Friday 20 February 2009

New Zidonians, Honorable mention, MIT competition

JerusalemSketch

The New Zidonians
Christos Papastergiou, Christiana Ioannou (Architects, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL)
The modern story of Jerusalem is a story of borders. In this submission, borders are investigated not as a division, but as a spatial structure of negotiation. This project proposes borders that would not divide space into two distinct and sovereign states, but rather would have to connect, to bring together two different communities in a single homeland. As Michael Sorkin describes:
‘Such a condominium would form a ‘third state’ defined as the territory of cooperation between Israel and Palestine‘
This ‘Third State,’ which lays at the heart of the narrative offered in this entry, is what we need to project in architectural projects and visions. But few have tried to formulate its basic dimensions.. What would the spatial characteristics of a `Third State be? What forms would its public spaces take? How it would realize a status of a coexistence of singularities in space? This entry answers these questions.The ‘New Zidonians’ is a narrative and a project of a Jerusalem’s imagined future. This future forms neither a vision nor a nightmare. It rather tries to imagine a future of a Jerusalem that has accepted its differential character and permit a space were the differences would coexist in an immanent relationship.

No comments:

Post a Comment