A foray into new technology: no longer will I handcut chipboard...

I designed the following three 1/2" scale courtyard sunshade prototypes in Auto-CAD and used a laser cutter for their production. The laser cutter may be old news to some of you, but it was my first time using it! Really happy with how this experiment turned out!


Sunshade 1 is inspired by Villanueva's Public Library in Colombia. His mildly haphazard wood screens have an amazing light quality! Instead of wood, the slats would be 1-1/2" x 1-1/2" x 2'-0" stone bolted together. I really love this sunshade because it fits so well into the neighborhood's unpretentious construction techniques. Also, it offers a new interpretation of stone's materiality which has been one of my goals throughout this design process.

Sunshade 2 is derived from an iron screen at a church in Ramallah of which I took a photograph. I also got the idea for this when I was working on a laser-cut metal screen for a bar in the W Hotel in Atlanta as a winter intern at ICrave Design, a firm in New York. Sexy stuff! This screen is my favorite of the two oriental patterns! Materially, the two oriental screens would be made from paint electrically-applied onto metal.

Sunshade 3 is a pattern traced from a photograph of Bauhaus-inspired plaster walls framing a living room in a family friend's apartment in Tel Aviv. Simple and beautiful, too!

Strategy 2: Marketplace as suture using a Persian precedent

The next problem I need to resolve is how to connect three disparate functions, the marketplace, academic conference center, and water feature/playground.

This bazaar in Isfahan, Iran provides the perfect precedent:The commercial area along the serpentine pedestrian street acts as a suture for madrasas, caravanserais, and bathhouses reached behind from passages between the narrow shops. At each end are two large mosques that anchor the development.

In the IPACC, the water feature/playground and academic conference center banquet hall take the place of the two mosques at each end. The shops lead to academic breakout rooms, accessible ramp systems, and courtyards that provide periodic structured opportunities for people from different backgrounds to interact and as well as to obtain privacy. The plan also translates very well to my site's undulating topography.

Strategy 1: Stone pavers as a unifying visual element

Finally! I made a decision about the project's primary boundaries. It's been a real challenge because I always assumed that it needs to be a tidy outline where there is currently open space (see earlier March 4 site plan). Well, I'm going to play the dictator and lay an imaginary rectangle from the northeast corner where there is a playground, use the Golden Section (2:square root of 3) to determine the proportions, and mirror it across Road 1. Every outdoor, horizontal surface (road, sidewalk, etc.) within this rectangle will be repaved in stone by the Jerusalem municipality.

Sorry private property owners!

Clearly there will need to be an interesting variety of textures for the stone pavers - tumbled stone for the road, rockface for the sidewalk, and a stone-based aggregate for the bike path.

Dynamic boundaries: a forensic mapping exercise

Surprisingly, choosing a site for this project was relatively easy. This literal no-man's land in the heart of the city begs for redevelopment that bridges the gap between East and West Jerusalem. The area around my site and Jerusalem as a whole is a truly dynamic urban space. Its maps and the rhetoric in identifying the boundaries within them fluctuated significantly in the last 2,000 years (let alone the last 60 years) and will no doubt continue to do so. The following maps and supporting text in this post delve into a very small sampling of the last 150 years of maps related to Jerusalem, and give me better understanding of the past and current boundaries of the site and determine how they impact the project.

With better historical background, the question that arises is, what should be done on my site with these artificial realities? I would make the case for their acknowledgment, yet subtle dissolution. Entering from Nablus Road or Shmuel Ha'Navi, a person should be taken by surprise. They will wonder, what is this place I have entered? Who does it belong to? The answer is of course: everyone.

Existing site plan with project boundaries in a dash-dot line

At the lower right of the above map are the Olive Tree and Grand Court hotels. A yeshiva sits at the lower left with two- to four-story homes directly north. East of the site are one-story, dilapidated homes and the four-story Comite International Geneva (International Committee of the Red Cross). The site has a total slope of 40 feet from the northeast to the southwest.

(Pieced together using the Jerusalem municipality GIS website and
elevation points I took personally on-site using a Kestrel 4000 Pocket Weather Tracker)

The next five partial maps of Jerusalem highlight the common features in all maps I found from 1850 to today, the Sheikh Jarrah mosque (red crescent), Nablus Road (Derech Shechem: Hebrew) terminating in Damascus Gate (Bab Al-Amud: Arabic), and St. George Road. My site is blocked out in the upper left corner.

1865 Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem by Wilson

A pond, trees, and ruins are located on the site. An unpaved street running diagonally northwest-southeast provides the first clues for boundaries that influenced the 1949 Armistice Line that have since disappeared. A critical turning point to American and European zionist involvement in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, this map was initiated for philanthropic purposes (particularly in addressing the dearth of potable water) and is part of a greater 70-page document spearheaded by the British that led to the creation of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

(http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/maps/jer/html/jer201.htm accessed 2/25/09)

1926 Jerusalem by Survey of Palestine

Expansion outside of the Old City in the 40 years between maps is significant. Development around the mosque and immediately east of the project site can be seen. The pond still exists and caves on the west portion are clearly demarcated. The curving street on the southeast side appears for the first time.

(American Geographical Library, Golda Meir Library, UWM)

1945 Jerusalem by Survey of Palestine

Houses are shown at the northwest and southwest of the site. The solid-stone house at the southwest end still exists today and has been expanded with lesser materials such as stucco and corrugated metal roofing.

(American Geographical Library, Golda Meir Library, UWM)

1981 Yerushalayim by Survey of Israel

This less detailed map was made on behalf of the Ministry of Tourism, but it was the best one I could find. It is interesting because it clearly illustrates Jerusalem's geopolitical reality as a newly "Judaized" city. For example, Bab Al-Amud is renamed Herod's Gate literally reclaiming the Jew's biblical territory . It is not uncommon that a dominant party whether it is ethno-religious or otherwise will rename streets in order to reinforce its urban identity.

(American Geographical Library, Golda Meir Library, UWM)

2009 Untitled by Google Maps

Since the first satellite image of the earth was introduced to the general public in the 1970s, humans gained the knowledge that our total ecosystem is a finite resource. Merely thirty years later, the click of a mouse leads to satellite maps of cities halfway across the world. This 2009 map demonstrates the role corporations such as Google play in territorial disputes.

(www.maps.google.com accessed 2/25/09)

Site Location/Context

Below is a partial map of municipal Jerusalem with the Old City towards the bottom. The dotted line denotes the 1949 Armistice Line or Green Line establishing the international border between Jordanian East Jerusalem and Israeli West Jerusalem that existed until 1967. Between the dotted lines were demilitarized zones also known as no-man's-lands. To this day, pockets of undeveloped land and surface parking lots testify to what still remains a de facto border between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. These pieces of land north of the Old City are remarkable considering the valuable, densely built up real estate that surrounds them.

The proposed site for this urban civic space is marked in dark green
and has a footprint of 200,000 square feet (4.59 acres).