Archinect - News

Lebanon has 34 cultural sites placed under UNESCO protection

2024-11-26T16:45:00-05:00

The cross-border Israeli military confrontation with Hezbollah has induced UNESCO to take drastic action by declaring 34 cultural properties in Lebanon to be under provisional enhanced protection, according to a new announcement from the UNESCO Committee for the Protection of Cultural Property.

The action mirrors another made by UNESCO last year to add heritage sites in Ukraine and Palestine to its Enhanced Protection List (to which Lebanon previously had no entries). Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s two-term Director-General, says: "UNESCO has a deep and long-standing cooperation with Lebanon. We will spare no effort to provide all the expertise and assistance needed to protect its exceptional heritage."

ALNY chat discusses 'Domicide' and its application to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza

2024-06-11T12:05:00-04:00

How might this destruction be stopped? International law remains one of the only paths to seek accountability. And it is not only lawyers who make its systems function. Through their stewardship of the built environment (including long-standing engagement with the right to housing and the politics of climate change), architects, planners, and preservationists can shed light on the techniques, procedures, and consequences of modern urban warfare. They also have the potential to change them.

Berlin-based Palestinian urbanist and scholar Natasha Aruri, formerly of the TU Berlin, breaks down the concept of ‘domicide’ with MIT's Balakrishnan Rajagopal and SITU founding partner Brad Samuels. The term can be traced to the 2001 title Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, but has roots in modern conflict (namely the U.S. bombing of Japan and Germany during World War II). The most recent reporting from human rights groups, including the UNWRA, has said that more than half of all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed since fighting began there on October 7th.

New U.N. report warns of potential decades-long rebuild for Gaza

2024-05-09T12:02:00-04:00

A new report on the socio-economic situation in Gaza from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has established a baseline for rebuilding as a cease-fire deal that would end the seven-month Israel-Hamas war continues to be up in the air. The findings lay out the most realistic timeline for recovery, which first requires an estimated 37 million tons of debris removal and the construction of temporary shelters for Palestinians who have lost more than 80,000 of their homes since the fighting began in October.

Israel will have to allow five times the volume of construction materials as it had after its two most recent incursions in order for Gazans to regain "normalcy" by 2040. The UNDP stated it would likely take another four decades to rebuild entirely, given the number of damaged residential structures. Around 25,000 buildings have been reported destroyed in Gaza, with 32 hospitals now knocked offline and another 100 schools or universities being completely destroyed, accordi...

A Palestinian architect looks for a future in Gaza’s rubble

2024-02-05T11:47:00-05:00

Over 60% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. But it's also the heritage, the culture, the collective memory. So it's important for us to rethink how to rebuild, how to accommodate one of the highest densely populated spots on Earth. Do we go vertical? Do we go horizontal? You've got an urban fabric. You've got a coastal fabric. You've got a rural fabric. Each one requires a different way of looking at it.

Yara Sharif is the London-based co-founder of the group Architects for Gaza. The Palestinian architect tells NPR the task now is to assemble a society literally of the rubble using the remnants of some 200,000 buildings that have been destroyed and in the most environmentally sensitive ways possible. A top-down solution that keeps Palestinians out of any post-war rebuilding process has been a growing concern for activists, who brought the issue to the International Court of Justice as part of South Africa's attempt to use it to stop the violence in December.

To date, the IDF’s military strategy has razed more than 70% of all residential structures, plus another 20 or so hospitals and approximately 350 schools. Its plan to establish a 23-square-mile "buffer zone" within the Gaza Strip's borders has become another recent point of contention (h/t LA Times).

Over 100 Gaza heritage sites damaged or destroyed by Israeli strikes, report says

2023-12-05T13:30:00-05:00

The Spanish NGO Heritage for Peace has published a report on the impact of recent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza’s cultural heritage. The report, released on November 7th, claims that over 100 cultural heritage landmarks have been damaged or destroyed as of publishing. Reports of subsequent damage since November 7th are not yet available.

The Heritage for Peace report lists 104 pieces of built heritage impacted by the latest war, of which 4 have been completely destroyed, 11 have been partially destroyed by direct shelling, and 89 have been partially destroyed by indirect shelling. The list of sites spans mosques, churches, archaeological sites, historical houses, shrines, cemeteries, and museums.

