RESIDENTIAL ENVIRONMENTS
2016
The semester dealt with the concept of 'home', understanding the complexity of a house and its essential programs, adapting it to the environment, and dealing with neighborly relations. The semester opened with the exercise of "boat, bridge, house" which its purpose was to stimulate the subjects that interested us, and to arrive at a design of our "ideal home". This exercise was even before placing our house into an existing environment; the house was modeled by looking at an object, accompanied texts and thoughts on the three elements. In the second half of the semester, we were divided into groups, each group receiving a different urban area. Each group made an analysis which included collecting, mapping, processing and presenting data about the area. The conclusions from the site analysis, and the first exercise led us to site intervention and planning. From the three concepts: boat, bridge and house, I went out to design the ‘ideal home’, where from every concept I took another element that together created a whole house.
The concept of ‘home’ is expressed in the use of walls that give order and guide the movement in and out of the home - to create a journey to the house and inside the house, a journey from the public space to the most private space. By duplicating the houses, we touched upon neighborly relations, understanding its complexity, and trying to solve the problems that arose. When I arrived at the Beit Hakerem site, located in the western part of Jerusalem, I first tried to understand what characterizes it as a neighborhood. My conclusion was that the neighborhood is characterized by the use of nature to create the streets and the locations of the houses. Beit Hakerem is an amazing attempt to combine the natural with the artificial in a way that does not harm nature but rather adapts itself to it. Therefore in my planning, I attempted to combine this characterization with other elements that were important to me to preserve the ‘ideal home’.
Led by: Sarah Genzel