הארכיון החי

The project proposes the idea of collecting the archive and opening it to the general public, emerging from a reality in which the Palestinian people have lacked a unified and accessible national archive. As a result, informal forms of archiving have developed, primarily through personal and family archives, which have preserved official and personal documents, photographs, correspondence, and testimonies across generations, forming scattered fragments of memory and history. My grandfather was one of those who maintained a rich family archive. Through examining and reading this archive, I was able to discover stories, information, and events that I would not have encountered otherwise. The project emerges from this personal experience, proposing a public, social, and cultural archival complex that transforms the act of searching and reading the archive into a spatial experience. The project’s composition and its expansion through space derive from the scattered, diverse, and non-sequential experience of reading an archive, transforming this experience into an architectural logic that shapes space and movement throughout the project. The project extends through Wadi Salib in Haifa, a neighborhood whose urban fabric bears the traces of demolition, neglect, and historical transformations. The project engages with the valley’s topography as an integral part of its architectural concept, adapting to the existing changes in elevation and carefully utilizing them to create a sequence of diverse and architecturally rich spaces. In this way, movement through the building and between its different levels becomes part of the experience of discovering, reading, and storing the archive.