House of Democracy

Since 1992, with the enactment of the Basic Laws “Human Dignity and Liberty” and “Freedom of Occupation,” Israeli democracy has undergone a constitutional revolution that fundamentally reshaped the perception of human rights in the country. Several years later, the Supreme Court ruled that it had the authority to invalidate laws contradicting the Basic Laws – a step that strengthened the judiciary but also deepened the tension between it and the legislature. The struggle among the branches of government, which reached a climax on the eve of the October 7 disaster, has become a clear marker of an ongoing democratic crisis in a state without a formal constitution, fractured from within and threatened from without.
At the heart of this dispute lies the question of sovereignty: Who is the “owner” of the state? Does the elected Knesset represent the people? Is the Supreme Court empowered to override the Knesset and strike down laws? Or the government, which determines policy? It seems that amidst all these battles, the true owner has been forgotten – the public. Ordinary citizens have been pushed out of the democratic discourse. Liberal democracy, which rests on the sovereignty of the people, has turned into an arena of struggle among state institutions – a struggle removed from civic space.
The National Quarter in Jerusalem, home to the three branches of government, vividly illustrates this condition. The state precinct has been conceived and consolidated as a closed, fortified, and opaque compound. Its architecture projects power: impenetrable facades, fences, cameras, and limited “public” areas. Today, the National Quarter is shaped by a ceremonial, hierarchical, and exclusionary logic that denies the possibility of daily encounters between citizens and their governing institutions. This raises the key question: what planning interventions can restore democratic function to the National Quarter – one grounded in accessibility and civic participation?
This project proposes a renewed architectural reading of the National Quarter to reclaim the public sphere for its democratic purpose. The intervention expands the discourse beyond representative democracy, as currently embodied in the space, toward additional models: participatory democracy and agonistic democracy.
The project thus reimagines the National Quarter not as a sealed-off enclave of government, but as an open civic space. It seeks an architectural and conceptual transformation of power centers, based on the conviction that citizens are the legitimate “owners” of democratic space. Through acts of opening, integration, and wandering, an alternative spatial reality emerges – one that restores democracy to the citizens, and the citizens to democracy.