The Safad Primary School

These renderings explore how the renovated buildings might look and feel. They test angles, structure, light, and form—how people might move through or use them, and how the structure interacts with its surroundings.

The design draws from Parker’s suspended fragments and Woods’ speculative forms. Architecture here floats, fragments, and suspends. There is no formal clarity—it resists completion. The spaces are intentionally incomplete. The structure becomes a spatial archive, a container for memory.

This project begins with a refusal to clear the site. The rubble remains—both structurally and symbolically. It supports new beams and defines the architectural language. History is not erased but integrated, protected, and built around. Drawing from Cornelia Parker’s suspended fragments and Lebbeus Woods’ speculative forms, the architecture floats, fractures, and suspends. It resists completion. Spaces remain intentionally unfinished, becoming a spatial archive—memory held in tension. Floating rubble plays with contradiction—its heavy past made light. Gaps let light and shadow pass through, emphasizing fragmentation. There is no central monument, no single path, no final narrative—only an architecture of open-ended remembrance.

Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” shapes the approach: to remain within the rupture, to resist resolution. The design embodies this ethic—dwelling within loss without closing it. The school becomes a living memorial, not a static one—a place of learning, living, and remembering. Memory here is not fixed in stone, but alive in space.

In Gaza, rubble is not exception but condition. It is the city’s material reality. This project reimagines rubble as both archive and infrastructure—as a means of rebuilding and remembering at once. Rather than imposing form onto ruins, the structure grows from them. Intersections in the rubble guide the new. Construction emerges not in denial of destruction, but as its continuation. Rubble becomes not just what remains—but what begins again.

Floating rubble plays with levity—the opposite of its historical and physical weight. Light and shadow pass through gaps, highlighting the fragmentation. Everyday actions are ritual in this space. There is no singular monument, no central path, no final narrative. This is a place of open-ended memory.

This material study examines how rubble can be translated structurally. It explores material intersections that appear in the existing rubble and how they might shape the new construction.

Here, we see suspended rubble—some sections enclosed in glass, others left open to the elements. Full rebar with holes, irregular windows and doors, rubble intersecting with rebar to form beams, and the merging of old walls with new structural supports.

This is just the beginning of a broader study. How might informal and formal construction come together, and how does Gaza’s material reality lead to a unique architectural language.

These next images include plans of the existing school and early sketches for the addition. This attempts to understand the layout, the communal needs, and the ways the new structure could integrate over time.

It considers how to organize kitchens, health areas, and learning spaces, and integrate these either next to or within classrooms. Perhaps spaces shift throughout the day.

This is not a fixed program. It’s a responsive, evolving spatial system. In Gaza, buildings serve many purposes all at once. The lines between home, hospital, and school have been blurred. This design embraces that complexity. The building itself performs resistance—through flexibility, through survival.

This sectional drawing shows how the proposed addition relates to the existing school buildings. The new structure floats above the ruins, light and fragmented. It gives an airy space, to memory, to breath.