Abstract

The paper will present HIT’s annual summer seminar taking place in Israel and Istanbul. Discuss its issues, relevance, method, and resulting students’ projects. The seminar was developed as response to Israeli design students’ attitude toward cultural and historical conflicts and controversy. The concept evoking the seminar is the issue of viewing the ‘other’, and how design can assimilate conflicts, and culture into current personal point-of-view. Those concerns have been found to be highly relevant in Istanbul. Jewish-Muslim, religious-secular, and tradition-contemporary, those dualities represent current tensions that are vital both in Israel and Turkey. Between the conceptual spaces defined by two books the seminar ‘expedition’ takes place. In “Journey to the East” Le Corbusier approaches Istanbul through the ‘west’. In “Istanbul: Memories and the City” Orhan Pamuk unveils and mystifies Istanbul from within. Both books give prominence to the artistic point of view: painting, drawing, photography, design and not least important dreaming. Following a preliminary engagement with current and historical cultural conflicts, and the two books, participants are encouraged to experience Istanbul and be confronted by its variance. In the process students are required to develop a personal method of observation, and produce a project that is based upon it. Their project is an answer to no brief or demand and represents reconciliation.