As a Palimpsest

Palimpsest – a manuscript or parchment codex, off of which past writings have been erased or scraped, and on which a new script has been written, resulting in a stratified script of interpretation, expansion, critique or correction.

The process of erasing the living fabric in order to create a modern city embodies an attempt to detach from the layers of the past and to impose an immediate and prompt alternative, in a way that reflects a hegemonic view of control and order. The narrow timespan of this process has resulted in a flattening and dilution of the spatial and cultural dimensions of the place. In opposition to this interruption in the sequence of space and time, the project seeks to examine a methodology for urban intervention, which utilizes layers of the past in order to create an architectural culture that provides a synchronous multiplicity – spatial and cultural.

By assembling the layers of time that have passed through the city of Tiberias and its existing current space, the project offers imagined potential scenes of moderate local changes, in which time is a renewed reconstruction tool that allows for a layered outlook upon every moment and provides space for reconciliation and internalization of past wounds. This process perceives space as a palimpsest – a multi-layered script of cumulative writing and erasure, where the new writing is based on the discovery and exposure of the old layers, and is stratified upon them as interpretation, expansion, critique and correction.