Hadar Faculty of Architecture

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Faculty of Architecture at the Technion and the completion of my own six-year journey through both undergraduate and professional master’s studies. But my path in architecture began long before that, shaped by life itself.

As a child, I found myself responding to the spaces around me not through theory, but through action, care, and a sense of responsibility. Problems I noticed turned into proposals. When something didn’t feel right, I tried to fix it. To do that, I had to learn how to draw, to think spatially, to listen. In hindsight, my first education in architecture didn’t happen in a studio, it happened in the world.

Through my formal studies, I gained language, tools, and professional capabilities. But as I became more skilled, the sense of purpose that originally brought me to the field began to fade. My years of study coincided with a time of rapid change: a pandemic that redefined physical space, growing social polarization, and astonishing technological acceleration. While the world was shifting, the institution remained largely unchanged. Studios moved to Zoom. Campus life grew quiet. Spaces once filled with design and debate were converted into research labs.

It was from this disconnect, not out of critique, but from a deep longing, that my final project emerged. It asks: What is the role of an architecture faculty in the 21st century? Where should it be? How should it operate? And what kind of graduates and citizens, should it nurture?

This project proposes bringing the faculty down from the hilltop campus and back into the city, specifically Haifa’s Hadar neighborhood – a complex, vibrant urban setting. Instead of a centralized institution, it imagines a distributed network of academic outposts embedded within real urban challenges. Each one becomes a site of teaching, research, and action. A central hub anchors the network, housed in the Technion’s historic campus.

This is not just a spatial proposal, it’s a call for reimagining how we learn, engage, and act as architects.