p.s. in nazareth - thesis

[ P.S. in Nazareth ]

Reem Abu Salem | Tutors : arch. Els Verbakel and arch. Amir Peleg

P.S in Nazareth

This title isn't an additional sentence after the main body in a letter. Public Space in Nazareth is the subject and the question of this thesis.

So the public space is simply a place, that doesn't belong to a specific person but belongs to the people, to a community. The public space has the power of creating conditions that cannot exist in a personal private space.

Quoting Kevin Lynch from The Image Of The City, “The City may be looked on as a story, a pattern of relations between human groups, a production and distribution of space, a field of physical force, a set of linked decisions, or an area of conflict” A city is so much more than just a set of buildings….

It is a whole organism that is made up of tiny parts. When one part fails…it weakens the rest. Strong, successful organisms (cities) have all of their parts working at 100% capacity.”

Speaking of Nazareth, it is obvious that the need of public spaces is not fulfilled. The city suffers of shortage in both public and open spaces, two major components, without which the image of the city can’t be completed.

In a modern city that draws it's magic from its holiness, the continuity of its uniqueness relies on the community and the present life it’s living. It is about focusing on the residences of the city that have the power to revive the public spaces, which in their turn take the role in reviving the people.

Investigating the public space in Nazareth, I referred to different types of spaces, it is important to recognize the difference between open and public, the fact that there are open public spaces, closed public spaces and open private spaces.

“Landscape moves from one function to another to design a new panorama and recreate facilities of recreation and leisure” Kevin Lynch.

I’m analyzing the public space in Nazareth, and questioning what qualities and characteristics are needed to design the right space. How can architecture create the right needed place for public activities and gatherings, how should this space be composed, what are the scales of this public space, what surrounding elements should exist around it to support it, what's the level of opening, the amount of green, the lighting, the topographic diversity and the trust and safety level.

WHAT? The project questions the role of public space in Nazareth by inserting a new public communal and educational layer to the main street in Nazareth that introduces a new typology of public space in the city. A new ‘linear campus’ stretches from Tawfiq Zayad Street along Paulus street creating a skeleton of public spaces including a library, an auditorium, research laboratories, classrooms and dorms along the route.

As a case study, the design focuses on a library in the center nearby Mary’s Well, in a search to create appropriate public and open spaces for Nazareth as an Arabic city of the 21st century.

WHY? The public space in Nazareth stands as a problematic field since it is very limited in several aspects such as quantity, diversity, green proximity and opening. In addition, open spaces are often inaccessible for the general public. The link between the public space and the educational functions along the skeleton refers to the importance of the education in Nazareth as an autonomous city and a metropolitan center that supports the Arab cities and villages around.

HOW? The library continues Paulus street’s unique identity by giving a façade to the street, and an open public space that is accessible yet protected.

The design creates a complex layered hierarchy between open and closed spaces. As a result of the design process I concluded that in order to create a working open public space in Nazareth, this space needs to belong to a mass, and this works in both directions, the indoor space should belong to an open space.

The library is designed in a way that embraces the open spaces within the building, by creating several holes inside surrounded by a sequence of interiors. These holes turn into a masses (cubicles) in the big patio, and support the open space that is organized around them.

This “hole” system continues in the façade of the building, creating different types of openings (inspired by existing elements in Nazareth) in the continuous white wall, giving opportunities of physical and visual connections to Nazareth’s urban context.

Mount Precipice

Bypass Road

Eastern Neighborhood

Paulus Street

Pilgrims Path

Old City

Latin Neighborhood

 [Nazareth section] This section represents the urban and symbolic shapes of a city along a topographic axis. It allows us to discover the different atmospheres of the places, as well as the views and characteristic monuments that are attached next to each other but separated by the height of the land. It allows to identify what gives the city its identity, and to see how well the different heights of the territory are used.

It manages to show the uniqueness of each urban tissue and highlights the differences between them. It manifests the change of the density and the scale of the tissues, starting from a very crowded and small scale houses in the old city, moving to a less crowded dwellings in the Latin neighborhood and then to the big scale of the churches, the low density and the fact that they are surrounded by green and open private spaces.

