NOMADIC HOUSE
AL ARAQIB, ISRAEL, 2019
MIT RESEARCH PROJECT
NuVu PRIZE FOR OUTSTANDING RESEARCH
The people of the village Al Araqib in Israel's Negev Desert are prevented from building permanent housing for political reasons, and the police demolish all their houses every three weeks. Working with residents of Al Araqib, we designed a temporary structure that would follow design principles the residents of Al Araqib were already using. This research explores how digital fabrication can be used to empower disenfranchised communities to act as their own architects. Because of the constant demolitions, the residents have to re-build their structures, and appropriate architecture as a resistance tool, and not only as a housing solution. This circumstance allows us to develop a structure designed primarily for the condition of rapid disassembly that can additionally be produced with a low-tech setup of a mobile CNC router. Beyond aiding the Bedouin’s fight for justice, our intention as designers, acutely aware of the power of technology and architecture, is to harness both physical and digital tools in an effort to create innovative systems that can be leveraged by unrecognized populations struggling for cultural survival.
MIT team: Molly Mason, David Allen White, Hugh Ebdy, Yaara Yaacoby, Hila Sharabi with Larry Sass. The project was published at IJAC (International Journal of Architectural Computing), June 2020.
