Beit Byout

This project emerges from a critical comparison between my personal experience of home and the lived reality of contemporary residential environments in Israel. Growing up in a carefully designed private house in a village, I experienced a spatial setting that responded to my needs at every stage of life. The house offered adaptability alongside stability, shaping my understanding of what a home truly is.

In contrast, today’s urban landscape in Israel is dominated by multi-story apartment blocks. Over the past two decades, most new housing units have been built within dense clusters of identical buildings, while private houses have become increasingly rare and financially unattainable for most families. This shift has been driven largely by neoliberal market forces that prioritize rapid, cost-efficient construction and profitability. The result is a housing stock defined more by standardized prototypes and economic efficiency than by cultural values, individuality, or long-term livability. Such spaces, stripped of flexibility and identity, serve merely as “houses” rather than genuine “homes.”

The project seeks to bridge these two realities. While the private village house is no longer a viable model for most, its underlying values remain relevant. The challenge, therefore, is to adapt the qualities of traditional domestic spaces to the scale of contemporary multi-story housing. By drawing on principles of human-oriented design—flexibility, layered thresholds, and a balance of privacy and community—the project reimagines how urban housing might better respond to the needs of its inhabitants.

In doing so, it builds on the lessons of traditional Arab architecture, where spatial organization fostered a sense of belonging, adaptability, and a deep relationship with the site and climate. These principles are reinterpreted as a framework for urban housing that resists uniformity and alienation, and instead cultivates meaningful, livable, and enduring places.

The project is guided by the following research question:
How can human-oriented principles derived from traditional Arab architecture be integrated into contemporary residential design to transform generic, repetitive urban housing into potential homes?