Rational Arch

Rational is a studio for architecture and urban design The original office was founded in 1990 by Abed Yassin. It specialised in public buildings with a strong emphasis on sustainability and cultural awareness. In 2019 it changed its name into rational and widened its agenda and scope to be an architectural practice addressing the needs and conditions of societies in transition, our first case being Arab society inside Israel. Arab society is a case study to what the American philosopher, Marshall Berman, calls “modernism of underdevelopment”, a phenomenon in which modernisation is happening in a distorted and perverse way leading to negative outcomes instead of towards the liberation and improvement of human life. One of the aspects of this underdevelopment is the scarcity in good public space, one in which people can shape their collective culture. Here we see our task and responsibility to envision and realise the spaces needed by this society in transition, spaces that push the boundary of what is possible in the political and economic limitations of the moment. our experience with these issues locally gives us the skills and tools to address the same phenomena in different contexts. we see ourselves as part of a global effort to direct change in a way that will best serve human life. Especially for the people for whom it hasn’t been working so good till now. We see architecture and design as one of the fundamental tools to: “transform the chaotic energies of economic and social change into new forms of meaning and beauty, of freedom and solidarity”* *Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air,(New York,Penguin,1988),174.