Among the sites completely destroyed by direct shelling is the Omari Mosque, described by NPR as “one of the most important and ancient mosques in historical Palestine.” Meanwhile, the Church of Saint Porphyrius was partially destroyed, described by NPR as “the third oldest church in the entir...

New Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance building is completed behind a playful stone facade

2023-06-01T11:43:00-04:00

Construction has been completed on the new Ari Kushner Building at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Designed by Tel Aviv-based HQ Architects and New York's HWKN Architecture, the scheme is housed in what the team calls an “elegant, playful, stone facade” to bring a “sense of unity and a contemporary, welcoming identity” to the academy’s campus.

Image credit: Dor Kedmi

The 27,000-square-foot cultural building houses new choreography, jazz studios, vocal and opera studios as well as a 115-seat music recital hall, equipping the campus with a central performance venue that it previously lacked. Externally, the development is defined by a “curiosity-generating” facade that extends in front of both the existing building and the new addition, constructed of unfinished Jerusalem stone blocks turned 45 degrees on their side.

Image credit: Dor Kedmi

“It balances the geometric order, natural materiality, and intentional imperfection all in a...

This Tel Aviv residential project blends two contemporary buildings with a historic villa

2022-07-26T17:41:00-04:00

Tel Aviv-based Bar Orian Architects has unveiled a new residential project that blends past and present by integrating two contemporary buildings with a historic, early 20th-century villa.

The development, titled Villa Rothschild, sits along Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. The original structure known as the Beit Awad Villa was designed in 1926 by Russian architect Joseph Berlin. The Eclectic-era building is part of Tel Aviv’s “White City,” which comprises a collection of over 4,000 buildings designed in the Bauhaus style and is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Photo: Amit Geron

The two new building additions in Villa Rothschild each stand seven stories and feature penthouses, a fifth-floor villa, and two garden villas. The pre-existing Beit Awad Villa was marked for preservation under Tel Aviv’s preservation plan and zoning policies, so Bar Orian Architects were restricted from making any changes to the building apart from an addition to the basement floor. In order to...

Forensic Architecture's latest investigation is a dig at one-sided Israeli archaeological pursuits

2022-04-13T12:14:00-04:00

Fresh off its recent Peabody Award win, London-based Forensic Architecture (FA) has returned to one of its most popular research sites with a new project, called “Living Archaeology in Gaza,” examining the fate of an important archaeological site under assault in the Gaza Strip.

The site in question was tentatively added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 2012 but has since been closed off to further archaeological research and beset by damaging new construction. The group examined ten years' worth of data collected by the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem between 1995 and 2005 to produce 3D renderings of an ancient city called Anthedon that existed for two millennia until about the High Middle Ages.

Image: Forensic Architecture

What they discovered was that Israeli bombing and consolidation, combined with climate change-caused coastal erosion, has placed a considerable strain on the site, which counts among its ruins examples of building from the Byzant...

Planned cable-car network over Jerusalem divides the public

2019-09-16T19:51:00-04:00

Israeli authorities have approved a plan to build a cable car to the Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world, by 2021. It’s the first phase of what proponents envision as a fleet of cable cars crisscrossing the locus of sacred sites known as the Holy Basin.

NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman explains the controversial plan for a cable-car network, envisioned to connect significant Jewish religious sites in Jerusalem while bypassing Palestinian neighborhoods, and how the concept contributes to a "Disneyfication" of the Holy City as much as Israel's "architecture of occupation."

"Trumpeted by right-wing Israeli leaders as a green solution to the challenges of increased tourism and traffic in and around the Old City," Kimmelman writes, "the plan has provoked howls of protest from horrified Israeli preservationists, environmentalists, planners, architects and others who picture an ancient global heritage site turned into a Jewish-themed Epcot, with thousands of passengers an hour crammed into huge gondolas lofting across the sky."

Israeli-born Canadian architect Moshe Safdie is among the vocal opponents of the cable car.

How did Tel Aviv become the site of so many Bauhaus buildings?

2018-12-28T14:41:00-05:00

The Tel Aviv coastline is crowded with a mishmash of skyscrapers, Ottoman-inspired villas, and four-story cubes painted a sunlight-reflecting shade of white. But in a place where stylistic jumble is the standard, one strain stands out as the defining architectural aesthetic and a beloved household name: Bauhaus.

