| Summary: | The Palestinian vernacular is a key site for evaluating the messy dynamics between modern and vernacular architecture, suggesting a need for the re-conceptualization of the social and political implications of “vernacular” and its uses in historiography. This article explores the relationship between vernacular and modern dwelling environments by conducting close architectural analysis of certain key examples in Palestine following the Ottoman land modernization of 1858. The modernization of land ownership, cultivation, and registration produced a new built environment of wealth extraction and peasant dispossession that I identify here as “plantation.” Focusing inquiry on Acre and Jaffa’s plantation landscape, I examine rural mansions together with “back of the big house” worker dwellings and agricultural structures, which were all part and parcel of this landscape of extraction. I examine the architectural history of the Mazra’a and Hammed plantations and identify two housing forms as alterations of Palestine’s traditional-vernacular architecture: serf hut and landlord mansion. I show that plantation dwellings, created from the 1860s onwards, involved a change to construction methods and building materials found on-site or imported, and resulted in single-standing structures in campus settlement layout, where mud huts and multi-room mansions distinguished serfs from landlords. The plantation decomposition of the courtyard house typology produced a modern-vernacular built environment, calling into question the Manichean divide between “modern” and “vernacular” as two distinct and opposing frameworks. Pointing to the plantation as a modern vernacular—rather than aboriginal—typology, this article identifies the plantation as the materialization of the fragmentation of Palestinian society by modernity, a dynamic producing two opposing Palestinian national archetypes: a landed elite nationalism aiming to replace the Ottoman Empire, and a movement for land reform for dispossessed local peasants.
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