ThinkArchitecture

One Land, Two Systems

International Ideas Competition for Ein Hud
organised by F.A.S.T. and DeBalie

A colourful international guest house on top of the hill, our project suggests an architectural intervention on the fringe of the village of Ein Hud which makes space available for activities of all sorts: chatting, reading, skating, watching, resting, cooking, dining, staying overnight, making friends. Before explaining our proposal in more detail we would like to briefly address some theoretical considerations which have led us to develop a special guest house which works both towards recognising the given situation of conflicting territorial claims and towards rearticulating the very terms and architectural structures by which they come into operation:

As Derrida has suggested, real hospitality transgresses the familiar gestures of invitation (of a specific guest) as it is always directed towards the unknown Other. Without this there would be no hospitality. Thus hospitality signifies an opening, play or intermination beyond the horizon of our expectation. Taking this notion of hospitality on board we feel that an architectural structure complying with such premises should take risks for the unexpected to happen, it should signify hospitality for the unspecifiable. Along the risks it takes the proposed structure will have to be negotiated at every instant. In so doing, we believe that a sustainable future for Ein Hud depends on entertaining its role within a wider network of interests for which it is to become a focal point, i.e. a point of interest for both local people and people from elsewhere to come together in the village of Ein Hud. In expanding the parameters of interest in participation, we might accumulate different ways of understanding that what is at stake is not just the sustainability of a specific village, but that of a multitude of networked singularities longing for recognition.

In creating sustainable nodes within this networked structure an important point is the move from being victimised and disowned to inhabiting the situation one is immersed in by way of inhabiting and negotiating the structures underlying it. This move is supported by a transgression of conventional accounts and modes of conduct and by a recognition that beyond the daily grief and terror other activities take place, lived cultural situations, which are sometimes difficult to conceptualise as they are too closely connected to notions of uselessness and excess, including leisure time, sports and enjoying a chat. Locating authority not within what is demanded from us by culture in its utmost abstract form but within the fleeting cultural moment these activities may provide interpretations of experience that are often politically more useful than conventional accounts. It is in this sense that we would like our proposed design to embrace lived moments of cultural encounter as its main source of inspiration.

Guest houses have a certain tradition as ambiguous places in remote or inhospitable territories: They are available for shelter as well as for relaxation. In remote alpine regions, for instance, guest houses often serve as temporary sites of chance encounters between people with completely different backgrounds and agendas. Originally built to accommodate those who came here to seek shelter in bad weather or to pray with a hermit monk, they now serve to bunk hikers communing with nature, couples on a weekend getaway, school groups or other guests who happen to stop by. They are landmarks of utmost improvised character, playful and benign places of refuge, hospitable to the coming together of trajectories unknown to each other.

In Totality and Infinity Emmanuel Lévinas has reflected upon the necessity of habitation in relation to hospitality. He argues that for there to be hospitality, there must be a home. Yet the home he envisages is the very opposite of a finished place. It rather reflects the fashioning of sites and identities in a process of continual improvisation and transformation (The German word “Gast” evokes its root “Geist” (spirit, ghost), so that one is reminded of the spectral potential of the enemy in the guest).

Military walls and towers have become the architectural icons of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. Beside their prominent roles in the imagery of the Middle East they also render important sites upon which competing cultural narratives and collective identities are grounded and performed. It is against this backdrop of military visual presence that we have chosen to deliberately integrate the ideas of tower and wall into the design of the proposed international guest house and to turn these elements into an inhabitable architectural structure.

Rearticulating cultural narratives by inhabiting these archives differently: Taking into account the complex hybridity of the Israeli and Palestinian situation, the distinct shapes of military walls and towers are transformed into a hybrid building which offers possibilities for local people and international guests alike to engage in playful, recreational or educational activities or to simply step back and withdraw from the routines of everyday life. Having a meal on one of the terraces of the wall-like building, skating the ramps between its different levels, watching the beauties of landscape and coastline from top of one of the towers, making oneself at home in one of the guest rooms. The guest house enforces possibilities to perform alternative relations to culture. It is dismantling and disrupting dominant perceptions and meanings. An experience that is rooted in the tradition of guest houses, but an experience that is nevertheless worked through in a different place, geographically, politically and socially.

