Going Up | Guerrilla Architecture in Israel

DESCRIPTIONMor Arkadir Team members of 72 Hour Urban Action.

Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv, is Israel’s most densely populated city. Few would call it beautiful. But it is precisely the absence of architectural splendor in this seaside burg, population 160,000, that makes it an ideal incubator for the 72 Hour Urban Action, a guerrilla architecture and design festival that wraps up today.

During the event, which was held as part of the city’s second Biennale of Landscape Urbanism, 10 teams of architects, artists, designers and students — from Israel, Morocco, the United States, South Korea, Italy, Taiwan, Russia, Bulgaria and Turkey — competed in a race to construct, from start to finish, public-scale projects in just three days and nights. The hope is that their vision may give a new tilt to the city’s design direction. “Bat Yam is almost entirely built, and has no other choice but to re-examine its already existing urban fabric,” said Kerem Halbrecht, the Israeli architect who dreamed up the Urban Action. “I wanted to challenge the common perception that creating change in public space is long and difficult, and to see if public space can respond to changing needs in real time.”

The competing teams were selected on the basis of their members’ portfolios, so what they have up their sleeves remained a mystery until game day. “Maybe we’ll see new ways to activate blind facades to improve street quality, or to offer a small open area where you can engage with other drivers while still waiting in your car to pick your child up from school,” Halbrecht said before the Action began, “or the creation of a public space where it’s legitimate to make out with your lover.”

All 122 contestants ate, slept and brainstormed in an elementary school (empty, thanks to the Sukkot holiday) near the project’s construction site. During the Action, construction and safety engineers offered support to the teams, which were given a budget of $2,500 for materials. They also had two trucks and a tractor at their disposal, along with a pair of bright orange overalls for everyone. The winning team was awarded $3,800 as a cash prize as well as the chance for its creation to remain in Bat Yam for good.

Juding the event was a team of five jurors, including the mayor of Bat Yam, Shlomo Lahiani, and the manager of public art and design for New York’s Times Square Alliance, Glenn Weiss. Weiss says these kinds of events are becoming popular on all kinds of scales but that Bat Yam, “more than others, has some relationship between the temporary events and potential permanent changes.” As Halbrecht explains it, “We live in a world where more and more elements are becoming privatized, meaning that they belong to someone. I am looking to find ways to work within this reality and to allow for privately owned and publicly accessible places and services where everybody gains.”