Ramot Polin (Hebrew:רמות פולין,lit. Poland Heights) is a neighborhood in theIsraeli settlement ofRamot in northwestEast Jerusalem consisting of a single housing complex. It was constructed by the Kollel Polen (Poland) in stages beginning in 1972, under the auspices of the Office for Building and Habitation, and is populated, as intended, mostly byHaredi Jewish families, includingBreslov.[2] The neighborhood contains 720 housing units of varying sizes.
The background to building this neighborhood, as well as several other neighborhoods in Jerusalem - including additional sub-neighborhoods inRamot and inGilo, was to settle wide parts of Jerusalem through new building after the 1967Six-Day War. This phenomenon was characterized by urban and architectural trials by many Israeli architects, building designers, and engineers to design new shapes of residential, community, and local structures. In charge of planning Ramot Polin was the Israeli architectZvi Hecker for both the neighborhood and the architectural planning.
Ramot Polin was built in 1972-75.[3] It was designed by Zvi Hecker. It is an unusualprefabricated apartment complex with 720 non-rectangular components.[4] The apartments were expanded later,[5] incorporating more cubic rather than pentagonal components. The design idea of the neighborhood may seem to be purely geometrical, but it has been likened to a chemical structure.[6]
The Ramot Polin complex has been named one of the "World's Strangest Buildings"[7] and has been described as a "housing project for honeybees".[8] The entire neighborhood is organized on a hill in central Ramot in a shape resembling a five-fingered hand or three-branched leaf. Each finger, which represents a different level of the building that lasted until the mid-1980s, is a series of 5-6 L-shaped apartment buildings incorporated in each other, creating a wide zigzag. In each of these fingers there is an inner courtyard, which was designed to remember the traditional courtyards of the older Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
31°49′12″N35°11′36″E / 31.82000°N 35.19333°E /31.82000; 35.19333