House On a Hill

HOUSE ON A HILL

OVERVIEW

EMPLOYER

LOCATION

YEAR

A small house in the communal

Senan Abdelqader

Neve Shalom,

2013

village of Neve Shalom.

Israel

Developed in Senan Abdelqader Architects.

HOUSE ON A HILL

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RULES

BACKGROUND The concept for the Landao family house was to create a small dwelling unit that will connect to the landscape.

Several alternatives were considered for the house. Presented here is one of the earlier options.

The house is owned by Mrs. Nilly Landao and her family. Mrs. Landao works as an experimental artist.

CONCEPT The house functions as a terrace on the hillside, overlooking the view.

The house design uses techniques similar to those used in historic habitats of local settlers who usually resided on hills or mounds and used simple retaining walls and ground-leveling methods for their agriculture and home construction.

LATRON CRUSADER CASTLE NEAR NAVE SHALOM HOUSE ON A HILL

The boundaries of the house are blurred by placing the outdoor circulation system on the site’s perimeter. This emphasizes the continuity of the house with the hill and still defines it as a secure entity.

Some of the courtyards are placed beyond the ‘building line’ in order to highlight the house’s horizontal lines... in the form of a long, new artificial terrace.

The glass box of the second floor is an optional future addition that contains the public spaces of the house, like the kitchen and living room, and frees the terrace-shaped first floor for the house’s bedrooms and private spaces.

The house design is part of the extension of Nave-Shalom’s communal village. The extension to the village designates several dozens of new lots for detached private housing in order to maintain the village’s pastoral quality.

The desire for pastorality comes from the Israeli rules of parcelation and urban design approaches influenced by theories of the ‘Garden City’ envisaged by Ebenezer Howard, according which most of the cities, towns and villages of Israel are built.

One of the main targets of this project is to keep, and at the same time to break, some of the parcelation rules in order to avoid a suburban villa and to create a habitat that has a rough feeling.

By using a series of courtyards and voids the house fuses indoor and outdoor spaces. These courtyards give the site its own set of rules and create a new type of house that consists of repetitive closed and open spaces.

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HOUSE ON A HILL

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8

5

1

4

7

8 4 5

8

3

2

10

9 6

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

[MULTI-FUNCTIONAL] LIVING ROOM / FUTURE STUDIO BEDROOM MASTER BEDROOM WRITING DESK KITCHENETTE LAUNDRY WARDROBE TOILETS

HOUSE ON A HILL

4 8 9 10

WRITING DESK TOILETS KITCHEN DINING AREA 19

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[OPTIONAL] FUTURE ADDITION

HOUSE MAIN FLOOR + COURTYARDS

NEW LANDSCAPE

LOT EXCAVATION

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CONTEXT Neve Shalom, also known as Wahat As-salam is a cooperative village jointly founded by Israeli Jews and PalestinianIsraeli Arabs in an attempt to show that the two peoples can live side by side peacefully, as well as to conduct educational work for peace, equality and understanding between the two peoples. The village is located on one of the two Latrun hilltops overlooking the Ayalon Valley, and lies midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In 2011 the village had a population of 236. As of 2006, it has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.

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