As land use is very restricted in this area, we would like the guest house to occupy as little ground as possible. It is situated on a raised platform above a large communal place, which can be used for shelter from sun or rain as well as for gatherings, sports activities or storage. The ground floor of the guest house includes a cafè/function hall, kitchen, reception area and a small office for administration, all surrounded by a large terrace. On the first floor there is a more intimate lounge area with a window safe to sit in which offers views of the valley, shared shower rooms with lockers, toilets and four guest rooms. A library/study, four more guest rooms and a large covered terrace in between are located on the second floor. On the third floor, adjacent to another terrace, the northeastern tower contains two guest rooms as does the south western one. The first of the two lookout platforms is located on the forth floor of the southwestern tower, while the north eastern tower provides two more guest rooms. Above these guest rooms there is the highest located platform. As the public is invited to share the guest house with those who stay there, all stairs are located outside the building, allowing casual visitors to climb the “towers”, mingle with the residents and enjoy the roof terraces on top of the building at any time. Thus, the proposed structure is more than a conventional hotel-style guest house or a lookout for tourists. It rather combines these two forms of temporary inhabitation into one hybrid structure: It is both a guest house that can be climbed to reach the lookout on top and a lookout tower whose structural voids have been occupied by a series of guest rooms.

Whom are the guest rooms for? They offer space for alternative tourism, seminar groups, day-trippers, local interest groups, activists, short-term lets for villagers or any other party that takes an interest in the local culture. The cafè/function hall and the multitude of terraces scattered around the building (between the towers, on top of each of them as well as those forming the ground levels) are available to both permanent inhabitants of Ein Hud and guests. They can be used flexibly according to the interests developed on site. More than half of the permanent residents of Ein Hud are currently under 18, many of whom may want to use the infrastructure for playing games, skateboarding or sports, while other people may want to use the space for conversations, for reading a book, as a lookout or for other recreational or educational purposes. We think that in taking risks and being open to this amalgam of people and interests, local and international, the guest house will be able to create sustainable opportunities to operate beyond the dominant confines of conflict and to build on something new: a multiplicity of elements entangled in a process of continual improvisation.

While being physically situated outside the centre of the village of Ein Hud, it is important for this guest house to be fashioned with much proximity to the daily life and to the logic of the village. Therefore, the building is supposed to be entirely built by the community of Ein Hud itself, making use of local building traditions, bringing in features that are of local importance and appropriating the guest house at once. The ‘front’ elevation of the proposed building with the main openings and the stairs is orientated towards Northwest, thereby providing views across the valley of Ein Hod toward the Mediterranean Sea while at the same time keeping the inside of the building from overexposure to sun and heat. For the same reason southeastern and southwestern elevations have either only small sized openings along the current military zone or none at all.

Materials, building techniques and architectural language of this proposal have been chosen with particular consideration of local resources, thus making sure the realisation of the guest house would benefit directly towards the local community. The load-bearing structure consists of concrete columns and floor slabs based on a rectangular grid. Cavity walls are made of an inner leaf of lightweight block work and brightly coloured concrete slabs for the outer walls. Through this choice of means of production and the hybrid mix of uses a highly visible and recognisable landmark of more than just regional importance can be created which at the same time keeps in tune with and becomes part of the local fabric. Rather than colonizing Ein Hud by drawing on a bold gesturality of ‘Western’ architectural icons, the proposed International Guest House seeks its wider international recognition through its singular ways of providing and inhabiting a place of cultural exchange and dialogue. Thus maintaining both local sustainability and international visibility and meaning.

Our idea builds upon an understanding of space that has been championed by writings on marginal/ised spaces (e.g. on the queering of space), spaces that exist less in/through material design but foremost in lived experience. If the guest is truly other, the host can only offer the other an always provisional sharing of space which does not frame the chance encounter in a strictly compartmentalised manner – a site on which the production of meaning takes place by way of co-inhabitation.