The Felt Sense of Landscape as Antidote to 'the Extinction of Experience': Designing an urban park in Tel Aviv

Every element in a non-human-modified natural environment – be it plants, animals, or inanimate creatures such as rocks, ponds and mountains – is the result of endless iterative cycles of responses to all the other elements it is embedded in and interacts with. This ongoing multi-level interaction may be described as “consideration” in that each element “considers” all the others at each developmental step of its becoming process. Our “felt sense” connects us with this fundamental meaning found in natural places when we experience things being “in harmony” in them, because they indeed are. Unlike natural places, man-made environments often lack this richness, contributing to what R. M. Pye termed as the ‘extinction of experience.’

In his talk, Ram Eisenberg will explore how the concept of “consideration” inspired the design of the democratic and ecological Kiryat Sefer Park in Tel Aviv.  The democratic participatory design process has been used as a mimicry of the iterative principle in the social realm, mimicking the iterative process of an ecosystem within a cultural context.

Co-sponsored by the School of Architecture and UVA Page Barbour Lecture Series // Transduction

About Ram Eisenberg: 

Ram Eisenberg is an Environmental Designer and lecturer of landscape architecture at the Technion Israel. Ram's firm REED, is responsible for various scale landscape projects in Israel. Ram specializes in participatory design, community, and urban-nature experience: working with the uniqueness of local narratives, people, places, and found objects, emerging into what he calls considerate designs.
In 2010, Ram received the prestigious Rokach Award for the design of HaHaskala Avenue in Tel Aviv, and recently enjoyed wide media acclaim for the design of Kiryat Sefer Park in Tel Aviv which opened in April 2013.

Along with his work, Ram continues to study and to teach. In 1992 Ram was part of the group that initiated the “Elul” pluralistic Bet Midrash, and in 1999 he joined the Heschel Center’s Environmental Fellows Program. Since 2012, he has been studying Focusing and E. Gendlin’s philosophy “a Process Model”, which he incorporates into his teaching and life. Ram has taught various courses of design and Landscape Architecture in schools in Israel, Turkey and South Africa under the auspices of the UN millennium task force for eliminating poverty, in “Global Studio”..

He is currently a research fellow at the Technion in Haifa writing a thesis on “the goodness" experience of being in nature and it's eliciting environments."