Le Corbusier's most persistent architectural element - Pilotis - was widely adopted in Israel, where entire neighborhoods were raised on columns, above street level, since the 1930's, mainly up to the early 1980's.

The Israeli open ground storey, in-between the columns, was an integral part of childhood and of growing up for many of us, providing as it did weather protected, often paved, playing and meeting spaces for all seasons. It also became a familiar part of urban community life when, in many instances, such vacant spaces were provisionally enclosed and inhabited by small commercial uses - grocery stores, laundries, barber shops etc. - compensating for their lack in housing quarters due to the prevailing modernist zoning conception.

However, nowadays, this once ubiquitous, almost "natural" phenomena is gradually being swept away from our local built environment, as more and more open ground storeys are being sealed, while new ones are rarely introduced, erasing not only a physical presence, but also the cultural significance it entailed.

There are many reasons behind this mass extinction. Some have to do with the major drawback which these open, shared-ground areas admittedly always suffered from, namely the fact that they require special collective household attention and care, which many buildings fail to give them over time. This often results in unpleasant "no man's land" ground spaces, which tenants are only too happy to get rid of.

Among other forces challenging pilotis spaces right from their very beginnings, in Tel-Aviv and elsewhere, are security and defense considerations, varying from wartime needs for bomb-safe entryways and shelters, to everyday entry-control measures keeping away unwelcome passers-by.

But the key player in the dramatic, rapid transformation taking place nowadays before our eyes has to do with... earthquakes. Unlike vertical loads, which pilotis are quite capable of dealing with, horizontal forces, such as earthquake "shaking" of buildings, are poorly answered by them. For this reason, one of the first constituents of a comprehensive anti-earthquake plan widely implemented in Israel in the last decade is the binding together of ground columns by reinforcing walls, usually ridding of the open ground floor altogether.

Our proposal for the 2016 BIennale outlined an initial analysis of this overlooked, relevant subject, along with directions of tangling it theoretically and visually, making use of the very fact that the Israeli Pavilion in Venice - a clear Corbusian edifice, partially on piltois - is in itself a good example of both original phenomena, as well as its transfigurations, having been time and again sealed and reopened during its 65 years of service.