White Cities, Black Cities

histoires d'archi

2011-12-06T13:10:00.000+02:00

For our French friends, here's a new web address containing French translations of some of my texts that appeared in "histoires d'archi", a video installation I had last year at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris.
http://histoiresdarchi.blogspot.com/

SABA in INDIA

2011-11-19T13:23:00.004+02:00

Monday, November 21 at 6:00pm at the Department of Architetcture, Bazalel Academy (1 Bezalel St. Jerusalem):
Presentation of projects by SABA (Spontaneous Architecture Bezalel Academy) students from the last summer semester (September – October 2011) in India.
The project, directed by Sharon Rotbard, Parth Shah and Acbar Nazim Modan, is a small school of 4 open classrooms. It was planned and built during the summer semester at the Centre for Rural Knowledge near Halwad, a small town in Surendranagar district, Gujarat, India.
The project was planned and the built in 20 days; the building costs were financed by the students. It was done in a close, generous collaboration with the faculty of Architecture at CEPT University Ahmedabad, headed by Prof. Neelkanth Chhaya, Centre for Environmental Education-India and his regional director Atul Pandyia, and the Centre for Rural Knowledge in Halwad and his director Ayub Sherasiya.

paricipants:
Jonathan Alon, Tamar Alon, Itai Bechor, Ayelet Ben David, Gittabenn, Inbal Helzer, Alon Itzkin, Yael Johnson, Karshanbai, Rajendra Menaria, Keren Christina Mendjul, Akbar Nazim Modan, Aleksei Noskov, Matan Pisante, Mevaseret Recanati, Michal Rosenfeld, Sharon Rotbard, Fouad Salem, Sanjibai, Ronen Sarudi, Tali Serebro, Parth Shah, Ayub Sherasiya, Tal Tomer, Oded Wieder

histoires d'archi

2011-05-09T07:56:00.000+03:00

« Soupçonnez l’architecture ». C’était le début du texte que j’ai rendu avec mon projet de diplôme de fin d’études en printemps 1991. A vrai dire, au départ, je me suis cru architecte. Je voulais, vraiment, sincèrement, croire en architecture, devenir architecte.

Bien que ce fussent pas mal d’années avant que j’ai eu l’occasion de découvrir avec stupéfaction la photo de Mitterrand à l’oreille de Pétain, je commençais déjà soupçonner ses idées architecturales de grandeur, ouverture et transparence, si présentes pendant mes années d’études. De retour en Israël en 1993, la pratique architecturale chez Avraham Yasky (futur héro de mon deuxième livre) et un peu à mon compte, aussi bien que d’autres découvertes que j’ai fait (comme par exemple, qu’en fait, la ville blanche n’était pas vraiment blanche), mes soupçons ne sont pas apaisés, au contraire: A part de son rôle habituel d’habiller l’immobilier, en Israël l’architecture est la continuation de la guerre par d’autres moyens ; L’évidence de l’injustice qui façonne le territoire, et de la violence et la corruption de l’architecture qui l’orne m’était incontournable. Et d’ailleurs, il me semble que cela devient comme ça partout ; en Israël ce n’est que plus visible.

Très vite je me suis trouvé dans une position justicière, voire même parfois justiciante, ma pratique professionnelle devenue action sociale, politique et polémique s’est confinée dans un espace de plus en plus réduit - par la ligne verte (CJ), la ligne pourpre (Golan) et plein d’autres lignes rouges. Et à partir de fin 2000, quand j’ai (in)achevé en plein seconde Intifada ma maison au sud de Tel Aviv, pratiquer cette technique même de la séparation pour le compte de ceux qui peuvent se le payer m’était devenu aussi difficile que pour un végétarien travailler à l’abattoir.

Heureusement, j’aime bien écrire, et publier. Je suis tout à fait d’accord avec Hugo: Le livre tuera l’édifice. J’aime bien faire l’archi, mais une bonne histoire peut bien valoir une belle maison, voir même changer toute une ville, du moins à Tel Aviv qui est peut-être la seule ville au monde appelé d’après un roman.

http://www.esa-paris.fr/Exposition-Autoportraits-avec.html?lang=fr

spontaneous architecture 2010

2010-07-02T12:01:00.002+03:00

In Memory of Broken Homes: Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial

2010-06-21T12:42:00.005+03:00

in association with o2a-studio - Amit Mandelkern and Omer Barr

Physical destruction of homes and cities, loss of lives by war and genocide, separation between children and parents, lovers and friends by deportation and forced exile - the main consequences of war and violence are the systematic destruction of society’s most basic elements and structures such as homes, families and communities. The most universal aspect of any holocaust is first and foremost the accumulation of many personal and family disasters.
The memorial’s main construction material recycles the very substance of destruction - Broken Homes, debris of demolished houses and buildings.
Debris will be collected, measured, sorted and then placed in the memorial’s post-tensioned structure, thus offering a transition between Atlantic City’s busy, hedonistic Boardwalk and a moment of contemplation facing the ocean.

2008 Jane Jacobs / The Death and Life of Great American Cities ; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour / Learning From Las Vegas

2010-05-27T23:14:00.004+03:00

2010 : Rem Koolhaas / Delirious New York

2010-05-18T00:18:00.004+03:00

Translation: Or Aleksandrowicz

Design: Michal Sahar

the Gold Bug, 1986

2010-03-19T03:14:00.004+02:00

Gal Raviv-Ringel / Chemical Pavilion, 2007

2010-03-13T21:08:00.003+02:00

Ofer Bilik, Lisa Blahmann, Noam Brukmann / Spontaneous Architecture, 2005

2010-03-13T17:12:00.000+02:00

sharon rotbard presents: students' projects 1985-2010

2010-03-04T01:47:00.000+02:00

at the Architecture Department, Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, 11/3/2010 - 25/3/2010

Sharon Rotbard on "White City, Black City" at The new Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, on Vimeo

2010-02-18T11:01:00.003+02:00

Warsaw Under Construction. Talks. The Parachute Architecture. Sharon Rotbard from Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw on Vimeo.

Shapira neighborhood

2010-02-14T18:06:00.000+02:00

Remez cultural center (proposal)

2009-12-29T16:37:00.002+02:00

With Barak Zippor

Tel Aviv museum of Art extension (proposal)

2009-12-29T16:23:00.003+02:00

with Or Alexandrovith and Sharon Chechnosky

lemon

2009-12-20T12:46:00.000+02:00

ADAM

2009-11-01T10:52:00.000+02:00

Le Divan

2009-09-23T12:03:00.003+03:00

1993: Prototype for a psychoanalyst's couch

Shapira Style

2009-08-15T14:00:00.002+03:00

spontaneous architecture, West Bank

2009-08-08T12:11:00.002+03:00

2007: The Birthday Present

2009-08-07T11:20:00.014+03:00

a tiny garden (20sqm) at our backyard made of an "organized pile" of 100 concrete blocks (cmu). No plans, just gravity and labor.

Michael Feige / The city that is not white: The celestial Tel Aviv and the earthly Tel Aviv

2009-07-27T17:31:00.005+03:00

Ir levanah, ir shehorah (White city, black city), by Sharon Rotbard, Tel Aviv: Babel
Press, 2005
Tel Aviv ha-ir ha-(a)mitit: Mitografiyah historit (Tel Aviv – the real city: A historicalmythography), by Maoz Azaryahu, Sde Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 2005,
A review in Journal of Israeli History, 27:1, 87 – 93, Routledge, 2008

