Forget more and more unruly battles, bloodshed and misery; forget the age-old rivalry and the terrible losses, that’s no way to solve a problem. A university student has come up with an imaginative answer to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a new form of habitable infrastructure he is calling Bypass Urbanism.
For a final student project he presented at Rice University, Viktor Ramos produced The Continuous Enclave: Strategies in Bypass Urbanism, exploring how to create new architectural forms from the legal interstices of the Oslo Accords, the first face-to-face agreement between Israel and political representative of Palestinians.
In an extensive write-up on Building Blog, the project is branded “a fantastic example of architectural speculation”. Ramos proposes bridges be used as transport links, aerial housing, and skyborne agricultural complexes in one massive structure.
A network of bridges cross through sovereign Israeli airspace, linking the dispersed islands of infrastructurally void territory in Palestinian control.
“This thesis takes a formal approach to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by studying mechanisms of control within the West Bank,” Ramos writes in his thesis.
“The occupation of the West Bank has had tremendous effects on the urban fabric of the region because it operates spatially. Through the conflict, new ways of imagining territory have been needed to multiply a single sovereign territory into many. It is only through the overlapping of two separate political geographies that they are able to inhabit the same landscape,” he says.
Ramos has used the Oslo Accords as a kind of spatial source-code from which unanticipated structural forms might be exacted, reports the Building Blog.
The Oslo Accords created a fragmented landscape of isolated Palestinian enclaves and Israeli settlements, says Ramos. “The intertwined nature of these fragments makes it impossible to divide the two states easily. By connecting the fragments through a series of under- and overpasses, the border between the two states has shifted vertically,” he says.
The architecture proposes internal stacked space, with bridges running over and under elevated farms. An inhabited zone weaves through the space otherwise known as the earth.
This is “one of the most thought-provoking and original contributions for the understanding of the current situation in the region since long time,” says Sharon Rotbard from Babel Architectures.
Ramos writes: “One feature of the Oslo Accords is the bypass road which links Israeli settlements to Israel, bypassing Palestinian areas in the process. These are essential to the freedom of movement for the settlers within the Occupied Territories …
“In the process, a continuous form of urbanisation has been developed to allow for the growth and expansion of the Palestinian state. Ultimately, this thesis questions the potential absurdity of partition strategies within the West Bank and Gaza Strip by attempting to realise them.”
