As one of the most segregated cities, Jerusalem has been a place between the competition of religions and polities. In our vision, the 2050 Jerusalem should be a capital of two states, a peaceful and sustainable city. The central feature of our project is the development of a series of kinetic structures which demonstrate characteristics of a walking machine, with the potential of moving themselves across the land in a manner similar as mobile houses. We named it as Land Walker, a solar energy driven building, which, according to the changing internal requirements and external stimuli, can produce potentially infinite scenarios. The entire building can be assembled on the individual unit level, compatible with the dynamic changing cultures.
Rather than designing a permanent structure in a shared land of multi-ethnic societies, Land Walker does not claim land property. It is a kind of sustainable development of complex adaptive systems that self-regulate, in opposition to the static building-site principles. It questions the struggle for land ownership among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the past thousands of years. As a messenger, it provides a gesture to the public that the key issue of understanding the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis is the ownership of land, rather than religion, ethnicity, or ideology.
Land Walker, a performative structure across the border
In multi-ethnic societies, ethnic groups tend to create segregated residential communities spontaneously. In the contemporary reality, the segregation wall showing the contest for Jerusalem is not only a competition for holy sites, but is first and foremost a question of borders.
By walking along the existing wall with “legs” on both sides, the Land Walker can perform various scenarios on the recognition level and stimulate an emotional response---similar as the pop art and post modern installations, although on a much larger scale. By giving up the land ownership and walking on the site with rich historic and political background, it provides unlimited potentials as a messenger, evolves and forms mutual associations among people, site and event. More importantly, audiences can have their own interpretations of the meanings represented by this “building without land”, according to their own experience and culture background.
Modular system
This project is inspired by Theo Jansen’s walking sculpture. This walking platform provides a mobile site to host living units. Each architectural unit, as an independent entity, is inserted into a lattice of frame structure, like "the bottles in a wine rack". Within this modular building system, a large quantity of plug-in and infill units are fabricated and assembled. Each unit has its own identity and can be customized by the users. While assembled together, they have a unique expression as a whole by the way of clustering. Thus, these process-driven methods produce living spaces, maintenance storages, balconies, and roof gardens. Beyond these functions, spatio-temoporal organization also produces various compositions to represent rich culture experiences and historical references.
Community
Our proposal promotes a multi-ethnic nomad community to avoid single-ethnic primarily residential development. The characteristic of this nomad community heavily relies on these individual Land Walkers’ spatial relation and the internal logic among them. The community is operated within a dynamic open system imposed by the social, economic and culture requirements of each ethnic group. The complex interactions and group behaviors rely on the individual building’s response to the logics of the mass, as much as they do on any single initiative. Multi-purpose buildings provide light industry, tourism, entertainment, shopping and office areas.
People are brought together to this shared community for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Each individual Land Walker responds to those around it, obeying simple rules with tolerance to each other. This new pattern results in a higher level of integration than any individual could achieve.
