No Man’s Land. A Forum for Jerusalem

Abstract

The idea is to realize a great container where you can feel the friction between close but distant worlds, where the dramatic shrill sounds, that characterize the city, are perceptible but where, at the same time, great harmony and peace can be found. A world that sums up history, the great protagonist of Jerusalem, in an overlaying of strata of golden ages with dark and cruel ages; a continuous mixing of contradictory situations and contrasting events that create a huge hole, at the bottom of which there is a common, unitary world. The huge void of No Man’s Land is an underground square, the FORUM, a room that paradoxically could be the first link in a cultural, social and finally, urban connections: the space that gathers, keeping intact the identity of populations. The lotus blossom of Jerusalem. Subtracting room to contradictions and fights, we create a neutral space. The void is conceived as a neutral space, no?contact space, but where different cultures and traditions can meet, where it is possible to build up a dialog. The void itself facilitates the growth of peace. The city lives in the underground space a new dimension, with its contradictions, but with a contamination of cultures through several human activities (study center, library, restaurant, cinema, theatre, shopping mall, art galleries, offices…). Focusing the FORUM, but always with a glance at the upper concrete world, people is called quietly but firmly to work and live for peace and multiratial dialog. The gamble is to make the individual reflect, by the instruments of architecture, through evocations of the deep gorges of the desert of Judea and Negev, of the karstic phenomena of the slopes of the Dead Sea, so dramatic but in front of which the individual finds himself pervaded with an overwhelming sense of peace and unity in front of the big enigma of the Nature. An architecture which evokes the subterranean nature of Jerusalem, a city that seems condemned by its history to roll up on itself as if an incurable fault from the time of all times were swallowing it cyclically with continuous seismic phenomena.