Moreover, it emphasizes the differences between the streets: the crowded and chaotic Paulus street, the wider and less crowded bypass route, and the uncrowned open pilgrims’ route, that is characterized with more green, wider sidewalks that looks almost like a pedestrian.

And ďŹ nally it shows the open spaces at the edges of the city.

[Open spaces in Nazareth] Analyzing the open spaces in Nazareth it’s obviously concluded that the city suffers from lack of open spaces. Most of these open spaces are not accessible to the general public.

Those private open spaces mostly belong to the churches and are surrounded by walls that are not only disabling the physical access of the public but also the visual one as well.

In the whole process of analyzing the public space it was important to recognize the difference between the terms [open-closed] and [publicpr iv ate], and t he different combinations that can be made of both groups, especially in Nazareth; where there are lots of closed public spaces and also lots of open private spaces in many scales, whether it’s a yard in a home or a big open space that relates to a church.

The design process tries to analyze the different types and combinations of these spaces in Nazareth in order to create new ones with the right scales and relationships between the different elements.

This timeline analyzes the historical public spaces of the city, that stand today as iconic figures of Nazareth, they draw their magic and importance from their role as places that contributed to the past public life of the city and served the public of that area according to the needs of these times.

Mary’s Well is known for it’s religious importance as Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and announced that she would bear the Son of God an event known as the Annunciation. In addition to the religious importance, Mary’s Well or (the Spring Plaza) served as the city’s main water source for several centuries. And here lies its public meaning, as it was a meeting and news exchanging point for the women that arrived to the well to fill water.

Khan El-Basha Khan is a Persian word, meaning an inn or motel. Khan el-Basha is the biggest, most impressive of the five khans built in Nazareth, and is named after Suleiman Basha, Nazareth's governor, who repaired the khan in 1814. The building, which is opposite the Basilica of the Annunciation, is used for offices these days but is scheduled for preservation.

Khan el-Basha was built at the entrance to Nazareth. It consisted of a large yard surrounded by domed rooms on three of its sides, while the fourth side is a curved colonnade. Originally, the khan had only one floor, but at the end of the nineteenth century an additional floor, with 10 accommodation rooms, was added. The first floor had storage room for merchandise and animals.

The Ancient Bathhouse (Alhamam) The public bathhouse has been dated to the Roman era and the time of Jesus. It used to be a public meeting point for all kind of activities, mainly health activities, such as bathing, in addition to that it included eating and coffee drinking activities as well as parties and shows to entertain the bathers.

The Old City Architectural buildings of housing and trade from the Ottoman Era with narrow alleys passing between them, it was divided to markets according to the trade type such as the brides market, the carpenter’s market, the vegetables market and so on..

Looking at the limited public spaces in Nazareth, they can be specified under two categories with very obvious characteristics.

Mary’s well and the city plaza are not considered as successful public spaces and this refers to the elements surrounding them, they are surrounded by streets and low walls, even though they are trying to give an open space with a certain amount of green, they are actually defined by what’s around them. And that’s the most important conclusion.

The successful public spaces in Nazareth are the ones surrounded by architectural masses, buildings that are giving a feeling of relevance and safety.

Usually the content of these architectural figures is shopping or food related functions such as restaurants cafes and bars, like we can see in Piazza Orthodossa and in Big Fashion.

In this project the aim is to create public spaces that are more diverse but at the same time based on what I concluded from the existing ones in the city.

(Paulus Street) When it comes to any main street in a city whether it’s Paris, Barcelona, New York or Nazareth, it is the street that makes you fall in love with the city, where the stories are born and the culture is layered year after year, where in each passing car a family exists, where the people salute each other when passing by, and the buildings embrace their street while they rise and welcome a new life in-behind their walls that are standing there smiling for the street’s lights.

Paulus Street is in almost every memory I have about Nazareth. I lived it through the windows of a driving car, every day for 18 years and it is Nazareth. The noises, the smells and the chaos, the crazy traffic jam, the buss stations, the faces of the people driving and walking and running, the shops and their signs, the trees, the flowers and the facades framing the sky, the illuminating lights at night, and the city’s treasures appearing from behind, the weird sidewalks that manage to mix the cars with the people in a messy way, and the vertical stairs sewing the street into the city’s topography.

