Safawi Fort: A Retrospective Analysis of an Early Conservation-Through-Use Proposal for Twentieth-Century Desert Infrastructure in Jordan

This article critically re-reads an unpublished late-1990s conservation-through-use proposal for Safawi Fort, the service unit of the H5 pumping station on the Kirkuk–Haifa pipeline in Jordan’s Northeastern Badia, prepared by the present authors as commissioned consultancy work. It addresses a specific gap: although adaptive reuse of industrial heritage is well theorised, little is known about how early, unbuilt reuse proposals in the region allocated programme to inherited fabric, why they stalled, and what they can teach present practice. The corpus (field photographs, plan, CAD and model views, two design proposals and the written programme) is cross-checked internally and corroborated externally against the independent 2022–2026 H5 survey, Iraq Petroleum Company records and three Jordanian comparator cases. A six-criterion compatibility rubric that includes technical and life-safety feasibility, and a four-level intervention-intensity classification, are applied. The authors’ dual role as designers and analysts is addressed through a Johari-window reflexive protocol and the reporting of disconfirming evidence. The proposal fitted accommodation into perimeter rooms, retained the courtyard as social core, concentrated wet services in an existing service zone and assigned craft production to the hangar; its low intervention intensity is explained by typological continuity between the building’s original residential-service programme and the proposed hospitality use, whereas technical risk concentrated where the proposal departed from that type. The analysis also exposes weaknesses: permanent courtyard platforms, unverified roof occupation, life-safety and accessibility gaps, an untested 50-guest capacity and a non-participatory process. Non-implementation is traced to the absence of an implementation budget, the building’s continued institutional use and a national policy context that gave the 1930s structure neither heritage status nor tourism investment. The archive is therefore valuable as a dated baseline and a tested precedent, not as a ready scheme; SDG targets 11.4 and 8.9 are used solely as an analytical lens applied by the authors.