These two books, by Sharon Rotbard and Maoz Azaryahu are, in many respects, very similar. Both address the broad area of research into place, both real and imaginary: one in an architectural context, the other from a cultural-geographical perspective. Both consider Tel Aviv through the developing academic point of view of local history. Both discuss the relationship between the tangible, living, breathing city, the terrestrial, earthly Tel Aviv, and the – no less living – image of the “celestial Tel Aviv,” a` la “celestial Jerusalem.” Both authors attach great importance to discourse. Thus Azaryahu makes the point that “although Tel Aviv was built of bricks and concrete blocks, it was created out of words”(Azaryahu, p. 336), while Rotbard points out that it is the only city to have been named after a book (Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland was translated into Hebrew as Tel Aviv, literally “hill of spring”). In some chapters they present a similar critical analysis of the same sites, especially the “White City” project which, enjoying international auspices and legitimacy, has preserved Bauhaus buildings. However, there is no need for an in-depth reading to realize that, while focusing on the same subject, these are two very different books. The difference is both substantive and principled in nature, and speaks volumes of the fault lines cutting through contemporary Israeli social sciences.
Rotbard’s book focuses on two interconnected narratives. One is an analysis of the process by which the image of the White City was created – a fabricated, invented image, intended to tie in with a narrative that attaches national meaning to the city’s existence and to reinforce it. While the “White City,” an expression much used to describe Tel Aviv, has been associated with the central emblem of the Bauhaus buildings, for Rotbard it holds a broader and more fundamental meaning, indicative of how a dark past was consigned to oblivion. The second story is the wiping out of the Arab city of Jaffa and the inclusion of its wretched remnants within the borders of the Hebrew city.
The white Tel Aviv exists in those places where the black Jaffa does not, and vice versa. Painting Tel Aviv white involves painting Jaffa black. The book is a harsh indictment of the destruction and obliteration process which, according to Rotbard, made possible the establishment of the first Hebrew city. It is critical of the lack of awareness and the denial that go hand in hand with this process. Underlying its approach is also criticism of Zionism’s alienation from the locality to which it brought the Jews from Europe, and mainly of the architects who implemented and conferred legitimacy on this process of destruction.
Maoz Azaryahu’s book is of an altogether different breed. Azaryahu, a cultural historian and geographer, is primarily interested in issues of symbolic space. An amused ethnographer, he strolls around the city examining how the city’s streets and squares fluctuate in symbolic importance, as they acquire and lose significance in turn. Apart from discussing Tel Aviv’s image in general, he documents sites which are concomitantly actual and symbolic, such as Dizengoff Street, Sheinkin Street, the seashore and the city’s public spaces, which jointly construct the overall myth of the city. While Rotbard concentrates on the hidden backyards, as uncovering the essence of the Hebrew city, Azaryahu focuses on facades, the celebrated way by which the city presents itself. Therefore, although both books discuss the city’s mythology, it is hardly surprising that the products are completely different.
This fundamental difference of perspectives – metaphorically the difference between black and white, between night and day – is tightly connected to a myriad of other differences between the two authors, some principled and some technical in nature. Rotbard’s book examines the process by which Tel Aviv became “white” as it set itself apart from Arab Jaffa, symbolically “cleansing” itself of the Orient. The change in the relative symbolic importance of the streets – a change on which Azaryahu’s narrative focuses – is claimed to be insignificant, a passing fad which can only be addressed after the elimination of the main threat, that Tel Aviv will no longer be Hebrew (even though this threat can never be entirely eliminated, and so must be tackled and eliminated over and over, each time anew). Whoever considers the development of Hebrew Tel Aviv in isolation from the exclusion, not to say the elimination and destruction of Arab Jaffa, together with the expulsion of most of its inhabitants, accepts and reproduces the victor’s narrative. In contrast, if one assumes Azaryahu’s perspective, Rotbard’s research has a banal feel to it: victorious Zionism ousted the Arab, as has been recounted time and time again. Is not Rotbard in turn replicating the threadbare critical discourse of victor/vanquished, expeller/expellee, white/black? Why is it illegitimate to place Tel Aviv’s existence in a different historical context?
In both books, Tel Aviv is presented as confronting the “Other.” Rotbard defines one particular, principled “otherness,” which constitutes the focus of his book. In one of the many dramatic passages in his book, he writes: It is far more a condition than a place. In point of fact, a “white city” is the only reason why a “black city” is black. A “black city” is an invisible city, it is everything that is hidden by the deep shadow of the white city, everything that Tel Aviv does not see and does not want to see. . . Wherever there is no “white city,” there is a “black city,” its antithesis: a “black city” is the complete “other” of Tel Aviv in its “white city” guise. It is the black background that Tel Aviv needs in order to continue to look white. In many senses it is also the black flag ("no swimming, dangerous sea”) flying above Tel Aviv. (Rotbard, p. 122)
This contrast, of course, was not ignored by Azaryahu’s detailed, in-depth study. He also writes about the contrast between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, about the attempt to bring about a “European oasis in the midst of the Asian desert” (Azaryahu, pp. 61–62). For him, this is just one of the contrasts responsible for the myth of Tel Aviv. No less important is the contrast between Tel Aviv and the other Jewish options in Eretz Israel, such as the pioneering collective and cooperative agricultural settlements – the kibbutzim and the moshavim, the moshavot with their privately owned farms, the settlements beyond the Green Line, and of course Haifa and Jerusalem. For him, Dizengoff and Sheinkin Streets typify mainly internal Jewish contradictions.
Azaryahu quotes Menachem Ussishkin, head of the Jewish National Fund, comparing Jerusalem and Haifa in 1924. As he saw it, Jerusalem would be the government and cultural center, and Haifa the industrial and commercial center, while Tel Aviv was destined to be the window on Europe and the western world (Azaryahu, p. 251). These three cities, together with other localities where Jews could come to live, resulted in a “division of labor” that enabled Zionist Jews to make their own private choices within the national Zionist undertaking. These different strands in the Jewish collective generated a spectrum of opportunities and distinctions, and in turn enable inexhaustible research options. On the other hand, they also contrast greatly with each other. Much has been written about the major contrast, not to say confrontation, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the eternal city versus the city of the present, the city of weightiness and wisdom versus the city of lightheartedness and frivolity, the Jewish city versus the city of Israeli normality. Azaryahu presents this contrast in the following terms:
Tel Aviv underscored what makes it unique – a city that never stops – in terms of distinguishing it from everything that it saw as threatening its ideological/ideal view of itself as representing Israeli enlightenment, formulated in terms of secularism, liberalism, and political moderation. According to this view, Tel Aviv is an island of sanity and normality in the midst of a sea of ignorance and fanaticism engulfing Israel. . . . In the mythical view, Tel Aviv has become an enclave of modern, secular and enlightened Israeliness beset and threatened by the forces of darkness. (Azaryahu, pp. 339–40)
In contrast, Rotbard highlights Tel Aviv’s conformity, as the standard bearer of mainstream Zionism involved primarily in Hebraizing or “whitening” the country.
The contrast with Jerusalem, and even more so with the moshavim and the kibbutzim, is a pseudo-contrast which camouflages the profound underlying similarity. Writing about the image of Tel Aviv, he observes:
The White City of Tel Aviv is not only the least problematic part of the Zionist project: it is also its intellectual core, its moral nucleus and its goal; because Zionism’s most important idea was the normalization of the Jewish people, the real Zion is not Jerusalem but Tel Aviv, the White City. It was born as a tabula rasa in the drawing of lots of Ahuzat Bayit on the sand dunes, there was nothing there before it, it did not come about at anybody’s expense, and all it did was to make the desert bloom. It was built, not by Arab laborers, but by students of medicine, law, and philosophy, who had in any case been expelled from Europe. (Rotbard, p. 85)
Rotbard’s research, drawing as it does on primary sources, is essentially deductive in nature. Tel Aviv’s destiny is the necessary conclusion emerging from its fundamental essence, while that of Jaffa is doomed due to its dangerous proximity to the city which grew out of it and is committed to the ethno-national undertaking. The pivotal historical moment was the murder of Jews who lived or happened to be in an Arab environment in the 1921 riots. It was at this point that the option of long-term coexistence came to an abrupt end, and the segregation between the peoples, between the white and the black, began its work which continues down to the present.
Rotbard’s description is deductive and determinist: the continued existence of the White City requires the obliteration of the Black City. He exemplifies using an examination of the painter Nahum Gutman’s books, showing how the eliminatory violence that negates the Other makes its way even into his naı¨ve children’s drawings. In his 1930s illustrations, the Arab Manshiya neighborhood, which was physically located between Tel Aviv and the sea, between it and Jaffa, and whose houses could be seen from many Tel Aviv windows, is not where it should be. In its stead is an expanse of sand dunes stretching to the seashore. This is something of a prophecy about the future, a self fulfilling prophecy. Tel Aviv’s symbolic “whiteness,” the removing of the Arab from its midst and its surroundings, was already writ large at the time in the Hebrew, Zionist and Judaizing essence of the city. The book merely details how this essence was fulfilled, namely the concrete way in which the whitening and blackening processes were implemented.
The particular charm of Azaryahu’s book lies precisely in its inductive nature; in its examination – on the basis of archival material and press clippings – of how space was shaped and how its images developed, images which seem to most Israelis to be autonomous of time and context. While Rotbard’s work has a closed, determinist feel to it, Azaryahu’s research is open, flowing wherever the material takes him. This is local history at its best. True, in the “contrastive scheme” that I have established between the two books, Rotbard occupies the “new” or “critical” slot, but this is unfair to Azaryahu’s book. His work presents innovative research, and in terms of social, historical, and cultural geography in Israel, he may even be said to be revolutionary, insofar as he provides a new perspective for examining Israeli spatial identity. It is not that long ago that research into “Dizengoff” or “Sheinkin” as concepts was viewed as lacking in legitimacy and “not serious.” In the Israeli historiographical context, Azaryahu’s book is a trailblazer. Both these writers can be related to the writing traditions connected with the key motifs in Walter Benjamin’s writings. Rotbard writes counterhistory, subversive history, which contradicts the official story of the White City that grew and flourished among the sand dunes. As Benjamin puts it, “he brushes history against the grain.” What Benjamin means in this expression is that the critical historian uses existing materials, those produced by the victors, and finds out how to salvage from them the hidden history of the vanquished. Azaryahu simply finds a different “pelt” to brush. Above all, he demonstrates an affinity with the “Benjaminite” wanderer, a subversive figure, challenging the consumer order by savoring experiences in “passages,” covered shopping arcades, at his own leisurely pace, contrary to the standard goal, which is to make purchases in a fiercely time-efficient fashion. A wandering and acutely discerning researcher like Azaryahu, who stings instead of goring, is a paradoxical, not to say ironic reaction to the overblown symbolism of the city that never stops.
The action in the two books is propelled forward by a variety of agents. In Rotbard’s book, history was shaped by the logic of the “whitening” nationhood. In Azaryahu’s book, the equivalent was the vibrant life of the city. Both books, however, identify a number of agents who helped history on its way. Rotbard attaches great weight to the architects striving to shape the city according to ideological outlooks. Their complex task includes both building the new and destroying the old, shaping both physical space and – for him, more importantly – the talk about place. They are followed by other cultural agents, such as Hebrew poets, who enshrine in sugary romantic lines the discourse that obliterates the Black City, like “There is nothing like Jaffa at night” or: “This is Jaffa, lass, this is Jaffa / It stirs your blood like wine,” and “There is something strange and unknown / There is something wonderful about this city.” Azaryahu also ascribes importance to cultural agents, although the deconstruction he proposes is nowhere near as subversive as Rotbard’s. For the former, when poet Natan Alterman opposes Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in his famous refrain “And yet it has something,” he is both formulating and reflecting images, and perhaps contributing to a kind of competition between the two cities. But according to Azaryahu’s formulation, Alterman’s refrain should not be interpreted as a violent, nationalist act of obliteration. As opposed to Rotbard’s radical writing, in Azaryahu the songs that have helped to shape the Israelis’ world retain their enchanted and legitimate status.
Although both books have been meticulously and beautifully produced, there is a fundamental difference between their aesthetics. Rotbard’s book is replete with pictures, maps, documents, photographs of the covers of the books to which it refers, and lengthy footnotes. Apparently because of the radical nature of his arguments, he sees himself as having to provide a wealth of visual evidence, even though this tends to have something of an “overkill” effect. Basically, the book contains the archive used by the author to prove his arguments. Although this point is not made explicitly, it is nevertheless cardinal. Because Arab Jaffa has been obliterated from history, the combination of pictures and documents about it in a historical book is a much-needed redemptive undertaking. As a result, the book is at one and the same time a work of history as well as a memorial to the city which once was and is no more, of which there remain only remnants subsumed in its victorious neighbor as a tourist attraction.
Rotbard uses the book cover as well to put over his message. The cover shows the Etzel Museum, named after Amihai “Gidi” Feiglin, a member of Etzel who led his forces in conquering Jaffa in the War of Independence. The building, a modern glass structure erected over the ruins of an earlier construction, is a metaphor for what the Jewish city did with the ruins of the Arab city. The front cover has a photograph of the building seen from Jaffa looking toward Tel Aviv, while the photograph on the back cover shows it as viewed from Tel Aviv looking toward Jaffa. Rotbard’s book is midway between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, between the white and the black, and the entire book – text, pictures, and cover – is involved in shaping the message of redeeming Jaffa from the black and extricating Tel Aviv from the white.
Azaryahu’s book is far more conventional. However, Azaryahu uses the opportunities offered by his subject in full, and provides pages of spectacularly beautiful pictures, reproducing postcards, cartoons, and photographs. Both of these books show how profound the revolution of recent years has been, in which the history book, in addition to its traditional role, has also become a consumer item where everything, including the book jacket, its external appearance and the photographs inside it, is designed to attract the reader to its content.
Following a key tenet of critical thinking, academic writing itself is now a political praxis. Thus Rotbard’s book is a self-declared political work which deals in depth with the attempts of Zionism and the State of Israel to “whiten,” to obliterate others, to gain control over space. The way in which Feiglin waged war in Jaffa (breaking down the walls of adjoining houses) is reminiscent of the Israeli military’s modus operandi in Palestinian cities; and the expulsions of migrant workers from Tel Aviv are a follow-up to the city’s unfinished “whitening” business.
Azaryahu’s book can be used to illustrate Rotbard’s arguments. Because academic writing involves the shaping of relations of power and control, and the most important thing about the city is its story, Azaryahu’s account is part of the whitening of Tel Aviv, albeit in a more sophisticated form than that used by other “whiteners.” The detailed description of how Tel Aviv – its streets, its very fabric – developed helps contribute to the oblivion that has been imposed on the original crime, through which they became possible in the first place. From Rotbard’s critical perspective, Azaryahu’s alleged objectivity can be defined as quintessentially national-political, as the researcher’s collusion with the other storytellers in camouflaging the city’s basic repressive nature. Azaryahu, with his ironic and inquisitive outsider’s view of the city and its development, would even perhaps be willing to accept such an argument before dismissing it as conventional. His stance is critical in its own way, one that recounts the story “as it is.” Incorrectly defined as apolitical, this is a quintessentially political position. It establishes the researcher as a powerful figure, who cannot be enlisted by either side, with a commitment to a truth arising from meticulous research and a privileged perspective from above. Critical research, with its postmodern narrative approaches, has not yet managed to undermine this strong ethos, which still shapes most research in the social sciences and humanities in Israel.
Ironically, Azaryahu’s “open” research makes possible critical thinking in places where Rotbard’s closes them off. White Tel Aviv is constantly subverting itself. An example is the fact that it has a firmly established gay-lesbian community with flourishing institutions, which threatens the hegemonic components of Zionist discourse. The oft-changing city that Azaryahu describes is what makes this subversion possible. The 1999 Love Parade celebration in Tel Aviv flaunted the city’s subversive potential in the face of earlier Jewish and Israeli traditions. Azaryahu cites the following newspaper report:
Last Friday, something remarkable happened in Tel Aviv: a love parade became a new, unchallengeable social icon, a new festival in the panoply of Israeli festivals, for which over200,000 people voted with their dancing feet. . . . The Love Parade, in such symbolic proximity to the anachronistic Jerusalem Parade, has put Tel Aviv on the map together with the major European cities such as Berlin, Paris or Zurich. For the first time, Tel Aviv presented itself as it is – a cosmopolitan, open city, with an on-line connection to what’s happening in the world. (Azaryahu, p. 174)
In addition, Tel Aviv, as a global, world-class city, has become home to migrant workers ("foreign workers” in standard Israeli jargon), who at one point made up about a quarter of its population. Rotbard notes their expulsion, which he considers more significant than their actual presence in Tel Aviv. But whether voluntarily or because it had no alternative,
Tel Aviv developed important municipal institutions to deal with migrant workers, including the chance to study at its schools, receive medical care, legal advice, and religious services. Perhaps what happened was that the State of Israel, with its segregationist and “whitening” principles, “overpowered” the subversive Tel Aviv and threw out those workers who failed to fit in with its ethnocratic principles. Such an analysis is more suited to Azaryahu’s perception, of a city in constant development, sometimes opposing itself to “others” and at other times in concert with them, and containing elements that work against the process of its own whitening.
Both authors would probably agree that Tel Aviv, over and beyond the straightforward geographical sense, is part of the Zionist enterprise that created it, and that it is one of the components that make up the State of Israel. The disagreement between them is over the extent to which national logic dictates urban logic. Rotbard devotes considerable space to the national logic, including its orientalist components, which penetrates and structures all areas of urban life. His Tel Aviv is not subversive: rather, it is a completely conformist representative of Zionist logic, in its entirety. In contrast, Azaryahu gives the city autonomy and shows how it is developing, including in directions that run counter to the logic or rationale that led to its establishment.
In June 1998, Israel won the Eurovision Song Contest for the third time. Its representative was the transsexual singer Dana International, and following her success many members of the Israeli gay-lesbian community went out to dance in Rabin Square (formerly Malkhei Yisrael – “Kings of Israel” – Square). Maoz Azaryahu refers to this event in a chapter about the square’s history (Azaryahu, p. 327). What he fails to mention, however, is that on the same day, the national soccer championship was won in Tel Aviv by Beitar Jerusalem, whose supporters also flooded onto the same square at exactly the same time. These two celebrations by two diametrically differing communities met and mingled in the square. For one magic, utopian moment, as if the Messiah had finally arrived, the most stereotypical representatives of loutish xenophobia, themselves the object of constant “blackening” at the hands of the Israeli media, celebrated together with the stereotypical representatives of Israel’s new “otherness.” There was a melding of the White City and the Black City, not to mention the Pink City. The global city is typified by its heterotopia – a term coined by Michel Foucault, meaning a place that functions as an arena for the meeting of many different types of places, and therefore where innovative, not to say revolutionary, encounters can occur. Naturally, not all encounters produce significant results, whether because of the state’s normalizing power or because from the outset the encounter was not a meaningful one. Although there was no follow-up (as far as I am aware) to the heartwarming encounter between the gay-lesbian community and the Beitar Jerusalem fans, it is indicative of the subversive and dialectical option created by the whitening dynamic. Rotbard’s book, more subversive than other books about Tel Aviv, does not come to grips with this possibility.
Having delved in some detail into the differences between the books, it is now time to return to the similarity between them, which is perhaps more significant than the differences. The two books are new history, subversive, provocative, asking new questions and proposing ways of analysis previously untried. They look at Tel Aviv in a way in which it has rarely been observed until now, and this is what makes them noteworthy. One begins where the second ends (and vice versa). They come from related disciplines, but there is no real dialogue between them. For some scholars, especially those known as "critical", Rotbard’s book will be an example of engagé academic writing. For others, Azaryahu’s book will be an outstanding example of local, cultural, and social history, exposing the development of the Israeli myth. Perhaps given the polarization that characterizes Israeli academe I will be alone in arguing this, but in my opinion both of these contrasting books – the white and the black alike (and it is up to the reader to decide which is which) – make a highly significant contribution to the thinking about Israeli place that has developed in recent years.

(Translated from Hebrew by Ruth Morris)

Note:
This article was originally published in Hebrew in Israel, no. 9 (2006): 237–44.
Note on contributor:
Michael Feige is a senior lecturer at the Ben-Gurion Research Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a sociologist and anthropologist. His book One Space, Two Places: Gush Emunim, Peace Now and the Construction of Israeli Space was published in Hebrew by Magnes Press in 2002

spontaneous architecture: Joshua Skarf, Yisca Katz, Rebecca David

2009-07-26T12:55:00.004+03:00

A structure by Joshua Skarf, Yisca Katz and Rebecca David from the 3rd year Spontaneous Architecture studio at the architecture department, Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, spring-summer 2009.
The structure is made by egg crates reinforced with steel wires.

Raping the Bride of the Sea

2009-07-22T14:23:00.011+03:00

(A chapter from the English translation of "White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa")
A brochure of The Etzel Museum (Gidi House), Manshieh, Jaffa

The natural cycle of effacement, destruction, desertification, and making the desert bloom is but a background to the true allegory of Altneuland/Tel Aviv. In Manshieh this realization of the oxymoron is apparent, the original, Tel Avivian interpretation of the meeting of old and new.

The architects of the Manshieh project – Amnon Nov, Amnon Schwartz, and Dani Schwartz – were also responsible for the only project in Manshieh to keep some sort of touch with the neighborhood’s past. In 1978, on the ruins of the last remnant of the neighborhood they constructed the Etzel Museum, named after Gidi Faglin and dedicated to the organization and the memory of the conquerors (or according to the Etzel Museum’s terminology – “liberators”) of Jaffa, which was opened in 1983.[1]
The museum recounts the history of the Etzel and gives its account of the different events the organization was involved in, from the massacre in Dir Yasin to the conquest of Jaffa and the Altelena affair. The building, whose design was donated by the architects, is a sort of local version of Mies van der Rohe’s universal glass box, nailed to the ruins of a Jaffoite stone house. The glass box, even more than the white cube, is the modernist figure, identified with the Bauhaus and the German building tradition much more than the white cube whose main advocate was Le Corbusier, and whose origins probably lie in North Africa. The glass box was designed in the Bauhaus building itself, planned by Walter Gropius, and was mainly developed by the last director of the Bauhaus school, Mies van der Rohe, throughout his career and especially in its American phase. The simplistic connection between the glass box with its new and Western corporate façade and the ruins of the old Eastern stone house calls for all age-old clichés, and turns the Etzel Museum into a poor allegory, where the exterior phraseology of the architecture is integrated with the architets’ verbal phraseology: “from the shattered walls of the old building grow dark glass walls, […] schematically completing the building to what it was. […] An attempt to freeze the special moment[1] and time of the day of the liberation of Jaffa.”[2]
The attempt to freeze time on the wonderful background of the Mediterranean Sea has succeeded. Soon after its completion, in 1984, the building received the prestigious Rokah Prize for architecture in Tel Aviv. The Etzel Museum has become one of the most emblematic architectural objects, not only in Israeli architecture, but in universal architecture as well. This may be due to its simplified cliché nature, and as a result of the architects’ complete identification with a consciousness of some kind of historic time.

In order to understand the dangers of this sort of architecture, one should examine the work of Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. An exceptionally problematic example of consciousness of time can be found in his “ruins theory”[3]: the objective of the “ruins theory” was to design the future corpse of the building by strengthening certain constructive elements and weakening others, so that even after hundreds of years of destruction, war and neglect, it would function as an independent monument. Speer, who was very much impressed with the Roman ruins he saw in Rome when he traveled following his studies, wanted to plan ahead the glorious degeneration of his monuments, thereby controlling their acceptance in history. Accordingly, when planning a building he would also plan its ruin, keeping in mind a whole iconography of images of ruins. In the practical level, the meaning of strengthening certain parts of the building beyond proportions (stone walls three meters thick) is also the weakening of other parts, the ones that could be dispensed with, or actually should be dispensed with in order to achieve the right image of the ruin. The idea is to allow the “carving” of the future story of the present from the building, which is perceived as a sort of raw material, analogous to the blocks of marble from Pietrasanta from which Michelangelo “carved” his pietas.

There is no doubt that any building is also the pattern of the destruction that may await it. This is in fact the working premise of any construction engineer (the engineer does not verify that the building will stand, but rather that it will not fail in front of destructive forces, from its own weight to an earthquake or a terror attack). While the efforts of the construction engineer are aimed to neutralize destructive forces – burden, cracking, bending, collapsing – and in more severe cases (such as the building regulations of civil defense) allowing escape and survival, the novelty in Speer’s “theory” is the attempt to tame all these, to harness them to the aesthetic and rhetoric of destruction and ruin, to turn them into architecture. What makes this architecture so troublesome is a distorted and disturbing consciousness of time: it never had a present, and will therefore never have a future. It was always in between nostalgia for the alleged past of the Neoclassical monument and longing for the imaginary future of the Roman ruin. Hiding this heterochronic time beyond-time of the ruins, as a sort of “time bomb” within the contemporary (and temporary) exterior of the building, eventually makes the present a festive funeral procession towards an unending and unavoidable future.
But Speer’s ruins were only forcefully-ruins, and in any case were not actual ruins but only their images, planted by Speer in his buildings as a reminder of the culture from which they descend. In the Etzel Museum, however, not only was the destruction created by its namesake and designers, but its aesthetics may bring to mind a sort of “retroactive ruins theory” – supposedly it has now become clear that the Arab house polished itself throughout its years of existence for the moment of its destruction and its role as decoration in Charles Clore Park. The ruin of Manshieh do not preserve even one moment that took place prior to its destruction. The builder of the house, its former owners and residents or their fate are not mentioned anywhere in the museum. The conquerors did not see it fit to mention or show, anywhere of the museum, what had been the neighborhood of Manshieh. In contrast with Speer’s ruins, displaying fabricated remnants of living, Niv, Schwartz and Schwartz’s ruin is meant to immortalize death and forgetfulness. This is even more morbid than the catacombs, since it is paced outside for anyone to see. A Memento mori in the daylight.

