ים יבשה

In the 1980s, a decision was made to build a marina in Herzliya. The potential is high and the vision is clear – establishing docking places for yachts together with hotels and turning the place into a tourist space on the Sharon coastline. Today, twenty years after it began operating, the marina includes an abandoned shopping mall as part of a desolate space that includes several hotels and parking lots. The current situation is paradoxical – how in an ideal location and an extensive program the opposite happens. The Herzliya marina is an amputation of the natural coastal strip from north to south and detaches itself from the beaches bordering it. To the east it borders a nature reserve containing archaeological finds with topographical differences. The result is an entire space that is detached, and in reality, the space also does not exist and lives within it. From the perception that the coastal area is a natural resource that should be public and accessible to all, the program in the area is touristic – but the program discusses the space as temporary in which there are no permanent residents or anchor for occurrence. The marina functions as a triple transit station – yacht owners use it for docking only, hotel guests use it for temporary recreation and mall visitors (the few) also use it temporarily. The project attempts to revitalize the space by outlining a plan to rehabilitate it and transform it from an " placelessness" to a "place". In macro, making the space adapted to human scale and suitable for walking, delineates a new road system that connects the beaches from north to south and between the two banks of the marina from east to west, and the addition of residential construction based on the assumption that housing leads to a permanent anchor of occurrence in the area. Micro, reusing the mall and turning it into a "place" that includes opening it according to the layout of the roads and its being as a continuous part of the coastal space, changing from introverted point commerce to commercial streets, and exposing and preserving the construction that is a symbol of postmodernism in Israel.