Design fans may know to pin Tel Aviv as an architectural destination for its unlikely connection to the Bauhaus movement, which originated in Dessau, Germany, but few know why the style traveled over 2,000 miles during the 1930's.

Krieger House | Courtesy the rothschild 71 hotel, Tel-Aviv

When the Nazi party gained control of Germany, the Bauhaus School was one of several creative institutions to be shut down, causing its faculty to disperse across the globe. While some of the more famous names from the school, such as Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer found a foothold in America, several of its students found opportunities in The White City.

According to Artsy, "The 700 total students that enrolled at the Bauhaus during its short 14-year existence dispersed globally, too, including four architects—Arieh Sharon, Munio Gitai Weinraub, Shmuel Mestechkin, and Shlomo Bernstein—who moved to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s. There, they found a rare opportunity, a modernist archi...

US Embassy in Jerusalem will cost at least $20M more than Trump's $250,000 bargain estimate

2018-07-19T15:39:00-04:00

President Donald Trump boasted earlier this year that the US would spend only $200,000 to $300,000 on a new US Embassy in Jerusalem, but it seems the project will cost nearly $20 million more than that estimate. [...] The US spent just under $400,000 on modifications to the consular facility that allowed it to open as the US Embassy in May, but the State Department told CNN at the time that it planned "for construction of a new extension [...] as well as for additional security enhancements"

Back in March, the 'Builder in Chief' promised that the highly controversial new United States Embassy in Jerusalem would have to be built "very quickly and very inexpensively" at a bargain price tag of around $250,000. According to documents made public this month, the State Department however recently awarded a $21.2 million contract to the firm Desbuild Limak D&K to design and build an extension and compound security upgrades to the former consular building in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood—nearly 100 times the original estimate.

The new Qattan Foundation arts center rises as “a beacon of culture” in the West Bank

2018-06-29T18:21:00-04:00

This metallic box is the new $21m home for the AM Qattan Foundation, an arts centre that its founders hope will stand as a “beacon of culture” in the occupied West Bank. “It has been years of fighting to achieve anything close to the standards we wanted. There are defects, but it is the best we could do while building under (Israeli) occupation,” [says achitect Juan Pedro Donaire, whose firm designed the new building]

Israeli Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale will explore the negotiation of holy spaces

2018-04-25T17:20:00-04:00

The Israeli Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale will explore the established mechanisms by which the country facilitates the co-existence of Holy places. As a location with special sacred status as the cradle of three Abrahamic religions, the region encompasses a variety of holy sites that are both contested and shared. Curated by Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania CoenUzzielli, the exhibition In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation will, through the lens of architecture, look at the status quo regulations within these mutually sacred places.

"In the geopolitcal context of the Holy Land, the combination of historical events, myths, and traditions has created a multiplicity of places, sacred to competing groups of religions, communities and affiliations" the curatorial team argue. "These in turn, have led to the formation of an extraordinary concentration of intricate spaces, fragmented and stratified both historically and physically." Through "a ...

World's tallest (mostly) Lego tower built in memory of eight-year-old cancer victim

2018-01-02T18:50:00-05:00

Plastic building blocks are once again reaching for the sky. This time, it was the city of Tel Aviv that made an attempt to build the tallest Lego tower — or, officially, the tallest structure built with interlocking plastic bricks, not all of them made by the Danish toy giant. [...] a joint effort between Tel Aviv City Hall and Young Engineers, an organization that promotes learning with toy bricks. The tower is intended to honor a child who died from cancer.

"Omer Tower" was built in memory of Omer Sayag, himself an avid fan of the colorful plastic blocks, who lost his battle with cancer in 2014 at the age of 8.

Clocking in at a height of 35.85 meters (117 feet and 7 inches), the structure on Tel Aviv's Rabin Square beat previous world records including the most recent one in Milan in 2015.