In a certain aspect the whole area polished itself in front of this ruin: in fact, the Zionist dialect of “making the desert bloom,” as formed in Ben Gurion’s rhetoric, was only a derivative of an identical European narrative that formed around the Orientalist tradition of the “voyage to the East” in the nineteenth century. The image of the ruin was the central iconographic image of this tradition, and was seen in its visual products, in drawings, engravings, and photographs. This ruins iconography served as a visual argument in the “case” of Europe against the East – the destruction of the places sacred to Christianity or the relics of Hellenistic culture explained the inferiority of the East in front of the West, delineated it, and eventually provided justification for its conquest. Same in Israel – the image of the ruin became partly a self-fulfilled prophecy and partly an outline of things to come: the ruins of 1948 quickly took the role of the historic ruins of the “voyage to the East,” a role that seems to have been set for them in advance. The Arab “hirbe”[4] became the natural state of Arab architecture, and came to be one of the foundations of the “wholesome Israeli landscape,” along with the Eucalyptus groves, the Sabra cacti, or the smell of orchards. The hirbe was never anything but a hirbe – that way it was easier to forget that it was actually a house once inhabited.

Another example of the pervert use of the ruins can be seen in the movie Kazablan (Israel, 1973) directed by Menachem Golan: according to the original story, Kazablan was to be the king of The Big Zone. However, in the 1970s The Big Zone has already become the Garden of the Peak, and so the ruins of Manshieh, still waiting its turn to become a park, came by the role of the ruins of The Big Zone. Still, the Etzel Museum stands out even in comparison with all the other ruins of 1948 that entered Israeli folklore through youth organization trips and were violated and defiled. There is something surprising and blood-curdling about the shameless manner in which the museum dramatizes once again the act of conquest, takeover, loot, and mostly the rape of the “bride of the sea” by architectural measures: the forced compression of the glass box onto the ruins of the Arab home, the complete effacement of all signs of life. The expressive vigor of the museum stems from that unbearable ease of the dialect of “old and new,” detaching it from the political context while still part of it. Strangely, the building uses the ruin and the aesthetics of the ruin in order to cover and conceal the destruction. The building tells the truth about the murder of the city of Jaffa, but lies at the same time, by dramatizing this drama as “architecture” and “environmental art.” The Etzel Museum is the embodiment of Adrikhalism[5] in its use of architectural phraseology in order to conceal and whitewash reality. All of these make the Etzel Museum an unbearable sight. Never before in the history of architecture has an ugly truth been shown in such a false, spruced up manner.

(English translation: Sharon Rotbard and Orit Gat)

Notes
[1] More about the Etzel Museum in Manshieh and the way in which it echoes the perception of the sea in the Zionist and Revisionist ethos, see Amit Gish, “Conquest of the Hebrew Sea: The Etzel Museum as an Expression of the Perception of the Hebrew Sea in the Revisionist Ethos”, Theory and Criticism (Teoria Ubikoret) V. 42, Spring 2004, pp. 113-131.
[2] Taken from the plaque in the museum. The fact that the architects donated the design of the project is also stated there.
[3] The theory is summarized in Speer’s book Inside the Third Reich, and is mentioned in Guyot and Restelliny’s book concerning Nazi art, and especially in the different writings of Paul Virilio, from Bunker Archeology to War and Cinema. Maybe at some later point Speer himself saw the morbid aspect of the ruins theory, and therefore it is not mentioned at all in his half-official biography, written by Gita Sereny.
Adelin Guyot and Patrick Restelliny, L’Art Nazi (Bruxelles: Editions Complexes, 1983), 122-123.
Gita Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (New York: Knopf, 1995).
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archéologie (Paris: Editions du Demi, 1991), 56.
[4] Hebrew slang for “dump;” it sounds like an Arabicized version of “hurba,” the Hebrew word for “ruin.”
[5] Adrikhalism (Architecturism) is a term I used in an early essay in order to describe a redundant expression of architectural gestures and mannerism.
Sharon Rotbard, Adrikhalism, Public Order and Good Citizenship, Studio Magazine, Fall 1994

spontaneous architecture: Adam Gilboa, Anat Dahari and Yonatan Masri

2009-07-21T13:03:00.006+03:00

A structure by Adam Gilboa, Anat Dahari and Yonatan Masri from 3rd year studio at the architecture department's yard, Bezalel Academy Jerusalem, winter 2006. The structure was erected in a back yard of a deserted house in Jerusalem, and was made by empty Coka Kola plastic bottles and nylon bags. After the end of the semester, the structure was left in the site and was inhabited by homeless people for a month until the complete demolition of the entire site by its owner.

spontaneous architecture: Liran Ben-Ami and Moshe Rotem

2009-07-20T11:32:00.014+03:00

A house by Liran Ben-Ami and Moshe Rotem (3rd year studio) on top of the giant Eucaliptus tree at the architecture department's yard, Bezalel Academy Jerusalem, spring-summer 2007.

Ramallah Syndrome

2009-07-20T00:22:00.001+03:00

"Ramallah Syndrome is the side effect of the new spatial and social order that emerged after the collapse of the Oslo ‘peace process’. It is manifested in a kind of ‘hallucination of normality’, the fantasy of a co-existence of occupation and freedom. It is as if the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state – in effect, indefinitely postponed – will be achieved through pure illusion. The consequence of this perpetual persistence of a colonial regime has not been sufficiently discussed. The colonial legacy is a vital link in national identity, and it must be resolved. Ramallah Syndrome is ultimately about the critique and potentiality associated with forms of resistance and subjugation in a colonial context."

A Conversation By Nasser Abourahme, Yazeed Anani, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Laura Ribeiro
http://ramallahsyndrome.blogspot.com/

2009: GEORGES PEREC avec ROBERT BOBER / RECITS D'ELLIS ISLAND

2009-07-19T15:12:00.007+03:00

Stories from Ellis Island, testimonies about wandering and hope.
In 1979 the writer Georges Perec and his friend the cinematographer Robert Bober went on a trip to New York and filmed a documentary on Ellis Island. They interviewed immigrants, searched the archives, wandered throughout the (then) deserted island. This book documents their trip, their investigation of this "place of non place", its history and functionning and questions their own quest for identity as immigrants.

spontaneous architecture: Edith Kofsky, Motti Rauchwerger, Sagy Schwartz

2009-07-19T11:19:00.019+03:00

A project by Edith Kofsky, Motti Rauchwerger, Sagy Schwartz from the 3rd year Spontaneous Architecture studio at the architecture department, Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, spring-summer 2009.
The student made the entire structure with wood and wires that they found in the streets of Jerusalem. All the connections, joints and assemblages are made by various techniques of sewing, stitching and weaving (more images, details and videos )

URBICIDE

2009-07-13T14:25:00.019+03:00

(A chapter from the English translation of "White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa")

View from Tel Aviv to Manshieh neighborhood, 1930s

View from Tel Aviv to Manshieh neighborhood, December 1948

The same way Tel Aviv was to symbolize the materialization of the national aspirations of the Jews, Jaffa, the greatest and richest Palestinian city, symbolized the Palestinian national aspiration. Perhaps for that reason many Jews saw Jaffa’s independent and autonomous existence as something intolerable, and some, like Begin, saw Jaffa as an obstacle that may later risk the existence of the Jewish State, and a possible base for Arab military powers and an attack on Tel Aviv and the Jewish Settlement.
According to the United Nations’ decision of November 29, 1947, in the division of the state between the Jews and the Arabs, Jaffa was to have the special status of an independent Palestinian enclave within the Jewish State. But Jaffa was attacked on April 25, and by the time it surrendered on May 13, the city has already been destroyed in many ways.
In the months between the United Nations’ decision of November 29, 1947, and the declaration of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948, a state of civil war was prevalent in Israel, in which Jewish para-military forces fought the civil population. As for Jaffa, the historian Benny Morris claims that the common belief amongst the “Hagana” forces was that as it is a large civilian population completely surrounded by Jewish settlements, it does not pose a strategic threat to Tel Aviv.[1] Following six weeks of violence that had started as early as December 2, 1947, and reached their zenith with the explosion of the building of the new Seraya building on January 4, 1948, a mass departure of inhabitants of the middle and upper classes was evident. The public and municipal services in Jaffa collapsed and most businesses in the city shut down[2]. Still, the siege on the city was not complete since the Jewish citrus growers insisted that the port remained open for the export of the fruit[3].
Maybe due to the fact that the Etzel’s center of gravity was in the large cities, especially Tel Aviv, or maybe on account of the love its leader, Menachem Begin, held for Tel Aviv (when he was elected Prime Minister, he decided to give up the formal residence in Jerusalem and keep his modest housing in Tel Aviv), Jaffa became the pivot of the Etzel’s activity. According to both Jewish and Palestinian testimonies, from the end of November 1947, and likewise in many places in the region, the Etzel and the Lehi terrorized the streets of Jaffa – at first by rolling “barrel bombs” (barrels filled with explosives) and directing snipers at the entrances of cafés in Jaffa[4], and later, in January 1948, the explosion of the new Seraya building in Jaffa.[5]
During April 1948, a decision has been cast in the Etzel to attack Jaffa not waiting for the British to leave. On April 25 the organization started massively bombarding Jaffa and Manshieh with mortars, and went on until the city was conquered. According to a few Palestinian accounts, the bombardments were joined by radio broadcasts in Arabic in which the Etzel promised the civilian population that their fate would be similar to that of the inhabitants of Dir Yasin[6]. At the same time, the Hagana organization commenced operation “Chametz” in villages surrounding Jaffa such as Salame, Khiriya, and Yazur, all of which surrendered by the end of April and the beginning of May, along with other nearby villages to surrender even earlier (Sheikh Muanis, Fedja). Around 40,000 refugees left these villages, just as at the beginning of the attacks many of Jaffa’s residents left their homes and traveled by land to Lebanon or Jordan.[7] In later stages, however, the escape was via the sea since Jaffa was isolated in the midst of the Jewish settlement. The Jaffa port saw many ships of refugees headed towards Gaza and Beirut. Even with the British protection at sea, the escape from the port and the attacked city to the boats waiting in the open sea progressed with such panic that many casualties were evident, caused as result of people drowning when falling off the boats or trying to reach them swimming. This may have been the only event in the history of the place where the saying “throw them into the sea” took place literally.
The battle on Manshieh and Jaffa is considered to be a stepping-stone in the field of urban combat.[8] The commander of the battle, Amichai “Gidi” Faglin, conceived, or actually rediscovered, of a technique of urban warfare based on gradual reduction of the urban mass from the inside, while moving from house to house under the protection of the continuous façades, taking advantage of the traditional urban fabric of the continuous block. Truth be said, the “mouse holes” technique has already been invented at least twice before: for the first time, exactly a hundred years earlier, Marshal Bugeaud, the French military leader who conquered Morocco and Algeria, mentioned this technique in the manuscript of his book "La guerre des rues et des maisons" (The War of Streets and Homes).[9] In the book Bugeaud recommends on a combination of engineering forces with the fighting forces in order to surpass uncovered routes that may be blocked by barricades or are subject to fire from the buildings, and create alternative axes by digging passageways from building to building and apartment to apartment under the shelter of the built mass, and thus take over whole streets through the flanks.
A decade later this technique was reinvented in Louis-Auguste Blanqui’s Instructions pour une prise d'armes (Instructions for an Uprising).[10] Blanqui, one of the great conspires of nineteenth century France, could not have known Bugeaud’s book, as the latter was yet to be published (even though Victor Hugo knew of the existence of the manuscript, distributed in a small number between military officials), and due to the fact that since 1848 he spent most of his life in prison. Blanqui describes the exact same technique of carving “mouse holes” within the urban mass, only that for him the new passages in the urban block are adjoined by barricades and occlusion of traffic.[11]
It cannot be assumed that the commander of the Etzel’s operation, “Gidi” Amichai Faglin, knew these two manuscripts. In fact, he reinvented the idea during the operation, and may have even been the first to carry out the “mouse holes” idea. Benjamin Runkle describes how Faglin dug out two parallel “overground tunnels” in the built mass of Manshieh, through which he outflanked the Arab posts, reached the extremities of the neighborhood, and used the psychological effect of his forces’ presence in the other side of the neighborhood in order to increase the panic in the hearts of the inhabitants and the despair among their forces. Chaim Lazar recounts how Gidi conceived of the new tactic, and describes a very similar one to that of Blanqui, composed of breaking through the urban mass and blocking major traffic axes with sandbags and building ruins[12]. This tactic is reminiscent of certain aspects of the Israeli Defense Forces urban combat methods employed in different battles in the West Bank in the past years, for example in the city of Tul-Karem and the refugee camp of Balata.[13]
Since the British forces entered the stage in the second phase of the war, Gidi’s battle in Manshieh and Jaffa had another military and urban aspect. This was the first occasion in the Israeli War of Independence where a confrontation with established military forces occurred. The Etzel was victorious on this occasion as well, owing to another novelty in the field of urban combat made up by Faglin: if in the first stage of the battle the urban space of Manshieh was redesigned to be devoid of its content and ruined on the inside, then on the second stage, when the British forces came into action, the city was again redesigned as a sort of weapon or live ammunition. Using the experience gathered at the Etzel with explosives, Faglin ordered to conceal explosive devices in buildings and streets, and at high-time explode the city on the British tanks. He turned the city into a barricade, blocking main traffic axes, and in fact redesigned the battlefront or urban space. Gidi exemplified this ability to redesign the urban reality and take advantage of the time factor, which the British forces lacked (for them the battle on Jaffa was an unnecessary one whose results were known in advance) one more time in an even more dramatic manner. During the negotiation with the British he held a press conference, simultaneously ordering the destruction of the police station in Manshieh, which was supposed to be handed over to the British until the end of the mandate. The echoes of the explosion cleared beyond all doubt that the British army better evacuate from Jaffa, just like its residents.
On May 13, following the British evacuation, the Arab Emergency Committee (Ahmed Abu-Lavan, Salach Nazar, Amin Andreus, and Achmed Abdul Rachim)[14] signed a surrender treaty. Only a few thousands remained in the city. In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem Benny Morris estimates that the original number of inhabitants in Jaffa was between seventy and eighty thousand people, out of which only around 4000-5000 remained in the city at the moment it surrendered. Wallid Khalidi estimates in his book All That Remains that only 3600 people stayed in the city.[15] Some claim that even fewer stayed behind – about 2500 inhabitants, most of whom were refugees from the nearby villages, Salame and Yazur. In his book The Conquest of Jaffa Haim Lazar of the Etzel claims that in the first census held in Jaffa 3665 non-Jewish residents were counted, out of whom 2047 were Muslim and 1540 were Christian, as well as some non-Arab Christians, including clergymen. Maurice recounts that on May 18 Ben Gurion visited Jaffa and wrote: “I could not understand: how did the inhabitants of Jaffa leave this city?”[16]
The conquest of Jaffa has an unusual aspect, exceeding the conquests of other Arab cities, since Jaffa had special and separate standing in the United Nations’ division decision. Beyond the military surrender of the city, and the humanitarian disaster of the mass departure of its inhabitants, the conquest of Jaffa was first of all a violation of an international decision. The political meaning of the fall of Jaffa on May 13, 1948, was therefore that the UN’s division decision was foiled by Israel before the declaration of the founding of the State of Israel. This fact goes against Israel’s formal rhetoric that casts the responsibility for the outbreak of the War of Independence on the Arab states, who did not accept the UN’s decision and attacked the State of Israel following its declaration[17]. It is true, the Arab states did attack Israel following its declaration of independence, but in fact Israel won the war against the Palestinians even before the British had left the country, and more important, before the declaration of independence. In the Declaration of Independence Ben Gurion said: “We call – even in the midst of the months-long attack on us – the sons of the Arab nation who reside in Israel to keep the peace, and to take their part in the formation of the state on the base of full and equal citizenship, including appropriate representation in all the of the state’s institutions, both temporary and permanent.” But at those moments, a few meters away from the hall in the Tel Aviv Museum on Rotschild Boulevard, where the declaration of independence took place, Jaffa already stood in ruins and spontaneous and organized looting was evident in its streets.[18] Its tens of thousands of inhabitants already scattered all over. So happened all over the area named today “Gush Dan” (the area of the Tel Aviv metropolis: from Nathania in the north to Ashdod in the South), which was “cleansed” a few days earlier in “Operation Chametz,” as was in Haifa and other places across the country.
Along with the city that had turned into ruins disappeared its inhabitants. According to Palestinian testimonies, during the Etzel’s bombardments of Jaffa all of the city’s hotels turned into hospitals. It is unclear how all these hospitals were evacuated during the quick escape from Jaffa, when many of the city’s inhabitants tried reaching the boats docking outside the harbor swimming. To this day it is unclear what had happened to most of Jaffa’s residents. According to Chaim Lazar, at the end of the battle on Manshieh the Etzel piled dozens of bodies of Arabs for the Red Cross in a field by the beach. Many of the residents who stayed in the city flew the flags of different countries hoping to be saved.[19]
A literary testimony on the fate of the inhabitants of Jaffa who surrendered can be found in Binyamin Tamuz’s short story Swimming Competition, taking place in a bayara house in Tel-A-Reesh, where in the end the captive, the son of effendis from Manshieh and a childhood friend of the storyteller, is murdered. “A western wind carried with it the smells of Jaffa” – tells Tamuz of the Hagana’s revenge actions in Tel-A-Reesh – “but at a later time, a back wind came in from the housing projects in Holon and brought with it the scent of white homes.”[20]

