The Wonder Cabinet in Palestine, designed by the Bethlehem and Paris-based practice AAU Anastas, has been honored with the prestigious 2025 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The project stood out among global submissions for its innovative approach to cultural infrastructure, serving as both a haven for creativity and a bridge between design and production. Conceived to support architects, designers, chefs, artisans, and sound and visual artists, the building demonstrates how architecture can simultaneously catalyze community engagement and economic enterprise. The award jury specifically highlighted the project as exemplifying resilience and optimism through design, recognizing its potential to reshape how cultural spaces function in contested territories.
The architectural language of the Wonder Cabinet deliberately adopts a calm, rational aesthetic inspired by common Palestinian typologies featuring ground-floor commercial "garages," a central staircase, and upper-level housing. The building's proportions are based directly on the dimensions of these traditional garages, repeated in plan and section to create a familiar yet transformed spatial experience. Constructed like infrastructure with minimal finishes, the design is intentionally unintimidating, encouraging occupants to manipulate the space freely. This approach reflects the practice's concept of "global provincialism," which they developed in response to the constraints of practicing architecture under occupation, including land expropriation, territorial fragmentation, and material scarcity. The project became a process of survival, forcing the architects to expand architecture's realm to encompass art, culture, industry, sound, and cooking.
A defining feature of the design is the diagonal void that connects three floors and links street level to valley level, creating a powerful vertical and horizontal connection throughout the building. This internal void is crucial for cross-pollination of knowledge and extends public space into the building's core, maintaining visual connections with the outside world. The void also creates potential performance areas for installations or artworks, effectively turning the building itself into a stage for whatever is produced within it. Combined with an East-West orientation that ensures daylight throughout the day, and a simple structural system of perimeter columns holding beams embedded in the slab thickness to span 11 meters, the design allows for complex interactions of wind, light, and program despite its straightforward skeleton.
The building's flexibility has led to surprising moments of community appropriation that exceed the architects' expectations. Spaces transform rapidly from production workshops to experimental dance performance venues, with different uses coexisting in unexpected ways. The architects report that their welders have attended experimental dance performances because they needed to work simultaneously in the same space, creating unique juxtapositions of activity. Dance, welding, ping-pong players, and chefs all coexist in a space that sometimes seems to disappear as boundaries between programs blur. This spontaneous adaptation demonstrates the success of the design's open-ended approach, where the community continually reshapes the building's function.
The hillside site between street level and valley level presented both challenges and opportunities that shaped the final design. The internal void enables natural cross-ventilation, while the simple structural system allows for future modifications. Beyond physical connections, the architects have fostered social infrastructure through a neighborhood committee that gathers local residents to collectively enhance their environment, focusing on planting, trash organization, and common logistics. Their vision extends to transforming this committee into a local media hub, organized around weekly gatherings and publications, to lobby local authorities for neighborhood interests and create a political community. This integration of social and physical infrastructure represents a holistic approach to architecture's role in community building.
Looking ahead, the Wonder Cabinet's evolution continues as its community grows. The architects plan to hold their first summer school next year, with the long-term hope that the building will become an experimental art and architecture school. They remain committed to being reactive rather than prescriptive, allowing the community to shape the project as experimentally as possible. The model challenges the idea of culture as mere entertainment, advocating instead for spaces that are inherently political—not only toward the Palestinian cause directly, but globally political in addressing labor rights, art world elitism, and the flattening effects of international cultural funding. The Wonder Cabinet stands as a radical response: a demonstration that culture must be central and radical to create meaningful change in contested landscapes.
