Off Grid

OFF GRID - Housing for New Immigrants (Olim Hadashim) and Young Locals in North Jaffa

As part of my second-year architectural studies, I explored the notion of getting lost, not as disorientation, but as an opportunity for discovery. This concept evolved into an architectural exploration of blurring: between spaces, between individuals, and between the private and the public. Inspired by Peter Zumthor’s Z House, where boundaries dissolve seamlessly between interior and exterior, I sought to create a similar sense of continuity and ambiguity through spatial composition.

The project is located at the seam between the American German Colony and the industrial workshops of North Jaffa - an urban condition defined by contrast. On one side, the noise of machines and garages and on the other, cafes, preserved buildings, and a park filled with children. This duality - noise and calm, production and leisure, became a key influence on the architectural concept.

Programmatically, the design proposes a residential complex for young Israelis and new immigrants (Olim Hadashim), encouraging cultural integration through shared living. The project offers 11 different units vary between two person and four person apartments, pairing locals and newcomers to foster connection and exchange.

The architectural process began with a fixed grid, an orderly framework that I gradually blurred and disrupted. Using a repetitive structural module of beams and columns, I generated variations in density, transparency, and rhythm. Two circulation systems emerge- one public, connecting the neighborhood and the nearby park through the site, and another private, reserved for residents, linking a sequence of shared rooftop spaces with different degrees of intimacy.

The result is a porous and layered environment, an architecture that much like the neighborhood around it, exists in between- between cultures, scales, and degrees of openness.