Notes
[1] According to Plan D, the Hagana only planned to conquer the suburbs of Manshieh and Abu-Kabir, and to siege Jaffa. Benny Morris claims that even after the beginning of the violence, most members of the National Committee of Jaffa opposed the idea of initiating a riposte against Tel Aviv.
Morice, Benny, The Birth of the Problem of Palestinian Refugees, 1947-1949, (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), p. 37, 135.
To the contrary, in the foreword to Haim Lazar’s book on the conquest of Jaffa, Menachem Begin claims that if it weren’t for the conquest, Jaffa’s port would have served base for an Egyptian invasion.
Menachem Begin, “The Truth of Victory and the Victory of Truth”, in Lazar, Chaim, The Conquest of Jaffa, (Tel Aviv: Shelach, 1951), 12.
[2] Morice, 71-76.
[3] Morice, 57.
[4] Haim Lazar recounts for example a barrel bomb rolled by Etzel members Shelbi Ben David and Shaul Bador into Café Venezia near the Elhambra Cinema. Lazar claims that following the conquest of Jaffa, it became clear that 40 people were killed in this action (he refers to them as “bandits”), and many others were injured. Lazar, 82.
[5] For an account of the dates of attacks on villages surrounding Jaffa see Khalidi, Walid, All That Remains: The Palestinian villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, (Washington: Institute of Palestinian Studies, 1992), 230-264.
See testimony the formerly Jaffoite attorney Shukri Salma, recounting five terror attacks in cafés in Jaffa, where inhabitants of the city and its surroundings came in order to listen to the radio. Between fifteen and twenty people were killed and dozens were injured in each of these attacks. In opposition to the Etzel and Lehi’s statements that these attacks were directed at “bandits” and “rioters,” Salma recounts that only civilians were harmed. In the case of the Seraya building Salma claims that between ten and twelve social workers were killed, all graduates of the American University of Beirut, some of whom he knew personally. The testimony appears in the internet project of the Oral History of Palestine initiated by Salim Tamari.
http://www.palestineremembered.com/jaffa/jaffa/story202.html
[6] See the testimony of Shukri Salma, ibid.
[7] See the story of Ghassan Kanafani on the escape from Jaffa to Lebanon through Rosh Hanikra.
Kanafani, Ghassan, ‘Jaffa, Land of the Orange’, in Al Ahram: 1948-1998: Special Pages commemorating 50 Years of Arab Dispossession since the Creation of the State of Israel. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/kanafani.htm
[8] See conversation between Philipp Misselwitz and the architect Eyal Weizman on the link between urban planning and urban warfare in general and in Jaffa in particular.
Weizman, Eyal, ‘Military Operations as Urban Planning: A Conversation with Philipp Misselewitz’, in Territories (Berlin: KW, 2003), pp. 272-286.
For an analysis of the battle on Jaffa in 1948 from a military perspective (in gratitude to Eyal Weizman), see
Runkle, Benjamin, ‘Jaffa, 1948: Urban Combat in the Israeli War of Independence’, in Antal, John col. And Gericke, Bradley maj. (ed.), City fights: Selected Histories of Urban Combat from World War II to Vietnam, (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), pp. 289-313.
[9] Bugeaud wrote this text in 1849 in his mansion in the Dordogne, during his forced retirement following his failure to subjugate the riots in Paris on June 1848. Bugeaud could not find a publisher for his book, and printed it in a small edition, which he distributed among his friends in the military. The manuscript was considered lost for close to 150 years, but its existence was known through Victor Hugo, who mentions it in his journal (Bugeaud approached him a few times to help him publish the book). Eventually the manuscript was found by the historian Maite Bouyssy, and was published in Paris in 1997. The War of Streets and Homes is a guide for urban combat in the streets of Paris, written in the short span of time between the riots of 1848, and the beginning of the Haussmannic project in 1851. It can be viewed as a sort of map of Paris before the Baron Haussmann. Beyond tactic questions such as those related to the conquest of barricades and digging “mouse holes,” Bugeaud spells out in the book a fascinating mapping of the dangers and threats held within the French capital, exposes the social boundaries between the eastern side of the city and the western one, and introduces a new perspective of the considerations that led the Haussmannic project two years later. Many of the components of The War of Streets and Homes reappear with Haussmann in civil guise: like Bugeau, Haussmann too spreads a net of headquarters across the city, only that instead of army barracks these were police and fire fighters bases. When Bugeau wanted to destroy buildings located in strategic intersections, Haussmann decided to cut off the edges of the Parisian building blocks in order to allow a wider vista in intersections. It can also be claimed that the ditches dug out by Haussmann within the urban mass – the new avenues, the metro tunnels – work exactly like the “mouse holes” Bujeau wanted to carve within the urban block.
Following his return to the metropolis after his service in Algeria, Bujeau was one of the leaders of the strict position of the Partie de l’ordre and advocated for an “evident war against social destroyers” (meaning the working class and the socialists). Then, however, Bujeau fell sick with the Cholera. On his deathbed, Napoleon III approached him in order to tell him “France and I need you.” With news of his death, the journal L’evenement reported celebrations in the streets, and societies of bakers and barbers asking to commemorate the date of his death as a national holiday, and popular feasts where people cheered their glasses and hoorayed the disease of Cholera.
Maréchal Bugeaud, La guerre des rues et des maisons, manuscript inédit présenté par Maite Bouyssy, (Paris: Jean-Paul Richer, 1997), pp. 78, 138.
[10] An online edition of Instructions for an Uprising can be found at
http://www.marxist.org/francais/blanqui/1866/instructions.htm
[11] One of the main characteristics of the barricade is the fact that it is based on recycling of the urban material, and using these for the opposite objection than that for which they were meant. This may be the reason why for Friedrich Engels “the barricade has more of a moral value than a material one” (The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850). Normally it meant using elements of traffic in order to stop traffic, but this inversion can be seen in other ways as well, and a maneuver like that of “Gidi” in Manshieh, where the full and the empty change places, is only an example. According to Instructions for an Uprising by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who was the theoretician of the modern barricade, the barricade had a real military role, and along with the “mouse holes” tactic was combined with the inclusive notion of creating a wholly new geography in the city. Blanqui recommends that, time permitting, the barricade should be built from the paving stones of the streets, and only when this is impossible, improvised from disarrayed carriages. Blanqui bothered to calculate the exact number of stones to disassemble in relation to the standard measurements of the streets: “The barricade will be built in the height of 3 meters, or in an emergency, a meter and a half. 18 cubic meters are 1152 paving stones, 24 rows of stones that need to be disassembled from the streets. If the barricade is important enough, 144 cubic meters should be used, using 64 stoned per meter, meaning 9186 stones for a 12 meter wide barricade, which is 291 rows to disassemble which constitute 48 meters in length – all this should be enough for complete fortification.
Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, Instructions pour une prise d’armes,”
[12] Lazar, pp. 171.
[13] In "War and the City", Nadav Harel and Eyal Weizman’s documentary film projected in 2004 at the Bezalel and KW conference and show "Territories Live" in Tel Aviv, the Brigadir General Aviv Kochavi (commander of the IDF “Otzvat Esh,” an elite formation) recounts the battle on the refugee camp Balata in Nablus on April 2002. The “mouse hole’ technique became the “worm technique” of the IDF in the 2000s, and just as was the case with Bugeaud, Blanqui, and Gidi, here it is reinvented for the first time once again: “The meaning of the territory no longer has any importance; there is no value anymore in declaring 'I won!' […] the reality and the space are subject to interpretation. We no longer wish to conform to the alleys, the streets, or the city. We do not want to conform to their interpretation as the architect or city planner who planned them envisaged them, we will interpret the space by the manner that suits us: if the alley is a place to walk through, then the alley will be a place where walking is forbidden, and door and window would become places one cannot pass through. […] We do not interpret the urban space in the classic manner but in a wholly new one. That is the reason we chose the method of passing through walls, like a worm chewing and ending up in a different place every time. The idea of passing through walls may not be new, but for the first time we took this tactic, this micro-tactic, and turned it into a method. […] This is what allows reinterpretation of the space. This is what we teach our soldiers – there is no more passage through alleys, through streets, through roofs. Movement is only through walls. […] Reality is an interpretation of the one who assaults and the one who defends. Someone could tell me one moment what does it mean? – a house is a house and an alley is an alley; but I say no way, it’s just an interpretation […] “
Rightfully, Weizman presents Aviv Kochavi in his film as a super-theoretician of the city, that must be taken as seriously as other famous characters such as Rem Koolhass, According to Kochavi, it is not only a tactic measure meant to take over a territory, but a whole philosophy, and a wholly new spatial perception of the city, reminiscent of that in computer games, such as "Doom". This perception naturally and instinctively utilizes strategies and terms from the world of Deconstructivist architecture, and is also reminiscent of the principle of ‘superposition’ that appeared in Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, and in Peter Eisenmann’s Venice Biennial project, as well as images like Daniel Liebskind’s Front Line in Berlin. The extreme abstraction of the simple geometrical law “a straight line passes through two points” and its immediate application in the space as a new order compelled upon it, derive from the need to use selective measures or to attack specific targets (selective assassination, for example), but express a paradoxical state of things in the space, where differences between state and city, between army and police, become indistinct.
This new geography makes the urban space and the existing order irrelevant by decision, in the same way one decides other things are no longer relevant. It permits the assaulter to refrain from the threats and traps in the enemy’s space, by creating alternative routes. For the defender it cancels out the most basic component of the existing order within a city, the separation between the private and public space. Beyond all aspects linked with breaking the fence (literally), the new geography turns the existing geography of the city, in a manner not devoid of irony, into a sort of artifice – an illusion, a camouflage, a trick, a stunt, a diversion: general Kochavi wants his enemies to believe that "a house is a house", "the alley is an alley", and 'the city is a city" – he knows very well that this is not the case, that as soon as his shadow city has been invented, that is the only city that counts.
[14] Lazar, pp. 236
[15] See Salim Abu-Shukri’s testimony for Wallid Khalidi, pp. 581.
[16] Maurice, pp. 135, 143.
[17] For example: “The War of Independence: the first war between Israel and the Arab states which erupted on the eve of the declaration of independence, and went on until January 1949. The War broke out following the rejection of the UN’s division decision of November 29, 1947, by the Arab states and the Palestinian Supreme Arab Committee. Even during the debate at the UN general assembly, the representatives of the Arab states threatened to use force to prevent the realization of the decision.” From the Israeli government website:
http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/heb/mil_atx.htm
[18] Tom Segev dedicates the issue of the spontaneous and organized looting a whole chapter in his book 1949: The First Israelis (Jerusalem: Domino, 1984), pp. 83-104.
[19] Lazar, pp. 220.
[20]Binyamin Tamuz, ‘Swimming Competition’, in Selected Stories, (Jerusalem: Keter and The Association of Hebrew Writers, 1990), pp. 62.

(English translation: Sharon Rotbard and Orit Gat)

Soupçonnez l'architecture (1991)

2009-06-21T20:06:00.004+03:00

Spontaneous Architecture

2009-06-05T09:48:00.006+03:00

"Spontaneous Architecture", the blog of my Bezalel studio is openned to the public. Everybody is mostly invited (Hebrew and English)
http://www.spontaneous-architecture.blogspot.com/

Double Class Villa on Domus

2009-06-04T18:32:00.002+03:00

http://www.domusweb.it/upd_Architecture/article.cfm?idtipo=1&id=408

Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman / A Civilian Occupation: the poltics of Israeli architecture

2009-06-01T10:09:00.010+03:00

Cover of the English edition (Babel, Verso, Tel Aviv, New York, London, 2003)

Censored last year by the Association of Israeli Architects, A Civilian Occupation is the first attempt by Israeli architects, scholars, journalists, and photographers to highlight the role of Israeli architecture in the Middle East conflict.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the declared aim of the Zionist project has been to build a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. From the settlement offensive of the Tower and Stockade villages in the 1930s, through the total planning of the state of Israel soon after its independence, to the colonization of the occupied territories from 1967 to the present, this book reveals how central Israeli architecture has been in securing that aim. 25 color and 116 b/w photos/illustrations.
Contributors: Daniel Bauer, B'Tselem, Meron Benvenisti, Zvi Efrat, Nadav Harel, Miki Kratsman, Milutin Labudovic, Gideon Levy, Ilan Potash, Sharon Rotbard, Rafi Segal, Efrat Shvily, Eran Tamir-Tawil, Eyal Weizman, Pavel Wolberg, Oren Yiftachel.

Cover of the French edition (Babel, Les Editions de L'imprimeur, Tel Aviv, Paris, 2004)

preface

Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal won an architectural competition organized by the IAUA (the representative body of Israeli architects) and were chosen to prepare an exhibition of Israeli architecture at the UIA congress in Berlin. Their proposal, that included an exhibition and a catalog, tried to measure the role of Israeli architecture in the Middle East conflict.
Seemingly, the IAUA did not like this critical portrait: a steering committee was nominated and soon enough, the exhibition was cancelled under a budgetary pretext. After examining the printed catalog, the steering committee decided to redraw from Weizman and Segal’s presentation, and to prevent its distribution by scrapping the 6000 printed copies of the catalog.

The debate on “A Civilian Occupation” and on its censoring has clearly split the Israeli architectural community between those who insist to regard architecture as a “civilian occupation” and as a mere professional activity and those who don’t. But the existence of the debate by itself, and its immediate extension from the architectural local scene to the public and international arenas, has proven that architecture is not at all innocent. On the contrary, in most cases, the work of Israeli architects is situated at the very center of the political debates: if the main concern of the Zionist project was to build a national home for the Jewish people, Israeli architecture is the reason and the goal, the project and the realization of that project. Since most of Israel’s physical reality is shaped by different scales such as the political, the urban and the architectural, Israeli architecture can be no less “political” than it is “urban” or “architectural”. Architecture is about the making and the shaping of the real, and it cannot serve neither as a retreat from the real, nor as an alibi for escaping from the real. The censoring of “A civilian occupation” is a proof that denying this political dimension of architecture is a clear political statement by its own.

An easy way to understand “A Civilian Occupation” would be to read it only in its local context: to contemplate it as a bleeding sample from one of the most radical laboratories of modernity on earth. After all, Israel is where to be found the most explosive ingredients of our time in their purest form, where modern utopias and ancient beliefs are boiling together with no precautions.
But such a reading might miss a great deal. The questions posed by “A Civilian Occupation” extend this debate far beyond the contested frontiers of Israel and should be considered of a more general nature. After all, how many architects would decline the opportunity offered to the architect Thomas Leitesdorf to design the city of his dreams? How far would they go in investigating the true motives and the real consequences of their projects? What is the role of politics within architecture, of architecture within politics? Is the architect really just an innocent professional or must he chose between obedient collaborationism and militant activism?
In that sense, the local debate created by Weizman and Segal must become one of today’s main issues, and should generate new thinking on architecture, urbanism and politics. This takes, if to paraphrase some of today’s architectural slogans, much more than “more ethics and less esthetics”: Architecture is not just a magnificent game and urbanism is not always a gay science. To really appreciate them, you may not commit a murder. If you can’t be responsible, don’t be irresponsible, because when more is more, enough is enough.

