The Reserve

“The Reserve” engages with contaminated and abandoned industrial sites (brownfields) as spaces of conflict, yet also of latent potential. The selected site—the Fuel Tank Farm in Kiryat Haim—marks the historical endpoint of the Iraq–Haifa oil pipeline and embodies the story of the double flattening of space.
The first flattening occurred in the 1930s, when the natural sand dunes of Haifa Bay were leveled to accommodate oil infrastructure. The second flattening is unfolding today, nearly a century later, through the implementation of the National Master Plan “TAMA 75”, which seeks to remove the tanks, remediate the land, and erase industrial memory in the name of urban renewal. A clear planning paradox emerges: in the name of rehabilitation, what was once flattened is erased again; in the name of the future, history itself is flattened.
Over time, the site became a disconnected, repressed space, functioning as a physical and mental barrier between the city and the sea and symbolizing pollution, guilt, and exclusion. Yet precisely from within these layers, the project proposes an alternative reading: not to erase the consequences, but to live with them. The central research question asks how an urban living environment can be established on a former industrial site while physically preserving its built industrial heritage and advancing a gradual process of environmental remediation.
In contrast to the sterile clearance-and-redevelopment approach, “The Reserve” proposes a model of reconciliation—a new statutory planning framework that enables construction and rehabilitation to take place simultaneously. The tanks are preserved not as nostalgic remnants, but as active infrastructure: topographic platforms, material memory, and a planning mechanism that transforms limitation into opportunity. Around them, sand dunes are woven into the site, creating a shifting landscape where nature and waste, past and future, coexist.
The architectural intervention is articulated through three actions: Filling—the partial covering of the tanks with sand; Exposure—their opening as architectural shells; and Excavation—the revelation of contaminated soil layers. Together, these actions form an urban “sandbox”—an open, non-final process in which remediation is not a prerequisite for construction, but an inseparable part of it. In this way, the site is transformed from an archive of pollution into a living reserve of memory, repair, and an evolving landscape.