Form
Finding
Project Name
Jerusalem Blue Line Metro
Sector
Transportation
Location
Jerusalem, Israel
Year
2025
Project Team
Abigail Benouaich
Yonah Odendal
Omer Neeman
Aeurbach Halevy Architects
The Blue Line’s station forecourts are essential urban thresholds, seamlessly connecting Jerusalem’s built environment with its new metro infrastructure.
More than just entry points, these spaces enhance connectivity, encourage pedestrian flow, and shape the commuter experience. Thoughtfully designed forecourts integrate with the city, offering gathering areas, shaded spaces, and clear wayfinding. By prioritizing accessibility and urban cohesion, they ease congestion and create vibrant, people-oriented public spaces that enrich daily travel in Jerusalem.
Land Sculpting
The station entrance, designed through a ‘land sculpting’ approach, seamlessly merges architecture and landscape to create a dynamic and immersive urban experience. By shaping the terrain itself, the design enhances both functional efficiency and spatial drama, ensuring a fluid transition between the city and the metro network.
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Early-stage concept models and parametric design tools are employed to explore and refine organic forms that balance innovation, aesthetics, and urban connectivity. This method allows for responsive adaptation to the site's topography while reinforcing the station’s identity as an integral part of Jerusalem’s evolving infrastructure. Through this synthesis of technology and materiality, the entrance becomes not just a gateway but an architectural expression of movement and transformation.
The Folded Landscape concept design for a new underground station entrance envisions a seamless integration of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure.
Emerging organically from the ground plane, the structure is sculpted to echo the unique historical context and complement the surrounding built scale. Its fluid, elegant form guides pedestrian movement, aligning with natural desire lines to create intuitive pathways. The design ultimately blurs the boundaries, fostering harmony between above-ground urban landscapes and the subterranean realm, offering a timeless gateway that celebrates connection and context-sensitive innovation.
© Yonah Odendal
A Journey Through Time
The proposition draws from the city's rich architectural history, reinterpreting its signature arches and stonework in a contemporary language. Like an evolutionary bridge between past and future, the design blurs the boundaries between architecture, landscape, and art. Carved from the earth, the stations feel both ancient and futuristic—an urban cave sculpted by light. This seamless integration of history and innovation transforms infrastructure into an immersive, story-driven experience, where movement becomes a journey through time.
The design process utilized computational software to test design options for the new station entrance. By interpreting the historical structural arch within a contemporary pavilion typology, parametric modeling enabled precise exploration of form and proportion. Finite element analysis verified structural integrity, ensuring the design balanced innovation with contextual sensitivity, resulting in a pavilion that seamlessly integrates tradition and modernity.
The station reinterprets Jerusalem's enduring arch typology as a contemporary civic space. A sequence of monumental concrete vaults unfolds around the escalator descent, transforming infrastructure into an architectural experience.
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By reducing architecture to its essential elements - light, form, and structure - the design creates a calm and memorable journey beneath the city. The result is a contemporary interpretation of Jerusalem's architectural heritage, where movement through the station becomes a passage between past and future.
Project developed at Auerbach Halevy Architects. Selected drawings and diagrams by Abigail Benouaich.
Some renders and schematic elements are based on original project materials.