Israel wants to thank Trump for Jerusalem decision by naming Western Wall train station after him

2017-12-27T13:48:00-05:00

The train station is being planned for the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City. Katz said he decided to honor Trump in this way following the president's decision early this month to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and to ultimately move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

Yisrael Katz, Israel's transport minister, has said he plans to name a future train station in Jerusalem "Donald John Trump" Station, after the U.S. President controversially recognized the city as Israeli's capital earlier this month. The station is part of a contentious proposal to extend Jerusalem’s high-speed rail line to the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews are permitted to pray. Plans for the project involve the construction of two underground stations and the excavation of more than two miles of tunnel underneath the Old City, a politically and historically sensitive area of Jerusalem.

New Rothschild Tower by Richard Meier & Partners Completes in Tel Aviv's White City

2017-09-11T14:10:00-04:00

Tel Aviv has the largest concentration of buildings in the Bauhaus/International Style of any city in the world. With a collection of over 4,000 buildings covering almost one and a half square miles, the White City, as it is called, was largely created in the 1930s by a group of 200 German Jewish architects fleeing Nazi Germany who were heavily influenced by Bauhaus principles as well as modernists like Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn.

Photo Credit: Roland Halbe.

Drawing on this rich architectural history, Richard Meier & Partners have just completed a new residential tower that draws inspiration from the Bauhaus design principles of its neighbors in the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. Meier commented on the surroundings saying "the great thing about the site is that it's related to the whole city; it's related to all of the wonderful buildings of the 1930s and to the historic buildings of Rothschild Boulevard. It makes me very happy to be in s...

The Palestinian Museum opens its first show: Jerusalem Lives

2017-08-25T18:41:00-04:00

The Palestinian Museum opens its inaugural exhibition this weekend focusing on the holy city of Jerusalem, a city that both Israel and Palestine claim as their capital. The wide-ranging, overtly political show focuses on the realities of living in Jerusalem as well as the idea that despite being seen as the original global city, it also serves an example of how globalization has failed worldwide.

The Palestinian Museum, located in Birzeit, Palestine’s West Bank, opened last May. Back then, however, the $24 million structure designed by Heneghan Peng Architects had no exhibits to show due to a sudden resignation of the museum's former director.

Its first show, Jerusalem Lives (Tahya Al Quds), on view from August 27, is participatory, consisting of four chapters that examine the cultural, political, economic and ideological aspects of Jerusalem. The exhibit will include works by contemporary artists, a display of 20 large-scale commissions in the museum’s extensive gardens 'based on ideas about land, openness and non-exclusion', featuring artists such as Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Khaled Jarrar, and many more. Additionally, supporting events and programs will be held at other Palestinian institutions.

“What is going on and why are these exclusionary policies being accepted? How are people—artists, organisations and civil society—working against it? And how can we build togethe...

Eyal Weizman uses architectural evidence to investigate bombings in Syria

2017-08-09T15:22:00-04:00

Eyal Weizman is a London-based Israeli architect and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work focuses on architecture as a form of political intervention and the discipline's role in modern urban warfare. For the past couple of years, Weizman's research project—Forensic Architecture—has been using architectural evidence for the investigation of crimes against the state on cases ranging from drone strikes to genocide. Repositioning the field of architecture within forensics, Weizman and his team look at evidence such as debris left behind, physical ruin, floor plans, cell phone footage etc. in order to reconstruct the events that took place, much like one would analyze a crime scene.

In a recent interview with Vice, Weizman talks about his work, recreating bombings in Syria, and using architecture to investigate the invisible. Check out the video below!

Phyllis Lambert receives 2016 Wolf Prize in Israel

2016-06-03T18:47:00-04:00

The one and only Phyllis Lambert continues to rake in architecture honors from around the globe. She received the American Academy's Brunner Memorial Prize this past April and was bestowed the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement during the 2014 Venice Biennale. Most recently, the former Canadian Centre for Architecture Director has been honored with the 2016 Wolf Prize in Israel. Past laureates include Eduardo Souto de Moura, David Chipperfield, and Peter Eisenman.

Architecture and the index: McKenzie Wark on Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture

2015-11-09T16:38:00-05:00

Besides the thing itself, architecture concerns itself with two kinds of sign about it: iconic signs and symbols. Iconic signs resemble the thing itself. They are the plans and elevations and isometrics. The more symbolic architecture is that of language, the word, the logo and so forth. The postmodern turn shifted the emphasis from the iconic to the symbolic. I think [Eyal] Weizman has created an architecture about a whole other kind of sign – the index.

