A political construct to dissolve the physical walls and psychological walls between Palestinian and Israeli | Location: Beit Safafa, Israel and Palestine | Scale: 4000 SF | Time: 2005 | Possible Client: The United Nations

This project utilizes the existing apartheid wall of the West Bank Barrier to create a community facility that can allow the Israeli and Palestinian residents of Beit Safafa to learn from each other. The goal of the project is to use it as an educational center to allow the two groups to have a common place to learn their history and become respectful to the others.

Students of this unique studio project are asked to do independent re-searches on a regions of conflict. The goal of the project is to design a “political construct” which, by its special site location and programmatic strategies, can act as an architectural entity to enhance the understanding between different groups of people. This new building type is “intended to act as a vehicle for teaching, informing, materializing, nurturing the very basic idea of social justice and peace.”

My personal concern about the Israel-Palestine conflict had eventually brought me to a site between the Israeli housing settlement Gilo and the Palestinian village Beit Safafa (two miles to the north of Bethlehem). Situated in the middle of the beginning of a ravine, I read the site as a potent place where the land, the horizontal surfaces merge together by the proposed construction as a "Zipper". A wall-like cinema with internet cafe and library is proposed to serve the local Jews and Palestinian children and their parents. The intervention will become an educational facility to enhance the understanding between the two ethnic groups.