Shabesh Na (TAU final project)

A Playful Perspective on Disrupted Space

In various incidents and moments around the city, the social order is broken by a disruption, and new temporary order emerges. After the disruption is removed, life goes back to order, but an opportunity was reveiled and space is seen with new eyes. I called these incidents “Little moments of freedom”.
The project studies these moments and proposes to implement their values in a real-life temporary disruption situation: the construction of the underground train in Tel Aviv, which started 3 days after the final presentation.

With order now disrupted, freedom of choice is given to users. It is then when space starts to shed its signs.

Diruptions activate us physically. They have the potential to expose our wilder side.

They offer an interprating look and unintentionally break borders between private and public.

They can break social and spacial hirarchy. Events, demonsrations and parties have the potential for new temporary order to emerge.

They make us think creatively, searching for solutions. And they make us communicate and cooprate with strangers.

This playfull interprating look is what children have and slowly lose as they grow up and begin to construct their perception of their surroundings.

Analizing the spacial qualities of construction sites reveiled spaces full of freedom and opportunities.
Breaking the semiotic code of space, makes it abstract, alien and thus open for inerpretaion.
Children are also very well known for having an interpretive and creative perspective of space. In their unstructured gaze, they explore space around them through play and physical engagement.

Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zone” spaeks about temporary utopias as anarchistic tactics. I extracted a few main principles from his theory:
* Every revolution will end in a new social order. Real freedom lies in the moment of insurrection.
* Transience is a necessary condition for freedom.

Guy Debord, considered part of the Situationist movement, in his book “Society of the Spectacle”, speaks about how society became a spectator. Passive and consuming the world around us.
He offers different playful tactics as a way to engage with our environment and challenge the common capitalstic agenda.

On August 2015, construction work started for the first ever light rail train the the Tel Aviv Metropolin. Most stations within Tel Aviv city are infact underground which resulted in many big scale construction sites located in key locations. The news on this future plan created public hysteria and described this period as sort of an armageddon.
This project’s objective was to suggest a different approach to this period. considering the values and benefits of temoprary disrupted space, its proposal was to celebrate freedom, given by chaos and make the hazzard into a festival.

Chosen construction site with new typological situations

Undergroung stations to be built in Tel Aviv

1. Instead of narrow passagway, a playful “cat-walk” bridge that requires an equal number of particpative spectators on both sides for balance.

2. Once connecting streets are now “Dead End” which attract neglect.
The proposal is an ifastructure for street events with a special view.

3. Traffic elements lose their function and become “Leftovers”. This traffic island is finally living up to its name, filled with excavated soil.

4. A more site-specific intervention, uses a near by elevated public parking as an infastructure for an elevated esplanade designed like a roller coaster.

5. As a result of the construction site wall located right on the edge of the sidwalk, this section was created. With a narrow, dark alley on one side and a deep dig on the other.
Inhabitants and shop owners were the ones to suffer from it the most.
As part of the perspective looking for potential in the disrupted space, the project proposes a bank (much bigger then the one presented here) of interventions and attractions that can be implemented in the alley.
These interventions turn the alley into a temporary festival, using the resources available fom the constuction site, giving the local residents programs that are usually impossible.
A special scaffolding system was designed as the structure for these intervensions.

The “Alley” part of the project was developped as a public engagement board game. The game enables the inhabitans and shop-owners of the building to choose and distribute different add-ons to the building for the construction period.
Every intervention has a card with different categories such as the foor it can fit to, physical difficulty, time of the day it is operated, etc. and a piece that represents it. In turn the different players can either deny, cooperate or reinterprate each other’s choices until they complete the building.

Different games result in different combinations. The following are 3 different game results:

Conceptual model - 1:20

Conceptual model - 1:20

When applied to a full block the result is of a construction site gone out of control. The surroundings now speak its language and feed off its resources and tempoary freedom.

Zachi Razel Architectural Designer + Builder +

Zachi
Razel
Architectural Designer + Builder +