The street is screened with various functions, usually commerce in the first floor and dwellings in the upper floors, in addition to other functions such as schools, offices, churches, parking lots and hotels.

Along the streets there are few voids between the masses that can be potential sites for future fill-ins.

As for the transportation, the street is very crowded and suffers from a traffic jam problems, and I suggest using the surrounding streets in the upper and the lower neighborhoods to decrease the traffic jam.

Project. (analysis conclusions)

As a result of the design process I concluded that in order to create a working open public space in Nazareth, this space needs to belong to a mass, and this works in both directions, the indoor space should belong to an open space.

The library is designed in a way that embraces the open spaces within the building, by creating several holes inside surrounded by a sequence of interiors. These holes turn into masses (cubicles) in the big patio, and support the open space that is organized around them.

Each outer space needs masses to surround it in order to support it as a function and as a physical figure that provide it with safety, power and meaning. That’s why the outer space in the library is divided to smaller parts and supported by small buildings that outline territories and create a certain division in the big open space, enabling the public to feel intimacy and relevance in an open public space. Those small masses in the big patio are private studying rooms that provide the public with a maximal concentration level; they include small living rooms, small studying rooms or small offices. These cubicles are the smallest public spaces that can exist as a part of a public building; they are public spaces designed for one person, two or three.

When it comes to the indoor spaces, the situation is the exact negative of what happens in the outside; small patios are perforating the mass in order to support the interiors, and so the inside activities are coordinated around these patios and drawing their power from them. Those holes are the smallest open spaces in a building, for instance they can be public open spaces for two people or even only for a tree or a chair.

This “hole” system continues in the façade of the building, creating different types of openings in the continuous white wall, giving opportunities of physical and visual connections to Nazareth’s urban context.

I am suggesting a new ‘linear campus’ stretching from Tawfiq Zayad Street along Paulus street creating a skeleton of public spaces including a library, an auditorium, research laboratories, classrooms and dorms along the route, in a search to create appropriate public and open spaces for Nazareth as an Arabic city of the 21st century.

The link between the public space and the educational functions along the skeleton refers to the importance of the education in Nazareth as an autonomous city and a metropolitan center that supports the Arab cities and villages around.

(Spatial image and architectural language) The spatial image of the project is about the line that separates the ‘In’ from the ‘Out’.

How the façade of the building can turn into a three dimensional figure and include functions within it, and also how this façade can be folded to both directions (in/out) merging them together and creating all kind of openings and interesting spatial situations.

The face of this project is a simple white wall that has all kinds of openings, that are inspired by existing elements in Nazareth and especially in the old city, those openings come in different sizes, from the small dots to window-size. Also, some of these windows are protruding from the façade and others are set back. Some of the patterns of the windows are existing patterns that had been rescaled and modified into new shapes, for instance I took the classic arc and scaled it into small arc holes creating a ‘Mashrabiah’.

[Main Site]

As a case study, the design focuses on a library in the center nearby Mary’s Well.

The site is a hole located between Paulus street and the Eastern Neighborhood.

It’s near a sequence of open public spaces that are draining from the pilgrim’s’ route, (Piazza Orthodossa and Mary’s Well plaza) .

The site contains the ‘Friendshiphouse’, Shawarma place and a parking lot.

‘Friendshiphouse’, a combination of offices with public functions likes shops, a youth center, etc. Architect Michael Abunofal’s design was only partially completed in 1975.

Nowadays the building’s shows a long-term neglect where we see closed shops, broken windows and piles of illegal trash.

It is planned to destroy the building in order to build a hotel instead.

[The Library]

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[Program] When planning a library as a public space in Nazareth, and thinking about the program, I referred to four important subjects in which there are different levels of situations.

-Concentration level: according to the users and the materials they are reading or the research they are doing, they need various types of spaces that provide different levels of concentrations, starting from a very individual rooms or cubicles and moving to a very public and communal space that enables all kinds of activities, and interactions between people, such as a kitchen or a living room.