1998 - 2000: Left Wing Architecture

2009-05-31T01:50:00.008+03:00

First screen of the online expo, 2000

The "Left Wing Architecture" manifestos were presented in Hebrew and English between 1998 and 2000. The first one, in Hebrew, at the openning of the Left Banc Club in Tel Aviv; the last one, in English, at the online expo of the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale. This excerpt is from a lecture I gave at the Tel Aviv University in 1999.

1. This paper is based on a manifesto under the same title, that I read in an architects’ reunion in Tel Aviv, few months ago. I will try to explain some of the issues treated in that manifesto, especially the ideological ground what I described as “right-wing” architectural manifestations. The relationships between politics and architecture are eventually of great importance here in Israel, where architecture is deeply anchored within the Zionist ideology and the architectural act and action are integral elements of the Israeli project. In Israel some of the dilemmas generated by this type of questions are sometimes obvious. I dare to hope that most of the Israeli professionals know the practical and the political meanings of professional activity in the occupied territories. I think that this awareness diminishes a great deal when it comes to the political meanings of building in Jerusalem and Jaffa, or when it comes to the use of oriental iconography.But since the relationships between politics and architecture extend to a much wider spectrum of problems, I would like to extend this debate beyond the contested frontiers of Israel. What happens here, happens everywhere in different forms.The Questions I am asking myself are of a more general order: What is the role of politics within architecture? and what is the role of architecture within politics? Should architects consider themselves as an active part of the political system or are they just mere professionals?I would like first to repeat Henry Lefebvre’s formula repeated again and again in his essay “Space and Politics”: “There is a politics of space, because space is politic”. Lefebvre was not the only thinker to be concerned about space and politics. There is a great modern tradition of political theory on questions of space, architecture and urbanism but my intention in this paper is to promote a political thinking of the architectural practice. Two centuries after the industrial revolution and deep within the celebrations of late capitalism victory, there is something extremely evasive and almost ridiculous in discussing architecture facing the totality, the aggressiveness, and the invasiveness of the present ever more commercialized and merchandised built environment. The activities led in this environment are as simple as ever - living, eating, drinking, parking, consuming, working, learning, healing. All those activities have been configured, enhanced, optimized, maximized. In this enormous project who once used to be the world, life has became a program, that through its own spatial representations articulates political positions, values and ideas about society, culture, economy; it conditions our behaviors in public and in private; It propagates ideology by shaping the physical support of the relationships between subjects, institutions, families, friends, neighbors, colleagues, strangers.Architects are not the only responsible for that. Those political and ideological impulses are present already in a pre-architectural stage: At the first place they shape the consensus, and serve as a moral infrastructure to create programs, commissions, zoning regulations. At the end,. Architects realize those ideological notions - by defining agendas, by interpreting programs, by setting orders of priorities, by giving shapes, by promoting imageries, fashions and references. I think that it is necessary today to question the participation and the role of architectural discourse within this ideological environment, to investigate the political dimension of architectural theories and practices: to search not only behind but also beyond all those discourses about form and function, structure and ornament. It is important that architects, who once were deeply concerned about progress and honesty, will consider seriously, facing this commercialized global city, if an honest architectural practice is still possible. or as W.B. Yates wrote so beautifully: “How can you take the dancer from the dance?” : Is it possible to strip architecture from its political? and if architecture is contaminated anyway with politics and ideology - what is the role of the architect, how innocent is his task, and how innocent is he in his task?
2.The movement from “politics” to “urbanism” represents a movement from the Greec concept of “Polis” to the Roman concept of “Urbs”. in practical terms it was a change of regime. It is much more convenient to speak of “Urban” problems rather than of “Political” ones. The Urban regime is what enables the understanding of cities in objective and material terms and their experience in esthetic and artistic values.According to Hannah Arendt , the Greeks thought that people are not born equal by nature. For that purpose they conceived an artificial institution they named POLIS. This institution could assure equality by constructing a common space of liberty that was governed by a certain notion of non-authority, expressed by the word “isonomy”. Isonomy is the very principle of the equal measure. It is the notion that guarantied the equal measure to every citizen and defined the Polis as a common space of liberty that allowed freedom of speech and discourse. It provided the physical body of a city with a political soul, and is maybe at the origin of institutions like community and society or values like solidarity and neighborhood. Those notions of Polis and Isonomy were constanly conquerred by the opposed notions of Agora and Democracy wihich are at the very origin of our present society. The oposition is between the authority of nobody and the governement of everybody.The main device to de-politicize the public space is urbanism. In 1967, Guy Debord wrote, in “La Societe du Spectacle”: “Urbanism is capitalism's seizure of the natural and human environment; developing logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must now remake the totality of space into its own decor”. “URBANISM” is this very objectification of territory, what Debord described as “the abstraction of territory into a territory of abstraction”. This abstraction of territory becomes the abstract space of the merchandise: If there is a Greek regime that is appreciated in modern cities, it is that of the ancient enemy of isonomy, the AGORA, the market place. And this market place was optimized and maximized, decorated by architects.
3. In order to understand the architect’s role in that politically contaminated environment, it is important to understand his operational mode: The most significant implication of modernization in architecture resides not so much in industrialization but rather in the institution of new rules of game: the creation of new circumstances of commission had engendered an irreversible split that occurred within the traditional function of the client. The architect had no longer to work only for one person but becomes a servant of a variety of many different and sometimes antagonistic masters - contractors, investors, users, tenants, customers and sometimes even citizens. In this situation, that becomes more and more complex, the architect has to take side, to identify, to decide who is he working for. Naturally, with the constitution of the profession of architecture as a liberal practice, architects moved constantly from the operational modes of craftsmen, artists and inventors to other professional operational modes, mainly economical, busyness-oriented or corporate, that enabled them generally to find ways and justifications to go to where the money and the job come from. From the other hand, the institution of specialized para-architectural disciplines has widely reduced the traditional position and authority of architects. The architect, who once had exercised the social function of an actual builder, and now sided and back-upped by scientific and economical authorities such as engineers, technical consultants, administrators and contractors, was forced to commit himself to the role of a “master of beauty”, limiting his responsibility to the cultural values inscribed in the architectural appearance. Mastering beauty means mastering the discourse about beauty. In fact, this became the very difference between the architect and his new colleagues. The architect talks, writes, theorizes - the contractor and the engineer don’t. The inner conflicts and dilemmas generated by this new task represents a great deal of the developments in modern architecture. The acceptance or refusal of beauty, the idealization and the theorization of its esthetic guidelines or ethical justifications, lye in the very heart of any modern architectural rhetoric.But beyond these dilemmas, that remained almost exclusively a matter for inner discussions between architects, the preoccupation of modern architects in mastering the discourse of architectural beauty has allowed not only to neutralize the architect’s involvement in other aspects of the built environment but also to assure the collaboration of architectural rhetoric in the general project of urbanization, the project of de-politicizing of the public space, a project that is essentially a political one.
Facing this political ambiguity of the urbanistic project, modern architecture had adopted mainly two approaches. The first one is the approach of Mies Van Der Rohe: it consists on the denial of the political dimension of space, on participating as an active agent of this project but at the same time on developing an ethical discourse that can function on its own. Mies did not want to take a side, he wanted to be professional and therefore objective, impersonal. in his 1924 essay “architecture and the Times” he wrote: “We are concerned today with questions of a general nature. The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.” Since then, those “general questions” have already became generic cities, modernist abstraction has became in so many ways the sign of the modernization itself. Remember Mies’s invention of corporate architecture in the 1933 Reichsbank project of Berlin and the development this paradigm later in his north-American projects. This approach was generally adopted under a cover of mere professionalism, but as Guy Debord has pointed out, de-politicization of the city and disconnecting public space from its political contents is a political act on its own. I think that today it is almost impossible to maintain innocently Mies’s position - to cultivate parrallely two ethical systems while believing that architecture and city can be neutralized from their political demons. The other modernist approach was Le Corbusier’s one, and it consisted on a clear Political identification of modern architecture. The last chapter of his inaugural book “Vers une Architecture” is entitled “Architecture Or Revolution” . In this chapter, where Le Corbusier excites for industry and praises the three eight hours shifts, he positions the morality of architecture, the noble esthetic of the engineer, against the common “moral” of the worker (or as he calls him: “the human beast”), getting proud from reading in the newspaper about the launching of a new car from the factory where he works. The way Le Corbusier juggles with the word “moral”, taking the credit of “morality” for himself while leaving the “moral” to the others is typical to his choice: “architecture or demoralization, demoralization and revolution”. Listen to Le Corbusier’s lessons about how to treat them servants nicely in his brand new Citrohan prototype. Listen to him praising Taylorism in Vers Une Architecture or complaining in his most problematic book Sur les Quatre Routes he wrote in 1940 under the occupation - that population transfers are done without a “plan directeur” . Take a look at that strange illustration taken from that same problematic book, advocating the military vertues of his “cite radieuse” concept. In that sense, and quite surprisingly, Le Corbusier shows more integrity than Mies. Le Corbusier declares himself openly as a political activist. For him, modern architecture is not only a practical antidote to revolution, but a true ideological choice. He has no doubts neither about the political colors of the modernist project nor about which camp to choose and as it may be seen clearly in his projects, especially in the urbanistic studies, the modern architectural order is synonymous with a certain idea of “public order”: the geometrical modernist apparatus of regularity, all-overness and repetition articulates the hierarchies between social classes and social functions in order to enable “the formation of the spirit of every man by the modern event”. These two powerful visions of Mies and Le Corbusier represent two right-wing strategies of dealing with modernity: the indifferent strategy that considers modernity as the “trend of our time toward anonymity” is right-wing de facto , and the engaged strategy that considers it as a time situated “in the other side of the barricade” is right-wing de yura. Facing these two forms of architectural right wing, the left wing theoretical opposition has flourished but somehow, left-wing architectural practice almost always seems pathetic: The Russian constructivist experience never really took up and was cruelly repressed by Stalin, and what is left of his legacy is just the manipulative use of its iconography by post-modern deconstructionist architects; The social-democrat tempered and humanist modernism of the Bauhaus did not survive Hitler. Its legacy of social housing was buried under the massive constructions of the reconstruction years; the post-war critical and radical visions of modernity were either swallowed or swept away by the “system”: British New Brutalism project “to face up to a mass-produced society” became a totalitarian form of high-modernism; at the same time, French strategies of protest like the Situationist movement or architecture principe of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio have been marginalized, neglected or rejected. The nostalgic return to the historical city, which was one of the vertues of the sixty eight events, became an attribute of a certain “petite-bourgeoisie”. In some cases those historicist attitudes were used directly as political actions - one may think of Prince Charles’s action in Great Britain and of Jacques Chirac Parisian policy during the presidency of Mitterand. The post-68 architects have nothing changed and even in its most radical regions, post-68 architecture has executed an acrobatic pirouette from left to right. The most important representative of this move would be of course Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In his 1994 essay “what Ever happened to Urbanism” Koolhaas argues that “Modernism’s alchemic promise - to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition - has been a failure”... “The” city no longer exists” ; Urbanists have became “specialists in phantom pains” in a “world without Urbanism, only architecture”. ”We were making sand castles. Now we are swimming in the sea that swept them away” - sighs Koolhaas and accepts this total loss of control with a certain pleasure: “Since we are not responsible, we have to become irresponsible”, “to dare to be utterly uncritical”. As always, Koolhaas is right. There is something extremely seducing in that “ethical” withdraw from ethics. There is a great deal of realism in this new hedonistic religion of architecture, what Koolhaas calls “gay science - lite urbanism”: after withdrawing from politics and after withdrawing from urbanism, architects can now function as an outsiders’ sect on its own - like those Soviet Architects swimming from Russia to Manhattan in his book “Delirious New York”. In the same way he theorized retroactively the architecture of Manhattan, Koolhaas rehabilitates the architectural expressions of globalization. By accepting joyfully The globalization’s fatalities he joins his voice to the general chorus of economical determinism. The irresponsibility of Koolhaas represents not only a very elegant way to theorize opportunism but also an architectural ideology of deregulation. The real nature of this irresponsibility can be understood in its price: koolhaas’s de-regulation means surrendering to the market by privatizing the very possibility to shape values. It means also again de-politicization. Koolhaas’s declaration that “there is no crisis” means either continuing to pretend that architecture’s existence is outside any public arena or political discourse or practically surrendering to the Agora. It means reducing what is left from the already reduced discursive field of architecture, to a very narrow space of irresponsibility.
4. Is there a way to define that space of irresponsibility in a more responsible way? to de-regulate without surrendering? Or in other words: Is a left-wing architecture possible? If architects are in any way activist of a certain political project, Is it possible to imagine another form of architectural activism? As a first intuition to what I would call an architectural left-wing sensibility, I would say that at the first place, the role of such sensibility is to out the repressed political dimension of space. If right wing interest was always to mask its biased discourse with natural, scientific or economical argumentation, the impulse of such a left wing architecture would be the opposite, to unmask the argumentation, to politicize architecture, to speak.

Tel Aviv's forgotten neighborhood

2009-05-26T02:48:00.011+03:00

Shapira neigborhood in the mid twenties (photographer: Zvi Oron)

"In 'White City, Black City' (Babel, 2005, Hebrew), Rotbard writes that 'cities, like history, are always made by the victors and ultimately always according to the victor's history, and are not equally welcoming to all'.
To a large extent 'Neither in Jaffa Nor in Tel Aviv', which he edited together with Muki Tsur, is an attempt to change the city, to provide entree to the history books to the Shapira neighborhood and to tell a story that no one else had bothered to tell."

(Maya Sela on the book "Neither in Jaffa Nor in Tel Aviv: Stories, Testimonies and Documents From Shapira Neighborhood", Haaretz, May 21, 2009 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1087127.html)

1991: Black Citrohan

2009-05-17T11:20:00.003+03:00

Clonning Mies

2009-05-15T19:34:00.009+03:00

1998: entry for GG idea competition (Sharon Rotbard and Dudi Elazar) for the Mies Van Der Rohe Foundation and a visitors' center near the Barcelona Pavilion

In 1929, on the occasion of the international fair of Barcelona, Mies Van Der Rohe built his famous German pavilion. The pavilion was placed like a Cerberus at the gate of the site of the Exposition that was a sort of an amalgam of neo-Spanish-Rococo and Spanish regional replicas. The pavilion was demolished 9 months after its construction. After that, it began a new life in a form of a set of black & white photographic reproductions. This new black and white pavilion made a massive entry into the catalogues and the anthologies and was soon canonized (rightly) as one of the century’s most significant masterpieces.

In 1986 this modern phantom resurrected suddenly in a form of a new Barcelona pavilion which was reconstructed by Sola-Morales, Cirici and Ramos. It was an accurate reconstruction, which followed very methodic studies made by the architects themselves. This new Barcelona pavilion raises a whole new series of questions about architecture, photography and modernity, but also about originality and authorship. Behind the need for that accuracy and behind the need for the very physical presence of the building in its exact original place, stood a quest for historical truthfulness, a hunger for originality and uniqueness.

But architecture does not exist only on a sensual level. Architecture exists in cultural and political spaces. What is the status of this new physical experience of the pavilion comparing to its strange trajectory and to its process of mythologization and canonization? If the physical experience is the issue, originality is the issue too. Therefore, It has to answer first to a simple question: what is it?
The answer is that it is a lot of things: It is the Barcelona pavilion and it is not the Barcelona pavilion. It is an original, a clone, a copy, a replica and a reproduction, at the same time.
One strategy would be to say, "there is no crisis". But we thought that since Mies was so much concerned about truth, more than about beauty - truth should be told. But the problem is to know what is the truth. Which one of the pavilions is the "truthful" one: the original that was probably in colors? Its B/W reproductions from the anthologies? the new 3d color reproduction from 86? Or is it just Mies’s plans, the one timely partition?

Therefore, In order to tell the truth about the new pavilion that became obviously a new hot spot in the architectural tourism circuit, we felt that its false "uniqueness" should be questioned.

