UIA Student Competition 2005
Program: Mixed Use
Categories: Building, Design, Architecture
Team: Joshua Freese Jordan Trachtenberg
Year: 2005
Location: Philadelphia
(re)occupation
a strategy for mitigation
UIA student competition entry Summer 2005
This project considers a future for Israelis and Palestinians where tensions are diminishing and more intimate contact and exchange including housing proximity are developing. Such a future would beg the question of the west bank wall. Could it serve only as an object to be removed as an obstacle to this emerging future, at best partially preserved as a monument to a troubled past. Or can the wall serve as an instrument of this future, a mechanism (re)imagined and (re)designed to support the proximity it once denied.
Our approach proposes phased inhabitation of the wall itself, instantly beginning the infectious growth that will lead to the corrosion of the walls capacity to be a divider and isolator.
We choose this project because we are very concerned by a world filled with
negative iconography, and the vague terrains that occur around objects of division which often hinder (re)development or (re)inhabitation near them.We consider the wall a potential instrument as well as an artifact; an integral member in both the physical form and historical development of the region.
