An All-Day Garden

"An All-Day Garden" is a term coined by my great-grandfather, the architect Shmuel (Milek) Bickels, to describe the public garden within the kibbutz — a space that supports daily life for all members and weaves the living areas into a unified landscape: the collective home. My other great-grandfather, Aryeh Ben-Gurion, was an educator and founder of the Kibbutz Holiday Archive. He documented everyday life in these communal spaces, and the cultural traditions he revived and reimagined became foundational to the kibbutz movement. This project revisits their legacy to explore the kibbutz environment — past and present — through three themes: Agora, Landscape-Garden, Detail. Kibbutz Beit Hashita, where both men lived and worked, and where I was born as the fourth generation, serves as the case study. "An All-Day Garden" proposes an intervention in the Agora — historically and still today the heart of the kibbutz. This space stretches between two key sites: the old laundry building, to be transformed into a home for the Kibbutz Holiday Archive founded by Aryeh, and the Cultural Hall, which will finally be completed according to Milek’s original design. The project redefines the relationship between public buildings and the garden structure, adapting them to current needs. It offers a renewed spatial interpretation of the mythic social model of the kibbutz — and what it has become.