fELTEAM

The production of felt will not only provide a communal activity for Ein Hud's children, men, and women, but also for residents of other unrecognized villages, who may participate by contributing raw materials or recording their own narratives on felt.
Two new major public areas are proposed for the village. The civic center, or "Uptown" area, contains the Community Center (housing a gym, meeting hall, clinic, and a library on the top level) and Felt Factory. The factory contains exhibition, classroom, and workspaces where artisans will engage in the often communal craft of felt making. This includes shearing sheep, producing felt, and laying designs into it. Dying pools, accessible through permeable walls, are on the inside of the building's curve and a store for selling the product is at the western end.
Influenced by the wide curves of arches in Palestinian vernacular buildings, the design of the two buildings aims to establish public spaces where all villagers can assemble indoors or out and which frame views of old Ein Hod and the sea. The buildings, which are a bridge between the existing village to the west and proposed new housing and agricultural zones to the east, curve around one another to frame connected public spaces which are receptive to both the existing and new areas of the village.
Another public area is proposed at the existing mosque, framed by buildings with shop spaces on the ground level and guesthouse rooms or housing above. Across the street from the mosque, two houses are converted into the village's enlarged school and kindergarten. This "Downtown" area provides a western anchor for the axis which runs uphill to the civic center area. Our aim is to charge with activity the road connecting these two public nodes, making it the village's main street. Since all visitors to Ein Hud will approach from the west, the Downtown square will greet them as they arrive. They may park in the main public parking lot, check in at the guesthouse, visit a café on the square for refreshments, and then walk through the village to the Felt Factory and Community Center.
An important tool for attracting these visitors will be the felt products kiosk which we propose in the old village of Ein Hod, already widely known for its art production. Visitors to the artists' colony who are not even aware of Ein Hud may in this way be drawn to the village through this cooperation with Ein Hod. Road signs pointing the way from Ein Hod to Ein Hud are also proposed.
The steps of the felt making process represent healing when the felt is a medium for individual and collective expression. Since the production of felt, a non woven fabric, is the least technical of the fiber arts, it enables immediate and more spontaneous expression on its surface. Similar to the production of arpilleras by Chilean women to commemorate lost loved ones, felt blankets and tapestries can be canvases for narratives.
These are then packaged and distributed for sale in the close by Ein Hod, throughout Israel, and beyond.