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Island About

Where art and business share a building.

A creative campus for Haifa: ten art facilities, a songwriting lab, a stage, offices, a café and mini-homes under one membership.

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The Lab film still Drag to turn
StatusConcept · 2021 plan
10art facilities, one per artform (2021 plan)
200seats at the stage (2021 plan)
6mini-homes for visiting artists (2021 plan)

  • A community centre for both art and business: rooms built for each artform, with equipment and materials to rent or buy.
  • Upstairs: offices, desks and a conference room for the people who fund, manage and sell the work.
  • The pitch: make people make art. The Lab looks for the marriage of the square and the circle.
Pale board-marked concrete walls and a cantilevered stair against a blue sky

  • Ten art rooms, one per artform: recording studio, atelier, ceramics, jewellery, dance, rehearsals, carpentry, stage, visual space, photography.
  • Song Lab: four writers make a demo in a day, and the day is filmed as the pilot for a songwriting show.
  • Business floor: four private offices of 15 m², 12 reserved desks and a conference room free to book for members.
  • Also in the building: a public café with a food garden, a 200-seat stage, six mini-homes for visiting artists and an ashram.
Floors
Five
Art rooms
Ten
Stage
Concerts for up to 200
Mini-homes
Six, for artists from abroad staying a week or two
A recording studio control room with mixing desk and monitors

  • Makers aged 15-30 who are new to a craft, hobbyists or established artists.
  • Independent founders aged 25-45 for the business floor.
  • Everyone within 15 km of Haifa, roughly half a million people, who values growth through art and locally made materials.
  • The coworking market keeps growing.

Sources: Straits Research

  • Tools, materials and rooms for a monthly membership, or one project at a time; the first week is free for everyone.
  • Art passes: Solo (one facility), Harmony (three) and Symphonica (every facility).
  • Work passes: Freelancer (shared office and boardroom), Cooperate (reserved desk and boardroom), Founder (private office, every business facility, daily lunch and drinks).
  • One location, several ways to earn, with production on site; private offices run for a minimum of three months.

  • A building that keeps a calendar: concerts monthly, outdoor screenings every weekend, songwriting camps and debates every two months.
  • Songwriting camps are built with publishers from LA, Norway, Denmark and China; dance classes run with local schools.

  • Soho House shows how far a premium creative membership can go.
  • The Lab's own angle: art rooms, a stage and offices in one building, on one membership.

Sources: Soho House 10-K

  • A full 2021 concept plan covering facilities, programme, staffing and pricing exists; the site is still to be found.
  • Philip Halloun: English lyricist and award-winning producer; songs delivered to five countries in Eurovision finals.
  • The 2021 plan aimed Song Lab at Eurovision. That window has passed; the format, the team and the roster have not.
  • A film under a minute long shows one building, four uses.
Founder & director
Muhamad Saleh Khalil
Founder & producer
Philip Halloun
Production manager
Rebecca Telhami
Writers
Tamer Nafar, Maysa Daw, Rola Azar, Jeebus Khoury, Marwan Halabi

  • Find the shell: a long lease on an existing industrial building, not new construction, so the model is proven first.
  • Pilot two rooms: a recording studio, one art room and the Song Lab programme, with the first week free to test membership.
  • Open the campus: fit out the full building floor by floor, from offices, café, stage and mini-homes to the ashram.
Watch the film