-Opening type: the level of exposure to the “Out” and the connection to the city. The transfer is from a small hole in a wall, to a window, a patio, a plaza or even a street.

-Technology level: the information source can be a simple classic book, a computer or even a tablet.

-Age: the library serves all ages.

As a conclusion I translated these thoughts into three-dimensional spaces that are answering these different needs and created all kinds of spaces whether those spaces are the small study cubicles or the big reading rooms. In addition to designing the information source that includes different types of materials, books, computers and so on in a unified designed element.

[The Library] The library, designed in the main site gives a façade to Paulus street managing to complete its continuity and highlight it’s line. It also continues the sequence of open spaces by creating a plaza opposed to Mary’s Well Plaza, from which is the entrance to the main open space in the library.

The open space goes down with the topography linking Paulus street with the western neighborhood, and filling the hole that exists between both of them, the library’s buildings surround this space, and it is divided to smaller parts (terraces), that are supported by the cubicles, to give it more intimacy and relevance.

In the main site, I designed a combination of a library, an auditorium, coffee shop and restaurant, dorms, offices and a gallery in addition to a bookshop and a tourist info point on the other side of Paulus street.

The library it self is divided to four libraries serving different communities and providing various experiences. Communal Library, Academic Library, Communal-Academic Hybrid library and Kids’ Library.

[Roof Plan 1:500]

[Library Types]

[Program]

[The Planning of the building]

Entering from the main square there lies the main entrance to the library building, specifically to the communal library that is designed in a lounge style, providing comfort siting spaces for reading, small sofas organized around the patios inside the building and accessible to the different info sources that are diffused in the space.

After the communal library you arrive to the hybrid library- the ‘kitchen’, in this library the activities are combined, the purpose is to mix the reading with other communal activities of meeting and eating, that happen around a long table that manage to bring the people together around this element. This table is decomposed according to the topography’s decline; it changes linearly from a table to bookshelves, stairs or a bench. Right next to the kitchen passes the outdoor pedestrian that links linearly the western neighborhood to Paulus Street.

The main patio declines with the topography either with the big ramp near the inner façade of the building or with the terraces that are supported by the cubicles that are providing the highest level of concentration and creating quiet public spaces for individual studiers and researchers.

In the second floor there is the art gallery of Nazareth that overlooks the city and frames it through the thick walls of it’s façade, and brings it into the gallery.

Above the kitchen there is the academic library that has studying tables, which enables group or individual study in a quiet area.

Meeting rooms and offices are situated in the third floor, replacing the existing offices in the ‘Friendshiphouse’.

On the opposed building there is the kids’ library where next to it the dorms are located. These dorms are designed according to the old houses in the old city (a very simple scheme of a central hole that leads to all the rooms).

There is an underground space that is related to the whole archaeological religious thing in Nazareth; this is a book storage space that can be observed through holes in the floor of the ground floor. It also has a glass window that enables viewing the underground soil and stones. Next to it there is an underground parking.

[Plans]

[Exploded Axonometric ] The exploded axonometric shows the placing of the patios and the cubicles in the space and how they manage to divide the space and create the design process around them, creating the hierarchy between the open and closed spaces and managing to relate them to each other.

[Sections]

[details] Here are two details of the windows, the first one showing the intruding rusty steel window from the white wall and the other one shows creating a green wall by inserting pots inside the wall , that gives green to both sides of the façade.

[P.S.]

Finally I would say that the public space of any city must be a combination of its culture, its layered history and its present contemporary life.

What works in one city wouldn’t necessarily work in another, it is important to design for the city and for the people, to concentrate on their needs and to help them find what they want, to create an image or a space they are trying to imagine or constantly look for. As an architect and observer it is my job to show them what they need and create the appropriate public space that relies on the culture of this city, a great city who’s power lies on the various mutual relations between things, whether it’s the reliance of people on each others, the reliance of open spaces on the buildings, the reliance of the street on it’s surrounding facades, and the reliance of a house on it’s garden.

This is my city, this is Nazareth, a warm correlation between its opposing ingredients.