2 more Barcelona pavilions will be built beside the new Barcelona Pavilion, 2 more 3d reproductions, but this time - in Black and white.
-The first reproduction is a simple black and white one. It would be made in black, gray and white materials. In the same thoroughness Sola-Morales and his friends have found the closest to "real" materials, it is likely to find in Spain their equivalents in Blacks and whites.
-The second reproduction would re-use the original photos of materials Mies himself used when he designed the pavilion. These photos can be silk-screened on a curtain wall system reproducing Mies's plan. The idea theorizes Mies's own strategies about architectural reproduction: The photographic conversion of Albert Kahn's Hangar and the 1:1 model or reproduction of the Kroller house.

La Littérature contre l'architecture: l'architecture et Michel Houellebecq

2009-05-06T11:50:00.010+03:00

In 1994, while having a short visit in Paris, I went to one of my favorite book stores, La Librairie du Nord Est.
The shop owner (Bruno, if I am not mistaken) gave me a small book and said that he got it that morning and it might be interesting. I was quite attracted by the book's puzzling title "Extension du domaine de la lutte" (extension of the combat's domain), by the graphics that reminded me the office building that I was designing in Tel Aviv, and of course, by the unusual name of the author: Houellebecq. "It pronounces WELBEK", said Bruno.
In 1999, I invited Michel Houellebecq to a conference that I organized in the School of Architecture at the Tel Aviv University. Although he missed the dinner party (he was held all night by the airport police for smoking in the airplane), he got to the campus the next morning and gave a lecture. Through the few days of his visit, he was revealed as a most humble, gentle and nice person. We published all his books in Hebrew, and once in a while, I try to translate some of his poetry.
Here is a short essay that I wrote in French for "Le monde de Michel Houellebecq" - a seminar at the Amsterdam university held in October 2007.

0.
Il se trouve que je suis architecte, enseignant et critique d'architecture, mais je suis aussi entre autre, l'éditeur Hébraïques de Michel Houellebecq. Ceci dit, il n'est pas du tout facile d'être à la fois éditeur de Michel Houellebecq et architecte, et je pense que je suis là pour essayer de vous expliquer pourquoi.

1. l'euphémisme architectural
L'architecture, il fallait y croire. Pour faire de l'architecture, c'est-à-dire pouvoir voire le monde en tant qu'architecture et en plus le projeter en tant qu'architecture, on est presque obligé de voir la vie en rose. En un sens, on peut dire qu'en dehors de ses rôles traditionnels d'embellir la réalité ou parfois de servir comme refuge du la réalité, l'architecture est une sorte d'euphémisme du réel. Parfois, on peut embellir le réel rien que par son couronnement en tant qu'«architecture», c'est-à-dire par l'addition d'un discours ou une phraséologie architecturale. En tant que jeune architecte, on est souvent éduqué selon des idées plutôt idéalisantes de l'architecture. «L'architecture est une musique pétrifiée» (Goethe); ou «L’architecture est le jeu magnifique des volumes assemblés sous la lumière» (Le Corbusier)…Cette idéalisation romantique a profondément marqué toute cette tradition discursive qu'on appelle aujourd'hui «architecture moderne» (architecture post-moderne inclus), mais la contraint de se replier sur elle-même. Tout le monde connait les fameux slogans qui détaillaient les vertus de la bonne architecture moderne et définissait des règles très précises selon une éthique autonome, noble et essentialiste tel que «Form follows function» (Louis Sullivan), «Less is more» (Mies Van Der Rohe), «Le plan procède du dedans au dehors» (encore, Le Corbusier); ou «La beauté est la radiation de la vérité» (Mies Van Der Rohe citant St. Augustin à la Reine d'Angleterre). Le problème était qu'en générale, l'homme n'avait plus rien à faire dans cet univers idéal: «L'architecture est la volonté d'une époque traduit dans l'espace» a dit Mies, «nous sommes concerné par des problèmes de nature générale, l'individu a perdu de signifiance. Son destin ne nous intéresse plus». Forcement, en architecture, et surtout dans les conditions de la modernité, la question de l'humain a du laisser la place au technique, au social, au publique: «L'architecture est l'expression de l'être même des sociétés, de la même façon que la physionomie humaine est l'expression de l'être des individus», a écrit Bataille. Et malheureusement, puisque ce n'est que «celui qui ordonne et prohibe avec autorité, qui s'exprime dans les compositions architecturales», l'individu «n'a pas d'autre chance que la monstruosité bestiale (…) pour échapper à la chiourme architecturale».De là, si on est vraiment honnête, on n'est pas vraiment loin de constater que ce n'est pas que l'architecture moderne est indifférente à l'humain, c'est qu'en fait, elle est souvent, et de plus en plus, opposé et contraire à l'humain. Ce n'est donc pas un hasard que dans «La Source Vive» le roman paradigmatique de Ayn Rand, il s'avère qu'en dehors de tous les débats entreprit dans le livre, sur l'architecture moderne et son integrity, les deux principales protagonistes, les architectes Roarck et Keating, sont des criminels: l'un commet un viol, l'autre un meurtre. Rares sont les architectes qui l'ont admit. On peut citer surtout des architectes de tendance brutaliste, qui par définition sont sensé de dire la vérité: Alison et Peter Smithson qui demandait d'extraire «une poésie brute des forces confus qui sont en action»; ou de manière encore plus claire Claude Parent et Paul Virilio, qui ont plaidé dans les années soixante pour une «architecture qui résiste à l'homme, qui lui fait obstacle …». La critique des années soixante, Foucault, Lefebvre et notamment la théorie du spectacle de Guy Debord, a largement développé cette idée d'une architecture qui est contraire à l'homme, qui par son rôle opérationnel et par son caractère spectaculaire, est «la technique même de la séparation». Aujourd'hui, face aux challenges morales de la pratique, en Israël comme ailleurs, si on veut être architecte et intègre, on est obligé soit de se dire, comme l'a fait Rem Koolhaas avec une extrême élégance et honnêteté «Si nous ne pouvons pas être responsables, soyons irresponsable», soit de devenir responsable et de refuser l'architecture, être responsable mais pas coupable.

2. Le crie du béton
Au départ, Houellebecq part d'une sensibilité très semblable à celle de la génération des architectes brutalistes. L'architecture n'est pas faite pour les humains mais par les humains, et en ce sens, elle est avant tout une trace de l'humain. Comme il l'a noté en avant propos du premier texte de RESTER VIVANT, «Le béton marque la violence avec laquelle il a été frappé comme mur. Le béton crie…». Cet amour pour la violence du béton, pour ce cri, a été un des sujets majeurs de l'architecture moderne depuis les années cinquante. Ce qui a été toujours très paradoxal dans cette recherche (et je le sais bien car j'ai construit un bâtiment tout en béton), c'est son quête de vérité: montrer les matériaux «as is». Le béton dite «brute» est censé d'être une trace honnête, un enregistrement de tout un processus qui s'étend dans le temps, et que par sa technologie est à tout moment susceptible à des irrégularités et des pépins. Deux camions de béton sortent en même temps de l'usine. Si l'un d'entre eux va griller un feu rouge, en arrivant au chantier leurs couleurs seront différentes. Et ce n'est qu'un exemple. Toute la grammaire et tout l'art de l'architecture du béton est composée des petits astuces pour contrer ce genre de problèmes. Et ceci pour une simple raison - les architectes qui travaillaient sur le béton, ont été toujours intéressés par la trace de la vérité plutôt que par la vérité elle-même. Même dans leurs positions le plus critiques et radicales, en voulant être «responsables mais pas coupables», les architectes sont piégés toujours dans la boucle de l'euphémisme architectural, ils y croient toujours, en l'architecture. Houellebecq, de sa part; qui n'est pas architecte, s'engage, comme Perec dans son temps, dans le rôle d'«utilisateur d'espace», pour se demander à travers la trace architecturale, la question qui l'intéresse: «et l'homme, que dirons-nous de l'homme?»

3. Zoologue de l'humain
Que dirons-nous alors de l'homme? De sa position de «zoologue de l'humain», Houellebecq dit toujours des choses très simples. Les questions qu'on doit se poser sur l'architecture sont donc très simples aussi: Qu'est ce que c'est? A quoi ça sert? Qui l'a fait? Pourquoi c'est fait comme ça? Combien ça coute? Ce même genre de questions doit se poser aussi sur l'apparence architecturale, qui après tout, comme l'a remarqué jadis Adolf Loos, son rôle n'est pas très différente de celle de l'apparence humaine. Ca ne risque pas de dire qu'un des grands sujets de Houellebecq c'est justement cette expérience d'être mal dans sa peau, comme il a écrit dans cette fin envoutante de EXTENSION DU DOMAINE DE LA LUTTE: «Je ressens ma peau comme une frontière, et le monde extérieur comme un écrasement. L'impression de séparation est totale; je suis désormais prisonnier en moi-même. Elle n'aura pas lieu, la fusion sublime; le but de la vie est manqué. Il est deux heures de l'après-midi». Cette expérience d'être mal dans sa peau s'étend vers cet écrasement du monde extérieur vers les peaux architecturales: et en générale, on n'y va pas mieux.

4. Les rayonnages de l'hypermarché social Dans «Approches du désarroi», un texte paradigmatique dans l'œuvre de Houellebecq et un des textes les plus aigue écrites sur l'architecture contemporaine, Houellebecq analyse le rapport entre mouvement, information et architecture. Dans ce texte il esquisse les contours de sa propre géographie et nous présente une vision de l'architecture qui est dépouillé de toute phraséologie, de toute euphémisme - exactement comme il y écrit un peu plus loin dans le texte, et peut être pour la première fois, sur les critères d'échanges sexuels qui demeuraient long temps «tributaires d'un système de description lyrique, impressionniste et peu fiable». Si on juge donc l'architecture sans les béquilles de ce système de description, rien que sur le mode opératoire, c'est-à-dire qu'on ne se demande pas comment ça se voit, l'architecture, mais comment ça marche et qu'est que ça fait, on constate que l'architecture contemporaine n'est qu'un «vecteur d'accélération des déplacements» et que son programme, comme le démontrera Houellebecq dans les années à venir, est très simple: «construire les rayonnages de l'hypermarché social».Depuis ses débuts poétiques, en passant par ses romans et essais, Houellebecq reproduit d'une manière élaboré la géographie artificielle de ces rayonnages de l'hypermarché social. Cette géographie, qui est à la fois paradisiaque et infernale, hyper-réelle et complètement hallucinée, est peuplé par des endroits hétérotopiques et utopiques, tels que pensionnats, clubs de vacances, hôpitaux psychiatriques, et par des objets d'architecture contemporaine tel que tours de bureaux, hôtels, hypermarchés, immeubles d'appartement. Dans un poème dans LE SENS DU COMBAT, cette géographie, est décrite comme une seule machine qui est composée par des components différents; ça commence à tourner depuis «le métro et le périf», qui se banchent à la tour GAN, « là que se décide ma vie», dans laquelle les cadres montent dans des ascenseurs de nickel et les secrétaires remettent du rimmel; et puis ça avances «sous les maisons, au fond des rues» vers des objectifs inconnues.

5. déplacement
Les déplacements des protagonistes dans le rayonnage social sont souvent basés sur la figure de la dérive, dont sa fameuse définition de Guy Debord de «passage hâtif à travers des ambiances variées» résonne bien avec la définition de Houellebecq de l'architecture contemporaine comme «vecteur d'accélération des déplacements». L'idée du déplacement est cruciale, car chez Houellebecq on n'arrête jamais de se déplacer, de décamper, de dépayser, souvent en perdant son but, à l'image de cette description complètement banale mais complètement originale de Paris, à travers les yeux du narrateur de EXTENSION DU DOMAINE DE LA LUTTE, qui revient dimanche matin dans un quartier pour chercher en vain sa voiture. Ce mécanisme de déplacement a tendance à s'accélérer, à se reproduire et à devenir de plus en plus excessif, d'aller encore plus loin et de transformer le territoire-même. Les lieux n'ont plus lieux - les centres de vacances et de prostitution en Thaïlande, les villes des retraités Allemands en Espagne ou en générale tout ce court circuit globale causé par le mécanisme mondial de déplacement entre le nord et le sud. Sa culmination se définit par le «double bind paradoxe» décrit dans PLATEFORME, ou le bagpacker occidental est forcé de chercher toujours des endroits nouveaux, qui ne sont pas «contaminé» par ses semblables. L'architecture Houellebecquienne est donc composée surtout par des lieux de et des appareils de déplacement – métro, train et ascenseurs au début, et plus tard bien sur, les aéroports, les cars de touristes ou les Mercedes. Les lieux sont des espaces temporaires conjoncturels par définition, l'entreprise ou le night club dans EXTENSION DU DOMAINE DE LA LUTTE, les camps, dans LES PARTICULES ELEMENTAIRES, le club hôtels dans PLATEFORME ou les espaces de la secte elohimite dans UNE POSSIBILITE D' UNE ILE. L'état d'exile est permanent et intérieur. Chez Houellebecq, une maison ce n'est pas une chose qu'on habite; c'est une chose qu'on vend, comme le fait le protagoniste de PLATEFORME au tout début du roman, pour pouvoir voyager, pour pouvoir lancer le jeu de déplacement et surtout pour pouvoir jamais retourner.L'état d'exile s'applique aussi sur le corps humain, avec sa peau frontière sous l'écrasement du monde extérieur. La séparation est totale même entre les différents organes, comme il est démontré avec ce refuge véritablement «partiel» que le narrateur découvre dans CLEOPATRE 2000, une sorte de pièce d'architecture qui est à la fois fantastique et minimaliste: «une petite cabine hermétiquement close, dont les parois sont percées de trous ronds, à quatre vingt centimètres du sol». (Les amateurs de peinture se souviendront d'une belle série de tableaux de Jasper Johns qui s'appelle «Dutch Wives», portant sur le mythe d'une planche trouée que les marins Hollandais emmenaient avec eux en bateaux).

6. La littérature contre l'architecture
Revenons à «Approches du désarroi». Vers la fin de cet essai, Houellebecq avance l'idée de la littérature comme le «véritable et seul art conceptuel», en l'opposant à la dérision générale de l'architecture et de l'art contemporains. «Un livre ne peut être apprécié que lentement», il dit. Contrairement à l'état actuel des choses, ou, à l'image de l'architecture qui ne fait qu'accélérer le mouvement et le déplacement, il n'y a pas de lecture sans arrêt, sans retour à l'arrière; face à un livre le lecteur est obligé d'avoir une existence individuelle et stable, il ne peut plus être un simple consommateur mais devient un en quelque manière un sujet. La littérature en ce sens est cette «Poésie du mouvement arrêté» dont il parle en se souvenant d'une expérience pendant l'hiver 1986, ou il a été cloué dans une gare d'Avignon pendant la grève SNCF, il rapporte ce moment presque magique: «Il y a eu un instant d'arrêt, d'hésitation, d'incertitude métaphysique». La possibilité d'arrêter l'accélération donne à la littérature une force inattendu face à l'architecture dans laquelle elle habite:«La littérature s'arrange de tout, fouille parmis les ordures, leche les plais du malheur. Une poésie paradoxale, de l'angoisse et de l'oppression a pu naitre au milieu des hypermarchés et des immeubles de bureaux». Et je pense que c'est là le grand humanisme du projet de Houellebecq, c'est cette proposition qu'il offre au lecteur de participer dans ce moment d'arrêt: «Chaque individu est cependant en mesure de produire lui-même une sorte de révolution froide, en se plaçant pour un instant en dehors du flux informatif-publicitaire… il suffit LITTERALEMENT, de s'immobiliser pendant quelques secondes».

NEW: Neither In Jaffa Nor In Tel Aviv: Stories, Testimonies and Documents From Shapira Neighborhood

2009-04-21T20:33:00.005+03:00

Muki Tsur, Sharon Rotbard (editors)

Neither In Jaffa Nor In Tel Aviv: Stories, Testimonies and Documents From Shapira Neighborhood

Bina, Babel 2009

http://readingmachine.co.il/home/books/1240134698

2004: Adolf Loos / INS LEER GESPROCHEN, TROTZDEM

2009-03-31T17:38:00.008+03:00

Don't think about the roof, think about the rain and the snow."
How to pour salt into your soup? should we cut our hair? which color for the danser's pantyhose? how to dwell?

Spoken into the void, Despite everything.
Almost all Loos' articles translated by Arieh Uriel and edited by Yahudah Safran, who added a beautiful, moving post-face.

2001: Guy Debord / La Société du Spectacle

2009-03-26T01:45:00.006+02:00

Translated by Dafna Raz, designed by Michael Gordon.

