Reality, Vision, Change - The Future of the Israeli Landscape

The studio deals with aggravating environmental, climatic and social phenomena in the overcrowded country and the manifestations of their consequences in the Israeli landscape. We face the inherent conflict between the desire to preserve as many valuable and continuous open spaces as possible and to encourage biological diversity, and the need to densify buildings while creating a variety of uses on a human scale and social equality of opportunity. Each student chose an issue and a place/space that is close to their heart and that represents one or more conflicts in the Israeli landscape. The variety of places and problems reflects the complexity and diversity of the Israeli landscape and populations: the permanent, changing and temporary urban and rural space, abandoned and violated areas, seam lines between borders, meetings of different populations, sites of memory and history disappearing alongside design innovation, a renewed reading of open spaces and infrastructure, and much more. In the studio we examine and map the various layers revealed in the multidisciplinary reality, the rate of local and global change, and ask what tools landscape architecture can provide to develop a vision that will lead to a significant perceptual change? With an ambition to examine and open the boundaries of the field and its interfaces with the other disciplines, emphasis was placed in each of the projects on the comprehensive approach that we must lead as landscape architects.