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Jerusalem Gardens

7th Architecture Biennale Venice
"Less Aesthetic, More Ethics"

The Jerusalem Gardens installation is built of 8.0 tons of thin plates of Jerusalem stone that form the geological strata of Judean Hills. Mounted on a 1.20 m high platform, it enables the visitor to perceive the work at eye-level. The installation can be read in two different ways: as a land-art object or as a model of a town of sixteen-story high buildings at 1:100 scale.

Housing as a subject of interest for architects has dramatically diminished in the eighties and nineties since its peek in the sixties. Cost-efficiency was of paramount importance to the building-industry rather than provision of new attractive solutions for the people.

Since 1994 our office has been developing housing schemes in the form of artificial landscape for a variety of urban situations, such as Achkamp in Netherlands, Bucharest in Romania and Marzahn in Berlin. Our aim is twofold: first to create a new environment and second to provide different living conditions within this environment.

Over thousands of years residential architecture has developed parallel to our own civilization. As humans in today's society we still – undoubtedly – retain a strong relationship to our archaic origin. Each generation is adapting itself to its own, newly self-imposed modern conditions.
Therefore housing should reflect both aspects of our lives: The permanent archaic and the temporary-modern.

Design:
Zvi Hecker

Collaborators:
Eyal Weizman
Angelo Cardillo
Elisabetta Boscarol
Stefan Geenen
Leonardo Brachetta
Francesco Schiera
Frédéric L. Fourrichon

Curator:
Massimiliano Fuksas

Period:
June – November 2000