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Architects: Gitai Architects
- Area: 800 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Yohan Zerdoun
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Manufacturers: Sika, Excellent Coatings, Greenline, Rammed Earth, Steico, Tradical® Bâtir
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Lead Architects: Ben Gitai, Munio Gitai, Dani Guinness, Charly Crochu
Text description provided by the architects. Reflecting on a piece of land can awake different senses and memories from stories and events that occurred to us in the past and that might happen in the future. The contemplation on our environment is a process that juxtaposes our own narrative and a observation of a piece of land into a single moment. The observer takes a travelling gaze to look at his nature and at the same time provokes a journey within himself that, through a plurality of paths, shapes his mental landscape.
These Layers of time and stratification were embodied and took form in a specific project by Ben Gitai Architects. Commissioned by the city of Haifa in 2017 to create a space of commemoration for the soldiers who died in the last height decade of war. The architecture and design project proposal is a memorial park in Kyriat haim in Israel which is entirely made with earth Adama in Hebrew. In terms of landscape and architecture it is the first of the kind, no memorial was done till today in this particular technic. memorial reassembles in it spatial qualities, craftsmen-shift, materiality and people’s memory into this piece of Landscape.
In this project, we transform the public space into a place where the memory of the fallen soldiers are immersing with the nature, the earth. In an open architectural configuration of the plan, each earth elements his situated in an open room system, Therefor the eyes and the ears can absorb from all directions and to connect to the place, so the death could dialogue with the living of the space.
We decided to locate, the memorial near the children background that are an integrated part in the piece, it is this specific overlaying source that feeds and animates the memorial itself by a system of sound streaming composition in a form of earth benches Soundscape.
This earth song is a Harmonization through the names of the fallen, each letter is composing a specific note in this song. The Harmonic basis through which nature is transformed. Each three minute a chord is realized where each first name of the fallen soldiers triggers one tone into the environmental transformation, articulation the sound of absent with the chores and pass in time were a person as fallen.
The streaming living sounds perceives auditory space as devoid of any specific focus, field or sphere - negating permanent and stable boundaries - as if it is made of the thing itself, rather than the space containing the thing it opens out with the open form system of the earth elements and to the memory of each visitor will awoke a sonor travel into himself.
The earth memorial is becoming in this moment neither visual nor delineated, but dynamic, constantly changing and creating its own dimensions of space that represents memory through time. It has no set boundaries or background. While the eye of the visitor focuses, locates, makes abstract, and places each earth elements in physical space in relation with the surrounding.
