The growing trend for opening your doors and letting people get a glimpse of your life and your style, has also reached Israel.
Open House events give a rare opportunity to see the heart of someone’s home. Now for some there might be an aspect of the ego, showing off the latest sofa or architectural credentials in your home, but for many it is a rather humbling experience to let people into your home. It takes an open heart to open the door to your home.
In Rajasthan, many Maharajahs have had to open the doors to their palaces and forts in order to afford to maintain them. But what a treat for us. When anyone opens the doors to an historical or listed building, we get a glimpse at another world. We get to envision how our ancestors have lived or get an insight into what goes on behind the closed doors of royalty. Many former palaces and forts in India have now evolved into hotels and guest houses. You get to sink into the heritage of the place.
Houses From Within Festival In Tel Aviv
At the Houses from Within Festival in Tel Aviv, you can find yourself in the listed building of 5 Zlotzisti Street, designed in the 1950s by celebrated architect Dov Karmi.
It’s an apartment in one of the most interesting buildings within the city and is on the municipality’s list of preservation sites due to amazing wooden blinds. In the 2008 festival, you could also take a tour with Ram Karmi, Dov Karmi’s son who shines a light on the changes in Israeli architecture since the 50s.
Created by architect Alon Ben-Nun and Aviva Levinson, Houses from Within has created a new awareness about architecture in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem since 2007. With 20,000 people participating in the 2008 event, there were free guided tours of 50 buildings, some of them private homes.
Open Houses are a way of celebrating advances in architecture and design. There is great scope in promoting environmental trends in design through opening your doors to the public or showing off innovative ways of refurbishing older properties.
Houses from Within aims to showcase people “who live and breathe the city, including some who devote their time to trying to improve it.”
The Houses From Within festival included nine environmentally-focused activities with open houses, but also mud brick workshops and bicycle tours.
So from the ALT E Company showing wind turbines installed on roofs of skyscrapers to the restoration of an historic building from 1925 using purely sustainable and environmentally friendly materials, this festival highlights new ways of creating urban solutions and sustainable buildings. Or you can visit a house that has been built around a mango tree.
Finding a way for architecture and nature to co-exist is at the heart of this festival. A new wave of green architecture is growing in Israel.
Soon Tel Aviv university will have a new eco-building designed by Josef Cory. He has already designed the SunSail, an eco-friendly residential building which focuses on water and electricity conservation in Haifa.
Cory hopes that “The building will be like a lighthouse for green architecture – something that I feel people should be more aware of, and also architects. Once we have more and more examples like this, architects will have more confidence to do it themselves.”
Similarly in Jerusalem, eco architect Gil Peled has worked on renovating old buildings with an eye on conservationism. In his blog, he says “the Eco-Housing Pilot Project building is 50 years old. When we began the project, it was very run-down, and had we not intervened, it would have slowly decayed and would probably have ended up being demolished in another 10 years. So we took a problem and turned it into a solution. It's harder to tackle existing architecture than to build a new eco-friendly building from scratch, but it is possible, feasible, affordable and sustainable. We've prolonged this particular building's life by about 50 years…We improved the building's insulation, converted the water boilers to solar panels, switched over to energy-efficient light bulbs and began a compost project. Also, the building's occupants are now more aware of how to save energy and water and reduce waste.”
At the heart of architecture in Israel, you can also find Josef Kiriaty who dubs himself a spiritual architect. Working on projects in Israel and India, he is also on the board of the Jerusalem Peace Academy. He is currently working on a building in Agra, India for the Brahma Kumari group – the Spiritual Love and Wisdom Museum.
He has envisioned an entire structure which appears to float in a pond of water.
Conde Nast also gave special mention to the renovated Hotel Montefiore, a boutique hotel in the heart of Tel Aviv’s White City.
This area is home to 2,000 original Bauhaus buildings dating back to the 1930s and the recently opened Bauhaus Center which celebrates this branch of modernist architecture. Hotel Montefiore is a renovated 1920s Mansion house who has recaptured the grace of this former time.
Houses from Within celebrates both the old and the new in architecture. We can learn from the past and put firm foundations down for the future of eco-architecture.