictures of tomatoes, wheat and chamomile as a tribute to the food that used to be grown in this area thanks to its abundant springs.
Not far from here an existing outdoor space with stepped seating in the Al-Hussain Cultural Centre is transformed and framed with vaulted structures made out of local stone by Syrian architect Wesam Al Asali that function as seating, stage and enclosures. Using a lightweight vaulted technique that has remarkable structural integrity used to be prevalent in the Arab region and 'is an attempt to bring a construction technique back to its natural place,' says Al Asali.
North of Ras El Ain, in the Jabal Al Lweibdeh district, is Darat Abu Adnan, a beautifully preserved 1950s house and one of the few remaining heritage homes in the area, renovated by its new owners, local coffee-making company Al Ameed Coffee, which has been active since the 70s and plans to turn it into a year-round cultural venue.
It was host to most of Amman Design Week’s public programme and also its Student Exhibition, which showcased the work of 47 students, from schools, universities and institutes who were mentored with designers for nine months.
On the roof, where talks and performances took place, Sharjah-based practice Architecture + Other Things had created a colourful backdrop of yellow water tanks as a nod to the roofscapes across the city that are used both for water storage and as communal or family spaces.
'They are also an explicit gesture to the history of water in Paris square, where the house is located,' says Tabbarah. 'Paris Square was once known as Dawar Al Hawuz (The Reservoir’s Roundabout) as it held an overground water tank that distributed water across the neighbourhood.'
After all this urban activity, a reprieve from the city was offered in the rural and lush setting of Iraq Al Amir just west of Amman. Here Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, whose career took off during Amman Design Week’s first outing in 2016, had filled the evocative ruins of a 2nd century BC palace called Qasr Al Abed with 200 glass snails and figs.
Blown by hand in Jaba, Palestine, she calls them the unfinished castle’s 'first residents' and a tribute to the ecological past and present of an area known for its historic relationship to water and the springs, creeks and ecologies that have sustained life here for centuries.
Nearby is a well-known women’s cooperative who, she explains, 'work a lot with ceramics and natural materials'. Because of its aquatic past, the soil in this area is very different from elsewhere in Jordan, and the clay is very special too so 'there’s a strong relationship to craft'.
During Amman Design Week, hikes to the palace included a visit and meal at the women’s cooperative, encapsulating the ambitions, thoughtfulness and scope of the event. Design is nothing if not the people, histories and contexts that make it and this comeback edition of Amman Design Week brought all those intertwined relationships to life beautifully.