Eilat, Israel
2009 (competition)

Eilat, a busy tourist hub in the southern tip of Israel, is known for its arid climate, hospitable beaches and numerous resorts, which join a discontinuous strip of leisure cities along the coast of the Red Sea; from Taba in Egypt’s Sinai Desert to Aqaba in Jordan. Separated by political boundaries, these cities nonetheless share the harsh climatic conditions and a distinct dramatic landscape. Paradoxically, the same features that attract the tourist prove to be disadvantageous to the permanent inhabitant. Responding to the call for the design of a town hall therefore harbored an opportunity to reconsider the notion of civic space in a tourist city. The project stressed the notion of the “town/hall” by attempting both to create a useable public space and dislodge the bureaucratic aspects of the municipal machine. This was achieved architecturally by overlapping the public amenities that constitute a centerpiece of an urban scheme with the pure organizational figure of municipal hierarchies enumerated in the program. The former took the shape of large, open spaces at the ground level while the latter was expressed as a hyper-rationalized elevated mat building. Their juxtaposition anchored the office structure through the specifics of the site and offered to activate public areas as shaded compounds of urban intensity. The locus of these two systems is the open square that not only connects the circulation of the two parts but delineates the potential formation of usable civic space in a desert town.

with Yonatan Cohen, Dan Handel