Architecture for Qalqilya

Abstract

An impossible situation in an almost unimaginable reality. That is the truth about the city of Qalqilya: a place surrounded by a wall that has become the victim of a conflict without a solution. This conflict, in which architecture was strategically and seamlessly used to create the political as well as the physical landscape, no longer allows the architect to enact change. But he must try. And so the question becomes how? In a place in which the traditional tools of architecture are no longer relevant, how does one create a space in which to act? Should earnestness be the desired solution, or is cynicism the lone alternative? Is it possible, as Reinhold Martin put it, to be a "double agent", to be driven by a sense of responsibility and earnest moralism while performing with an equally earnest cynicism? And if that is the case, is it beneficial to imagine a world, an alternative reality? Would that allow for the creation of new possibilities and could those be grafted onto our present reality? Perhaps that is the main task of the architect. To imagine. Not from above, as he sees the plan, but from the ground that the farmer sows. Or from the streets that the school girl walks. Or even the zoo where the animals spend their lives. These are the places in which to act, to image possible alternatives. What follows is a story, one of many, of Qalqilya.