"Indexical signs are traces of events: where there is smoke there is fire. The smoke does not resemble the fire. It is not an icon. Nor does it have a code like a symbolic sign system. Forensics is a matter of working backwards from the index to the event of which it is the sign, like in a detective story. A forensic architecture takes as its subject events that happen or don’t happen in build space, including the destruction of built space."

Downtown Jerusalem gets a Libeskind-designed Pyramid Tower

2015-07-28T13:20:00-04:00

A new high-rise building called the Freedom Pyramid will change the face of Jerusalem’s downtown area. The project, conceived by architects Daniel Libeskind and Yigal Levi, will see a multi-purpose tower comprising commercial shopping and residential units atop the old Eden theater. The idea for a high-rise at this location, adjacent to Mahaneh Yehuda market, first hit headlines in 2011. But a Jerusalem municipal committee only now approved the construction.

Correction: Studio Daniel Libeskind has informed us that the correct project title is "The Pyramid." The incorrect title "Freedom Pyramid" has been the result of an unauthorized press leak.

Studio Daniel Libeskind also provided us with new renderings of the project as well as some more information about The Pyramid:

The Jerusalem Municipality approves a mixed-use tower designed by Studio Libeskind (New York/Milan/Zurich) in conjunction with local architect Yigal Levi.

Located adjacent to the Mahane Yehuda market, commonly known as “The Shuk”, in the heart of the city, the 105-meter, 26-story complex entitled The Pyramid will feature 200 apartments, a boutique hotel, a public plaza lined with shops, and a roof-top observatory and restaurant that will provide sweeping views of the ancient city.

“The Pyramid mediates between ancient traditions and myths, while providing a 21st century reinterpretation of that great form,” said architect Daniel Libeskind. “The design complements the context...

Germany to help fund renovations of Tel Aviv's historic Bauhaus buildings

2015-05-15T15:29:00-04:00

Thousands of Bauhaus buildings are concentrated in a central district of Tel Aviv, called the "White City." It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003. These houses were built by Jewish architects who fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to what was the British Mandate of Palestine at the time. They designed their houses according to the principles developed by Walter Gropius [...] Germany plans to invest 2.8 million euros ($3.2 million) to help preserve the cultural heritage.

Israel okays plan of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem

2015-04-01T15:09:00-04:00

I had doubts about accepting this project. I didn’t want to become a pawn for politicians, but the residents gave me a mandate. The public understood that it could act collectively in order to improve its situation - Architect

Project's architect Senan Abdelkader is well known to NY Times a few years back via Nicolai Ouroussoff.

A distinct aesthetic language from Senan Abdelkader: an apartment building in an Arab neighborhood near Bethlehem.

An apartment building, designed by Senan Abdelkader, in an Arab neighborhood near Bethlehem

Let's just say this is not another maneuver by Netanyahu government to ease off the international pressure on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Are driverless pods the future of public transportation?

2015-03-18T17:34:00-04:00

Driverless pods, gliding above city streets using a network of elevated guideways. This is SkyTran -- but is it the future? SkyTran wants to do away with train schedules and central stations to develop a grid system above the ground with multiple "off ramps" acting as stations where users can board pre-booked pods – a cab service for the skies. Call for SkyTran on your smart phone and a computer-controlled, magnetically levitating pod arrives. It will whisk you across the city...

SkyTran claims the pods, weighing just 300 lbs, would consume about a third of the electricity used by today's hybrid cars. And the infrastructure can be built for $10 million per mile, at least according to the CEO Jerry Sanders.

Later this year, the company plans to complete its first pilot project at the campus of Israel Aerospace Industries in Tel Aviv.

The Most Relevant News of 2014 (for Architects)

2014-12-30T14:02:00-05:00

Sometimes it's easy to pretend that architecture exists outside of this world, erupting instead in the blank of a 3D space governed only by the laissez-fair laws of software. But sometimes a news headline will penetrate through this fog of imagination, appearing as a blazing light shining forth from an image of some distant row of houses hollowed by mortar fire and colored with the blood of a strangers' body. "This is the real of architecture," the news seems to silently implore.