Here are some fragments from the English online translation by Ken Knabb at the Bureau of Public Secrets.

4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images

21
As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

34
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.

168
Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized. The economic organization of travel to different places already guarantees their equivalence. The modernization that has eliminated the time involved in travel has simultaneously eliminated any real space from it.

169
The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved its own special technique for molding its own territory, which constitutes the material underpinning for all the facets of this project. Urbanism — “city planning” — is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor.

171
While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various forms of separation, urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground for their deployment. It is the very technology of separation.

172
Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most effective field of operation. The efforts of all the established powers since the French Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally culminated in the suppression of the street itself. Describing what he terms “a one-way system,” Lewis Mumford points out that “with the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” (The City in History). But the general trend toward isolation, which is the underlying essence of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consumption. This reintegration into the system means bringing isolated individuals together as isolated individuals. Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts and housing developments are specifically designed to foster this type of pseudocommunity. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the ruling images — images that derive their full power precisely from that isolation.

174
The self-destruction of the urban environment is already well under way. The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls “a formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,” is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile — the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance — has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever-wider dispersal. Within this process various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly crystallize around “distribution factories” — giant shopping centers built in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by acres of parking lots. These temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal momentum, which casts them aside as soon as they have engendered enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary centers in their turn. But the technical organization of consumption is only the most visible aspect of the general process of decomposition that has brought the city to the point of consuming itself.

Double Class Villa on A Weekly Dose of Architecture

2009-03-23T17:30:00.004+02:00

http://www.archidose.org/Mar09/16/dose.html

1998: Roland Barthes / Mythologies

2009-03-23T17:18:00.006+02:00

The world of "catch", the psychoanalysis of meat, the profound world of detergents and washing powders, the Tour de France, the Romans in the cinema, the photos of Paris-Match, the new Citroen DS.
The myth today, quoi.

The cover by Yael Bar Dayan is one of my favorites. It is a photo by René Zuber. The legend is unique: "French people that live in Syria often buy themselves Salukis, those wonderful gentle Arabic greyhounds".

1998: Georges Perec / Espèces d’Espaces

2009-03-17T11:27:00.010+02:00

End of October 1985, on my first day at the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, I was asked to pass an examination in French.
One of the school's professors stood in front of the huge audience of foreign students that filled the auditorium. He held a slim book, read a short paragraph from it and asked us to answer some questions.
To my surprise, the text was quite simple, the language was clear and the writing was straight forward.

It was composed by a series of questions:

What does it mean, to live in a room? Is it to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean? As from when does somewhere become truly yours? Is it when you put three pairs of socks to soak in a pink plastic bowl? Is it when you've heated up the spaghetti over a camping-gas? Is it when you've used up all the hangers in the cupboard? Is it when you've drawing-pinned to the wall an old postcard showing Carpaccio's "Dream of St Ursula? Is it when you've experienced there the throes of anticipation, or the exaltation of passion, or the torments of a toothache? Is it when you've hung suitable curtains up on the windows, and put up the wallpaper, and sanded the parquet flooring?[1]

I fell in love immediately.
At the time, I did not know, of course, how important this first encounter with Georges Perec would be for me. Later I discovered Paul Virilio, who commissioned this book from Perec. He told me that before his death in 1982, Perec used to come regularly to the Ecole Spéciale in order to speak with the students about their projects.
In the following years in Paris I read almost all his work. When returning to Israel, the publication of Perec's work in Hebrew became one of our main goals. The first book that we published was Les Choses (1996), and two years later came Espèces d’Espaces. Since then, we published three more books of Perec: Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour?, Un home qui dort and La vie mode d'emploi.

The Hebrew translation of Espèces d’Espaces was done by Dan Daor and Evelyne Amar. The cover was designed by Yael Bar-Dayan. The image on the cover shows Perec in Café de la Mairie in Place St. Sulpice, writing one of his Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien. The photo was taken by his friend Pierre Getzler.

[1] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, (translated by John Sturrock), Penguin Books (Twentieth Century Classics), 1998

1998: Le Corbusier / Vers Une Architecture

2009-03-17T01:52:00.008+02:00

Le Corbusier's passionate manifesto (Translation: Ido Basoq) was the first title published in the Babel (architectures) series. Behind its rational facade, drawn with tracés régulateurs, and underneath its Cartesian appearance, this book is an outburst of many contradictory impulses.
The novelty of Le Corbusier does not reside in inventions such as the Dom-Ino (the Americans had already thought about it), in principals like the rejection of ornaments (Loos had already rejected them), or in noticing silos in the USA (Gropius had already noticed them), but in conceiving a new type and role for the architect, that of the rhetorician of modernity. In that sense, his Machine à Habiter, is not a house that is a machine, but a house that says it is a machine.

Viktor Ramos: The Continuous Enclave - Strategies in Bypass Urbanism

2009-03-08T22:53:00.008+02:00

BLDG Blog presents here a final project by Viktor Ramos, an architecture student in Rice University.
Beside the fact that it is one of the brightest and funniest final projects I have ever seen, it is one of the most thought provoking and original contribution for the understanding of the current situation in the region since long time.
The project aims to mirror Israel's logic and strategy of planning the West Bank as a network of Jewish enclaves interconnected by heavy transportation infrastructure (Jewish roads, viaducts, bypass roads and tunnel roads). Ramos sets a parallel network of Palestinian enclaves connected by huge infrastructure devices.
The beauty of it is that despite the Sci-Fi impression of the project, basically, what Ramos suggests is in fact quite realistic, it is not very different than what is currently done anyway. As shown by Eyal Weizman in his book Hollow Land, these same strategies of bypass spatial urbanism are already employed since long time ago everywhere in the West Bank, with the same violence and impact on the environment. The only thing that makes Ramos' project unrealistic is not its scale or impact but the mere fact that the planning situation in the West Bank is unilateral and under the rule of the israeli military regime. In that sense, this proposition of a Palestinian unilateral "Bypass Urbanism" is a contre projet par excellence that reflects the true reality in the ground. I hope it might give Israeli planners involved in construction in the occupied territories some idea about the reality that they create.

Double Class Villa on Archdaily

2009-03-08T15:55:00.004+02:00

http://www.archdaily.com/15292/ordos-100-24-babel-architecture/

Excuses From Here To China

2009-02-22T11:35:00.010+02:00

"Sharon Rotbard, a key figure in the critical architectural discourse in Israel, is building a 1000sqm villa in the framework of a project for China's nouveau riches. What about the problem of human rights in China, and what about China's aggressive capitalism? Rotbard will convince you that he builds in the name of principle of equality and justice. An interview and a manifesto."
(Esther Zandberg, "Excuses From Here To China", Haaretz, February 18th, 2009)

Last Wednesday, the ORDOS 100 Double Class Villa got to the front pages of the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz as the main feature of the newspaper's cultural section.
Esther Zandberg, the newspaper's senior architecture columnist, argues that the project makes use of an "elaborated web of excuses" in order to "cross the lines from the fierce criticism of political injustice in architecture Rotbard is identified with, to designing a 1000sqm villa for a rich developer in China". Zandberg was convinced that the "web of stories woven by Rotbard is brilliant, admirably constructed and sophisticated, much more than the average in the profession", but sais that "the enthusiastic response of leading architects to work in China and in other countries known for not respecting human rights (Sometimes Israel is included in this list too) – countries in which it is possible to realize professional fantasies – is accompanied by a fascinating apologetic acrobatics."

My argument in the interview was that "there is no point of speaking of the human rights questions in China as an architect, and that could be a matter of a civilian activism. If there is a political architectural problem with the Ordos 100 villa, it lies in its inherent class system, which could be found in any 1000sqm villa on earth (including in Israel, of course)… In the light of the official socialist ideology of the people's republic of China, the accelerating invasion of capitalist values and the renewal of class struggle in China, we thought that it would be a proper opportunity to criticize it architecturally... The question is: to build or not to build?"

(Full Hebrew article and interview)

Recycling TVCC

2009-02-15T16:37:00.024+02:00

Impressive, Bert de Muynck's photos of the TVCC building after the fire at movingcities.org and archidose.blogspot.com.
The "Cake-Tin Architecture" was one of my favorite "universal modernization patents" in the book CONTENT.
I really liked that building, not so much for its "accommodation of residuals of a dominant program", but for its "nouvelle Cuisine Mold", which was very beautiful.

The videos of the burning tower show that all the building caught fire almost everywhere at once. It seems to me that even if there was a problem with the smoke detectors or the sprinkles, something in the whole conception of voids and atriums should be reviewed. Buildings should be prepared for accidents – I mean profoundly, deeply. Many years ago Koolhaas described Manhattan as "an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen". This daring, provocative optimism has certainly a great part of OMA's charm, but it must not bring to complacence.

As seen in Bert's photos, this building is at his best when empty. I really hope that the owners will not decide to tear it down or to rebuilt it, but in case they do, I hope they will do this:

Double Class Villa, Ordos 100

2009-02-01T11:51:00.042+02:00

(More images from the Double Class Villa, and a short essay, see here)

Project description

The villa's program was divided into two distinct volumes: a big villa for the owner and a small one for the worker.
In order to preserve the notion of the villas as distinct, clear objects dominating their "property", and in order to reduce the neighborhood's density, all of the common and space-consuming elements of the program are located bellow the ground level. All in all, the foot print ratio of the built areas above the ground level is 15% (instead of 35%). Both villas were planned on compact squares, recommended by the master plan.

The Villa is composed by 3 elements:
- 2 brick skin cubes above the ground level: private spaces for the owner and the worker
- a concrete flat surface (camouflage carpet) at the ground level
- an underground level: common spaces and courtyards

2 brick skin cubes above the ground level
The private spaces of the villa's owner and the villa's worker are located in two distinct cubes juxtaposed side by side. The choice of this form stems from the logic of the master plan that designated the footprints of the villas as generic squares.
Each cube materializes by its size its relative portion in the program. As the planners were encouraged by the client to use brick as a main construction material, the two cubes are covered with brick skin.
Since in China gray brick is twice more expensive than the red brick, the big cube of the villa's owner is covered by a gray brick skin and the small cube of the villa's worker is covered by a red brick skin.
The two cubes have separate and private access from the main underground entrance floor and from the ground floor camouflage carpet.
The Big Gray Cube houses the owner's 5 bedrooms. It is of 1058 cm length and 3 levels – 2 bedrooms on the ground level (1st level in China), 2 bedrooms on 2nd level, one master bedroom on the 3rd level.
The Small Red Cube houses the worker's dwelling. It is of 798 cm length and 2 levels, the living room, the dinning room and kitchen on the 1st level (in China there is no ground level); the bedroom and its services and bathroom on the 2nd level. The small cube is covered by a red brick skin.
In both cubes, all the rooms (floors, walls and ceiling) are covered with brickwork in the corresponding colors. All the attached areas – closets and bathrooms are white.

Camouflage Carpet at ground level
Most of the plot is covered by a generic carpet that reproduces a "Woodland" standard camouflage pattern. The landscaped camouflage pattern represents in its turn a portion of a generic landscape, and hides all the common and luxurious parts of the villa from curious gazes either from the street or from Google Earth.
The camouflage pattern of the landscaping will be formed by hollow

paving – like upside down hollow concrete 2 holes (40/20/20) blocks. According to the design pattern, the hollow parts will be filled with different plants or fillings (chosen according the seasons or taste).
The carpet is perforated by square openings in 3 measurements.

Underground level
Protected from sandstorms and wind, the underground level houses the entrance and the reception areas, 3 inner gardens and patios, and common and leisure facilities in one open space flanked by the different services attached to them.

Credits

Architects: Babel Architectures (Sharon Rotbard, Dan Hasson, Yuval Yasky)

Location: New Ordos, Inner Mongolia, People's republic of China

Architect in Charge: Sharon Rotbard

Project team: Sharon Rotbard, Dan Hasson, Yuval Yasky

Collaborators: Shira Gleitman, Jessy Feng, Igor Shevchenko, Amit Mandelkern, Omer Barr

Structural engineer: Tzuki Rokah, Rokah-Ashkenazi

Photos; Roee Boshi

Design year: 2008

Construction year: 2009

Curator: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China

Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, Inner Mongolia, China

saturday evening, before the demonstration

2009-01-21T23:50:00.003+02:00

Excerpts from the English translation of "White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa"

2009-01-21T09:08:00.023+02:00

(English translation: Sharon Rotbard and Orit Gat)

White City, Black City: The cover of the Hebrew edition, Babel, Tel Aviv 2005

Sometimes, in order to change a city one has to change the story of the city.
In Tel Aviv, the only city in the world that was named after a book, the story of the city since long time is called “White City”.
Despite some inaccuracies, the story of the White City with its Bauhaus buildings emerging from the dunes has been largely adopted by the Israeli public and gained international recognition that its culmination was the inscription of Tel Aviv in the World Heritage Sites list of UNESCO.
White City, Black City shows how the story of the White City has deviated from the debate on modern architecture and Israeli architecture; how it served as a fundamental element not only in the building of the city but also in the building of national identity, culture and rhetoric; and how it became a part of the “general”, political history of Tel Aviv, Israel and the Middle East.
White City, Black City tries to sketch a new story, in which Tel Aviv is no longer emerging by its own from the dunes, as drawn by the national painter Nahum Gutmann, and is no longer built “from sea foam and clouds” as written by the national poet Naomi Shemer, but is born in Jaffa and shaped according to its relation to Jaffa.
This story is not only about architecture, building and writing, but also and maybe mainly, about war, destruction, erasure and the erasure of the erasure.
One might argue if in this story, that its end is allegedly known in advance, there are good guys and bad guys, but there is no doubt that it has victors and losers; and if the victor's story is called “White City”, the story of the losers might be titled “Black City”.
(English translation: Sharon Rotbard and Orit Gat)

Part I - White City

"They told me that the city is white. Do you see white? I don't see any white."
French architect Jean Nouvel standing on a Tel Aviv rooftop, looking at Tel Aviv for the first time in his life. November 1995

"If you will, this shall not be a legend."
Theodor Herzl, Altneuland, 1902

July 2003, UNESCO's World Heritage commission recommended inscribing the “White City” of Tel Aviv in the World Heritage Sites list of the organization. “The White City of Tel Aviv - argued the official text[1] supporting the inscription declaration – "is a synthesis of outstanding significance of the various trends of the Modern Movement in architecture and town planning in the early part of the 20th century. Such influences were adapted to the cultural and climatic conditions of the place, as well as being integrated with local traditions.”
Almost a year later, in spring 2004, the UNESCO declaration was celebrated in Tel Aviv by a series of events, exhibitions, ceremonies and conferences. This was a culmination of a two decades’ long historiographic campaign. The implications of this historiography go far beyond the architectural history of the Modern Movement or its (dis)integration with local traditions. They have much to do with the political history of the Middle East and that of the State of Israel. This history of Tel Aviv, presented for a moment as an architectural history, is part of a process in which the physical building of Tel Aviv and its political and cultural construction are interwoven; thus it has an important role in the construction of the case, the alibi and the apologetics of the Jewish settlement in the country. In that sense, the architectural history of Tel Aviv not only reveals some of the true political colors of the modernist architecture and the Israeli architecture, but it demonstrates how history can change geography.

"The Tel Avivians have good reasons to look up - now the whole world knows why!": An add of Tel Aviv municipality after UNESCO declaration, 2004

Book of Paper, Book of Stone

A city is built in the same manner as history – always by the victors, always for the victors, and always according to the victors’ history.
As with history, a city does not greet everyone equally, and certainly does not satisfy everyone’s desires equally. To change a city and its stories and to write history takes a great deal of power, and power is never distributed equally. There is a kind of war that takes place in the physical space of a city, and within its cultural space. Those who control the physical space often control the cultural space, and they are never those who have lost the battle over history.
Nevertheless, those who control the cultural space have many ways of influencing the physical one. Those who have the power to shape the physical space to suit their needs, can shape it to suit their values and stories; and those who are able to obtain for their values and stories a hegemonic stature, can reshape the city in accordance with their proper values and stories. We may formulate this state of things in the following paradoxical rule: a city is always a realization of the stories that it tells about itself.
One of the most common ways to realize the stories that a city tells about itself is conservation. A reverse way is demolition. Hence, whatever is done or not done in the physical body of a city is also a kind of historiographic deed. The decision to demolish an old building, to build a new one, or to conserve an existing one, defines what is doomed to be forgotten, what is spared and what is worthy of remembering. Therefore, there is a direct and necessary relation between the history of the city and its geography. The geography of a city conserves what history tells it to remember and erases what it tells it to forget. Sometimes a city chooses to highlight certain parts of its story that were found worthy of a particular mark – to erect a monument, to set a commemorating plaque, to outline a walking axis, to conserve or even to reconstruct a building.
The process of the physical building of a city is interwoven with the process of its cultural construction. The control over the process of cultural construction of the space may even be more effective and profound than any other political governance or program, because hegemony, in opposing to all the other forms of governance, is ubiquitous but also hidden. It is hidden behind the common sense of the rulers and the subjects, suggested by the obvious, defined by the unthinkable, and told through details of numerous stories. Finally, it composes what we tend to designate as "normality.”
And like that “Peepers’ Beach” in Tel Aviv, named so after the film[2] shot there, at times a city can change only by being looked at differently, only because its story is told differently. Victor Hugo once wrote, “The book will kill the edifice.”[3] Therefore, victors or vanquished, whoever wants to change a city must first change the city's story.

