The few buildings that constitute Wadi Salib are illustrative of Haifa’s entire urban history. It is one of the last remaining physical reminders of a pre-Israeli Haifa. Most of its buildings from the 18th century were single family homes of the upperclass land-owning Arabs. Now left in ruins, this cluster of buildings is a palimpsest, where the Ottoman architectural heritage is the last of the city’s erased past. The ruins also stand as a symbol of a tangible urban trauma. As the homes to many communities, each house represents both sites of exile and sites of origin. The memory of a single house is shared by hundreds of individuals, therefore political categories of ownership are extraneous to our current understanding of the site; it is a public landscape. 

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Our challenge is now between two contradictory desires of destruction and reuse; to destroy is to seek a tabula rasa for new beginnings, which is to continue to erase history, and to reuse is to create a new urban order or spatial narrative. The third, as we pursued, is to subvert the site by repurposing the ruins such that houses become shared voids open to the sky for public or green space, and the liminal spaces  between buildings become solid mass as potential for new affordable housing. Within the destroyed structures, ad-hoc artists studios and galleries are sites to activate the ruins. Connecting the volumes of new and historic architectures is a liwan, a central hall element of the Arab vernacular acting as a public armature to draw visitors from the street into the building.