Competition Award - 1988 – First Prize
Location: West Rishon Lezion
Client: Rubinshtein Company
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The design competition for the “ Villas City” neighborhood on the Rishon Lezion sand dunes required a plan for 900 private houses on plots of 250 - 500 sqm per house. In addition to the design of each individual house within the given plots, we were required to design the public spaces in the neighborhood as a whole.

My main objective was to plan a residential environment where people would feel a profound sense of belonging and identification.
In order to avoid the barrenness and alienation that characterize contemporary designed neighborhoods, my proposal was based on different assumptions:
1. Although each and every family has common interests with the other families, it is unique and its needs differ from theirs. The concept of an “average home”, designated for the “the average person”, is a fundamentally destructive one.
2. Houses cannot be conceived as static “models” to be duplicated and copied arbitrarily from one place to another. The structure of the house must grow out of the forces acting on different sites and the specific needs of each family. However, there had to be a common language shared by all, at all levels of scale, a language that would define the desirable relationships between the street and the houses as well as the common architectural patterns and details of the houses themselves.
3. Although the plots themselves have common characteristics, the smallest differences between them, that stem from their different location in the neighborhood, should be noted. A northern plot cannot be treated in the same way as a southern one; a house on a plot that opens onto a main street cannot be planned in the same way as one situated on a plot that opens onto a lane, etc.
4. The house, the street and the neighborhood should be regarded as one continuous whole, where each of these elements is dependent upon the interrelationships between them.

The basic types of houses proposed for the neighborhood included duplexes, row houses and single homes. The use ofcommon patterns at different sites with varied environmental conditions ultimately producedthe distinctiveness and the variety of housesin different parts of the neighborhood.