As gravity serves as the counterweight to the feverish, technofuturism fashionable to today's students, news events seem to ground architecture just at the moment it seems like it may finally escape into the vapors of idealism. While it may seem that architecture is increasingly consigned to the building of institutions or expensive residences, the demand for buildings and dwellings simultaneously grows louder and more desperate with every unfolding disaster.

A year-end round-up is as fraught as a ranking. If...

New York state of mind: Weekly News Round-Up for November 10, 2014

2014-11-17T14:53:00-05:00

Thursday, November 13:

Smithsonian hires BIG architecture group for $2 billion South Mall renovation plan: While approval is still pending, the large-scale renovation will include "two underground levels of visitor amenities" and could take up to twenty years to complete.

Lucas museum faces lawsuit from Friends of the Parks: The nonprofit advocacy group claims that cordoning off the Chicago waterfront for Lucas' museum violates the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing "equal protection and due process" for deciding what to do with land belonging to the state of Illinois.

Wednesday, November 12:

Two window washers trapped on scaffolding at 1 WTC: The two men were shortly rescued by firemen, after uneven ascending cables left them dangling at a 65-degree angle 827ft in the air.

The Courtyard House Plug-In: A House Within The House: People's Architecture Office created a modular interior set to install in Beijing's historic buildings, as a renovation alternative to demolition.

The Race to Save...

Herzog & de Meuron to Build Israel National Library

2014-11-10T13:23:00-05:00

The National Library is pleased to share the concept designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron for the new home of the Library in Jerusalem. As set out in the brief for the new building, the design, which will evolve during subsequent design stages, communicates the ‘values of openness and accessibility to the general public of all classes, nationalities and denominations’.

The 34,000 square meter building will house climate-controlled archives as well as digital facilities and both indoor and outdoor venues for cultural programming. In a statement, Herzog & de Meuron claim, “Our project reflects the open and transparent ambitions of the National Library of Israel. The strong, sculptural form of the stone, related to the specific topography and context of the site, is elevated off the ground, and situated above vitrine like elements. The stone contains a large open space for the library’s visitors and users to interact while the vitrines expose the collection, reading room and public functions to the street and adjacent surroundings.”

The firm won the project over other well-known practices such as that of Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry and Israeli architects Ammar Curiel, Kimmel Eshkolot and Kolker Kolker Epstein. Originally, the Israeli architect Rafi Segal was set to design the building until becoming embroiled in a copyright dispute.

"The new building is ...

What can ‘forensic architecture’ reveal about the conflict in Gaza?

2014-09-02T13:25:00-04:00

Weizman has also made a name for himself as the chief proponent of “forensic architecture”, by which he analyses the impacts of urban warfare for clues about the crimes that were perpetrated there. To Weizman, buildings are weapons. When he looks out across the landscape of the occupied Palestinian West Bank [...] he sees a battlefield. “The weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers.”

See For Yourself

2014-09-01T12:29:00-04:00

it is clear that the scale of damage is unprecedented, with approximately 13 percent of the housing stock affected, five percent of the housing stock is uninhabitable – an estimated 18,000 housing units have been either destroyed or severely damaged. This on top of a shortage of 71,000 housing units before the Israeli attack.

This is a real challenge for architecture. I urge Architecture for Humanity to directly involve and bring this crisis into their working platform, producing ideas of reconstruction.

Rebuilding Gaza

2014-08-20T14:32:00-04:00

The Palestinian Authority government has estimated that it could cost $6 billion to rebuild the territory: 50,000 homes have been totally or partially destroyed, roughly 250 factories have reportedly been rendered inoperable, and Gaza's sewage treatment facility and power plant have been damaged, shrinking the available supply of drinkable water and creating a potential health crisis for residents.

The recent (and ongoing) Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip has taken a massive toll on the densely-populated urban area's infrastructure. While the need to begin reconstruction is urgent and unquestionable, the mechanics are much trickier. In order to get cement into Gaza, Palestinians must either smuggle it in or wait for Israel to slacken the seven-year old embargo. Israel, on the other hand, remains opposed to easing restrictions on construction materials after Hamas used imported cement to construct its network of tunnels, although it has recently signaled that it will slacken some elements of the blockage. The process will begin with a donor conference with funds processed by the Palestinian Authority, which is supposed to lead reconstructive efforts.