The Graduate Students Village is part of the Technion’s broad plan for attracting young minds, master’s and doctoral students who may become the next Nobel Prize winners. The model is simple: affordable housing, around NIS 1,700 per apartment including utilities, which enables students to concentrate on their research while assimilating into a cohesive community, and encourages them to settle down in the future at the Technion and in Haifa.
The Zielony Graduate Student Village is located on the southwestern side of the campus, far away from the academic department buildings, and overlooks a natural and built landscape. The first decision that the architects made was to keep the natural forest in place far as was possible.
Each building has some 30 apartments (218 in the housing complex overall ), which are arranged around three stairwells. Apartment sizes range from 60 to 100 square meters, with some having the option of “shifting” a room from one apartment to another to make it bigger or smaller.
The most important and innovative design component is a system of bridges that link up the interim levels of all the buildings and allow tenants to move around freely without needing to cross roads.
The experience of walking among the treetops is thrilling, and is reminiscent of works by the Japanese artist Tetsu Kondu, who deals with examining the relationship between man and heaven and earth. The buildings themselves look like giant masses that have had chunks “bitten” off.
“It’s meant to bring the landscape into the apartments,” Schwartz explains.
Schwartz and Bar Orian agree with the comparison, but say their version takes the idea a step forward. “The public housing complexes in Israel were designed without any connection to the site. They were positioned at random without any link to the ground conditions. We tried to converse with the environment and with nature. The buildings in the village are ‘deformed’ in order to adjust to the landscape.”
The architects Liran Chechik and Nitzan Kalush have been living in the village for the past nine months. They moved there from junior faculty housing after their family grew. They deem the village a successful project, with “a whiff of colleges in Europe,” that enables community life and cooperation and makes you feel like sticking around for a long time.
“The public spaces have had a lot put into them, and generate a pretty lively community life – all relative to the Technion of course,” they say with a grin. “The bridge that spans the buildings serves as a pleasurable route for walks, and opens onto playgrounds that are suited to a range of ages. The spaces in between the apartments constitute alternative ground, which is important because the topography in this area of the Technion is really extreme.”
Chechik mentions favorably the way that the village blends into the natural forest.
“There is a sense that the buildings are well integrated into the forest. Old trees stayed put and the buildings kind of squeeze between them. More than once we have come upon wild boars and jackals,” he adds.