Site Locations

Site 2: Sela - East Talpiot

Site 1: Sheikh Jarrach

Studio Program

1. Objectives

The studio will focus on the design of a neighboring center on different sites along the interface between East and West Jerusalem. We will question the role of public buildings within the urban fabric and how to address social, political and economic questions through the design of a building.

Throughout the semester, students are expected to engage with the realities of the site and its context and develop design strategies that can produce useful approaches to the problematic of contested land.

Therefore the studio will work in dialogue with different organizations and other important actors related to the site and respond to competitions and plans currently underway for the future of the threshold between East and West Jerusalem.

At the same time, students will be challenged to propose innovative design concepts, using the studio as a laboratory for developing a new architectural language that can address both far-ranging, global and transnational issues as well as local and everyday needs of neighboring communities.

2. Methodology

The studio will start with a short exercise in which students will immediately intervene in their site with a small scale installation that critically interprets the issue of neighboring. The intervention should include a spatial, material and structural maneuver. This initial exercise will serve as a ‘tectonic manifest’ to which we will keep referring during the rest of the semester.

After this first design experiment, we will focus on ‘siting’ the tectonic manifest concept by developing two- and three-dimensional drawings of the site in different physical, visual, social, economic and other ‘layers.’

This will be followed by a phase of programming in which students will explore the possibilities of the assigned program and in addition they will propose their own programmatic additions to the minimum requirements, both indoor and outdoor, private and collective

In a fourth phase we will focus on developing an architectural language for the project, a systematic approach to spatial, material and structural logic, revisiting the tectonic manifest. Students will investigate how this systematic design language can accommodate the aims formulated during former phases. Students will focus on developing a system that can generate a variety of spaces and adjust itself to different demands.

Finally, the former phases will be revisited and consolidated and elaborated into a well developed building that addresses functional, conceptual and structural parameters.

3. Intellectual Framework

The studio will work with three competitions that provide an intellectual framework for the studio.

Just Jerusalem is a competition organized by MIT as part of Jerusalem 2050 a larger research project that envisions Jerusalem in the year 2050 as a ‘just’ place. The competition calls for art, architecture and text submissions that provide visions for a future Jerusalem.

Sela Observatory is architecture competition organized by Sela Observatory Ltd. to propose an alternative non-hotel tourist attraction. Initially, the developer had proposed to build a large scale observatory tower on this site to provide a view to the Old City from above. The proposal was rejected by the National Planning and Building Committee who asked the developer to organize an alternative competition.

Lastly, the Open Architecture Prize is a competition established by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Architecture for Humanity. $250,000 will be awarded to the winning design of an open competition to develop e-connectivity centers for communities in need.

These three competitions will provide a framework for students to reflect on the possibilities of coexistence, develop a critical reaction to projects currently underway and generating communities in complex urban contexts. Thereby students will negotiate between symbolic and transnational considerations and the everyday life and needs of local communities.

4. Program

Students are asked to develop a ‘neighboring center’ that will provide spaces for the nearby communities, art display, internet connectivity and events. In addition, each student should propose an additional program, both indoor and outdoor that addresses and reinterprets the issue of neighboring. How to allow for neighbors to co-exist, how to provide spaces that can negotiate between conflicting realities, how to bring together converging identities, habits and everyday life, how to build secure spaces without creating segregation and negating opportunities for exchange.