Writers and Builders

Cover of the first 1902 edition of Theodor Herzl's visionary novel "Altneuland"

Tel Aviv may be the only city in the world named after a book. The revival of the Hebrew language and the building of the land is the essence of Zionism, and this might be the very particularity of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is the living proof that books can erect buildings and establish cities. In that sense, it is a full size realization of the oxymoron[4] Altneuland and its first Hebrew translation by Nahum Sokolov titled "Tel Aviv."[5] Tel Aviv was at first a book and only later, a city.[6]
To understand how this happened, it would be worth while to start with the victors' story, the "White City,” the urban legend Tel Aviv tells of itself. Although sometimes it is told slightly differently (usually it is preceded by a short preface that includes two previous episodes – Neve Tzedek, the first Hebrew neighborhood in Jaffa, and Ahuzat Bait, which was the first Hebrew neighborhood built separately from Jaffa, that later became Tel Aviv), and despite the fact that it is full of inaccuracies, this is the story, more or less, that each inhabitant of Tel Aviv is supposed to know:
[…] In the 1920s, in a small town named Dessau, in the Weimar social-democratic republic, there was a school called the “Bauhaus.” An avant-garde, international atmosphere was prevalent in this school. Among its students there were many German Jews and also sons of Jewish pioneers from Palestine. The Bauhaus teachers and students believed that it was possible to shape a better and more just world. In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany, and closed the Bauhaus. The school’s teachers and students dispersed in all directions. The Jews among them fled to “Little Tel Aviv,” “a small city with not many people,”[7] and “eclectic” architecture, where they revived the Bauhaus style and built the White City[…]

The White City exhibition

Michael Levin, White City: International Style Architecture in Israel. Cover of the exhibition's catalogue, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1984

The theme of the White City became a reputable architectural theory and received a "scientific,” historical and architectural stamp in the summer of 1984, with the exhibition "White City" curated by the architectural historian Michael Levin at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.[8] In the context of Israeli culture, it was a revelation. The exhibition succeeded to draw attention to a coherent ensemble of high-quality modern architecture and to a number of excellent architects who were active in the thirties – Erich Mendelsohn, Richard Kaufman, Dov Carmi, Karl Rubin, Zeev Rechter, Aryeh Sharon, Shmuel Mestechkin, Sam Barkai and many others. But the White City exhibition was a first attempt to invent the history of Israeli Architecture. It wrote it as a story and established the White City of Tel Aviv as the inaugural place and moment of Israeli architecture, as its point zero. Hence, the White City exhibition itself became a key moment for Israeli architecture, and in a sense, the very beginning of its historiography and a main reference for any debate on Israeli architecture from the eighties to this day.
It was a reflexive moment: the first time that Israeli architecture spoke of itself and to itself, that it creates history and understands its own self as history. It is important to see this moment in the context of the historicist tendency that reigned the architectural world from the mid-sixties. But the particularity of this moment in Israel was that while the European gaze towards the past went back to the medieval city, to the Renaissance and the Baroque, or to vernacular and local traditions; the Israeli gaze toward the past was set on the near past, halted in what could be seen as the most modernist moment in architecture. In other words, the uniqueness of Postmodernism in Israeli architecture lies in its historicist gaze directed backwards and its rebounding from the modernist progressive moment that had been aiming forward. If in Italy the Postmodern architects longed for the Baroque city or Neo-Classical architecture (which was longing for another past), Israeli Postmodernism longed for European Modernism. The best demonstration of this paradox is evident in the fact that the architect Shmuel Mestechkin, one of the few Bauhaus graduates in Israel, often argued that no building should be conserved, not even "Bauhaus Style" ones.
The Exhibition was an important moment in many other domains as well. Twenty years following White City, it is impossible not to recognize Michael Levin's achievement. He succeeded in placing the International Style architecture not only in the agenda of the Tel Avivians’ agenda and that of Israeli architects, but, as it turned out, also on the cultural agenda of the world. With a small exhibition, a thin catalog with a short, modest, and straightforward text, Levin succeeded to do what no curator had done before. The White City exhibition influenced profoundly not only the work of architects or the taste of designers, but also the way Tel Avivians looked at their own city, the way they showed it to others, and finally the way the city of Tel Aviv has been shaped since.

Notes
[1] http://whc.unesco.org/sites/1096.htm
[2] “Metzitzim” (Peepers), Israel 1972, director: Uri Zohar, with Uri Zohar, Arik Einstein, Sima Eliyahu, Mona Zilberstein. This film, showing the vulgar and unpurposed lives of youths on a Tel-Aviv beach, is considered to this day as one of the summits of modern Israeli cinema. Over the years, the film has gained status of a cult film, to the point that the beach where it had been shot was named after the film’s title.
[3] "Ceci tuera cela. Le livre tuera l'edifice" – "This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice." says the archdeacon at the beginning of the fifth volume of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo adds a detailed explanation of what he qualifies as "that mysterious remark,” while apologizing for delaying the plot. Besides the archdeacon’s concern with the consequences of Guttenberg's invention on the church, the great revolution of print made human spirit search for other means of expression. The one-time phenomena of the "book of stone" (the city, the building) is doomed to leave its place to the printed book, which by its great distribution is more durable than stone. And not only "the print will kill the church" but "print will kill architecture" as well.
http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/hunchback_notre_dame/24.
[4] It would not be completely unfound to say that the oxymoron is the typical, paradigmatic figure of the Zionist Project, accompanying it from the beginning by settling the "old new country,” reviving the living dead language. Even at our time the oxymoron keeps on accompanying this project with paradoxal definitions such as "Jewish democratic state,” "Israeli Arabs,” "Peace in Galilee War,” or "unilateral separation.”
[5] Theodor Herzl's visionary novel Atneuland ("old-new country") was first published by Herman Seeman in Leipzig in 1902. The Hebrew translation appeared in Warsaw two years later under the title "Tel Aviv,” borrowed by the translator Nahum Sokolov from the book of Ezekiel (3, 15).
[6] In fact, Tel Aviv was not the first settlement to adopt the translated title of Herzl's novel. It was preceded by a small settlement that had been founded in 1904 near the colony Nes Ziona but was united with the latter two years later.
[7] This is the title of a book by Nachum Gutman published in 1959. Gutman (1898-1980) was an author and illustrator, famous for his graphic and literary picturesque approach, and one of the establishment’s most beloved artists. A Small City with Not Many People was perhaps the first nostalgic book published about the period of “Little Tel Aviv” of the 1910s and 1920s.
[8] Michael Levin, White City: the International Style Architecture in Israel, a Story of an Era (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1984). The second part of the exhibition displayed photographs of Tel Aviv buildings by Judith Turner.

boats in Montparnasse

2008-12-19T12:14:00.006+02:00

Wall and Tower: The mold of Israeli Adrikhalut

2008-12-17T12:59:00.036+02:00

Architecture and Adrikhalut

The Jewish settlement project over the past century in the "Eretz Israel" (The Land of Israel) has given birth to two architectural traditions: Eretz-Israeli Architecture, and Israeli Adrikhalut.
Eretz-Israeli Architecture refers to architecture made by Jews in the territories of Eretz-Israel (“The Land of Israel”, alias “Palestine”) before the declaration of The State of Israel. Israeli Adrikhalut is an architectural tradition of Hebrew speaking Jews in the territories of State of Israel, the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority after the declaration of The State of Israel.
The distinction between those two traditions is chronological and political, but also linguistic: the evolution from one to another required a sharp move from a European architectural culture to a Hebrew, invented one.
While the architect, as Loos said, is “a builder who learned Latin”, the adrikhal that already had forgotten his foreign languages, in many cases didn’t even speak Hebrew properly. And Hebrew too, was still something to invent.
Apparently, “Architecture” and “Adrikhalut” are synonymous and are in use commonly and sometimes simultaneously. Thus, the Technion in Haifa forms “Architects” and the Tel Aviv University forms “Adrikhals”, and in addition to the historical Union of Israeli Architects, there is today a new Association of Adrikhals (the famous IAUA). Despite their foreign origins, Greek and Accadian, and the fact that both of them are included in the Hebrew dictionary, the use of “Adrikhalut” is more common nowadays and is perceived as more “Hebrew” than the other. In a strange manner, the meanings of “Architect” and “Adrikhal” are quite opposite and reveal two very different agendas about the role of the architect and its relationships with the physical reality: while the Greec Archi-Tect pretends to be the proud “Master of the Tectonics”, the Acadian Ard-Heikhal is occupied in a much more humble role as the “Slave of the Palace”.

Masters and Servants
The uniqueness of the Israeli condition is revealed by the difference between masters and slaves, between Architecture and Adrikhlut. If any planned physical reality is produced in three dimensions, the political, the urban and the architectural, architecture is no less political than urban. Nevertheless, architecture’s relationships with politics depend on its ability to define itself independently as an autonomous discipline, to impose its own agenda and to realize it physically. While acts of modern architecture were being formulated throughout the western world under the illusion of their autonomy, and were structured in a complex relationship between architectural theory and architectural practice, in Israel they were governed primarily by their political circumstances and significances. Comparing the western architecture that had the luxury to cover the political under layers of books and manifestos, in Israel it is impossible to ignore its simple, concrete truths.
The most significant aspect of both Israeli architectural traditions, at once most evident yet so well concealed, is its political dimension. In Israel, just like war, architecture is a continuation of politics through other means. Every act of architecture executed by Jews in Israel is in itself an act of Zionism, whether intentional or not. The political program of ‘building the Land of Israel’ is a fundamental, albeit often latent, component of every building in Israel and the political facts it creates are often more dominant and conclusive than any stylistic, aesthetic, experiential or sensual impact they may have.
Renew, settlement and construction of the new Jewish State have been the declared central goals of the Zionist movement and that includes also its architectural traditions. The new architecture, the new house and the new town were the site and the tool by which the project of settling the Jewish People in the Land of Israel was realized. They were means of attaining territorial objectives, means of deterrence, an industry for the fabrication of political facts. Building the Land of Israel became the central value and key metaphor of the new national ethos: “we came to this land to build and to be built” – sang the pioneers of the twenties. In Israel, building is an educational tool, an official language, an ideology.
This dictated to the Eretz-Israeli architect and much more to the Israeli adrikhal, a paradoxical list of priorities, according to which, political ideology and architectural theory merge, depend on each other, confront one another, hide and are hidden one from the other. Every practicing architect in Israel is confronted with a situation in which distinctive ‘architectural’ dilemmas are infused with critical political implications.
From its inception, the Zionist movement used the means provided by modern architecture to create its places. Both of them were seeking a new place: the first needed one, and the latter strove to create one. As an extension of the European debate of modern architecture, Eretz-Israeli architecture had managed to keep a decent appearance of a normal, western modern architectural tradition. But inspite (and maybe because) this normal appearance, one must remember that in the Middle East, there is nothing more political than normality, and that normality, westhood and modernity have always been the Zionist movement’s most powerful strategic weapons.
Since the declaration of the State of Israel, architecture has been openly mobilized. The new Hebrew speaking “native” tradition, Israeli adrikhalut, had to provide answers for the political needs of the times (to conquer territories, to spread populations, to house immigrants) and, if possible, to proclaim itself as doing so. Israeli adrikhals at their best have been true servants of the palace, serving the Zionist project to a varying degree of integrity, humility, dedication and responsibility, as they attempted to allow political ideology to infiltrate through the architectural forms, and simultaneously enabled architectural doctrines to express themselves through programs inspired or even dictated by politics. In Israel, political ideology and architectural doctrine are dependent on one another and are in a constant and complex dialogue of justification and argumentation. The architectural dimension of architecture – that cultural or spiritual aura of the built object and the added value of the act of building – served at its best as a mere accessory, and at its worst as pure camouflage. In any case, the Israeli adrikhal never had much time to read - the theoretical debates of western architecture have been pushed to the sidelines, giving place for an intensive practice in which any reflexive activity could be considered as almost subversive. The “architectural” dimension of the architectural practice was transformed, in most cases, from the inspiration that imbues a building with meaning into an appendix, a superfluous addition that is used as a pretext, a justification, a cover-up.
Besides relinquishing the universal viewpoint held by Western architects (and Eretz-Israeli architects) that had been rooted in the dialectics between theory and practice, the defining essence of Israeli adrikhalut is rooted between politics and architecture; this is where its dilemmas, its blind spots, and its paradoxes are to be found. Israeli adrikhalut produces impressive architectural objects but lacks a reflexive, comprehensive view of itself; mobilized by the political ideologies it establishes facts cast in concrete that are inherently political, but entirely lacks political awareness.

The Settlement Offensive
Although dated from the period of the Eretz-Israeli architectural tradition, the Homa Umigdal (“Wall and Tower”) settlements in the thirties were a first expression of a Jewish native architectural tradition, Adrikhalut. As an architectural phenomenon that was initiated and conducted almost “without architects”, in the service of political objectives Homa Umigdal was a true realization of the concept of Adrikhalut, and certainly the most direct answer to the palace’s demands.
Homa Umigdal was a response to the “Great Arab Mutiny” that outburst in Palestine/Eretz-israel in April 1936. The mutiny started with riots in Jaffa (9 Jews were lynched and dozens were wounded[1]), followed by a general strike. It included economical measures such as the boycott of commercial and the banning of any real-estate transaction with Jews, and organized para-military activities. The “Great Arab Mutiny” was the most violent reaction of the local Arab population to the Zionist project and certainly a first political organized expression of a new Palestinian identity.
For the Jewish population and especially for the Zionist organizations, to whom the mutiny was known simply as “The Events”, the mutiny offered a golden opportunity to destroy the Arab economy and to progress even faster towards a Jewish state: in Tel-Aviv, the result of the Arab embargo on Jewish ships in Jaffa port was the erection of a new port while the boycott of commercial transactions of fruits and vegetables gave reason to the establishment of two new markets.
Facing the Arab resistance to Jewish settlement in remote parts of the country, and the growing difficulties to purchase lands and to settle them, the Zionist organizations elaborated a new strategy of a coordinated “Settlement Offensive” all over the country. The idea was to establish in the shortest period of time, a chain of new settlements that would create a Jewish continuum and define the future borderline of the State of Israel. This continuum took the form of the letter “N” placed in the valleys[2]: from the northern point of the Jordan Valley to Beit Shean Valley, to the Yizrael Valley, and throughout the Litoral plain, to the Neguev desert. To realize the “Settlement Offensive” strategy, the main tactical tool was Homa Umigdal – Wall and Tower.

Wall and Tower System

Wall and Tower is a system of settlement seemingly defensive but essentially of offensive form invented in 1936 by the members of Kibbutz Tel-Amal, (today Kibbutz Nir-David) in Beit-Shean valley. The invention was attributed to the Kibbutz member Shlomo Gur,[3] and was developed and encouraged by the architect Yohanan Ratner.[4]
From the start, the objective of this communal and fortified type of settlement was to seize control of land that had been officially purchased by the KKL-JNF[5] but could not be settled upon.
The system was based on the hasty construction of a wall made of pre-fabricated wooden molds filled with gravel and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. All in all, the enclosed space formed a 35m by 35m yard. Within this enclosure were set up a pre-fabricated wooden tower that commanded the view of the surrounding area and four shacks that were to house a ‘conquering troop’ of forty people. Between the years 1936 and 1939, some fifty- seven such outposts were set up throughout the country that rapidly developed into permanent collective settlements of the Kibbutz and Moshav type.
The primary tactical requirement for the Wall and Tower settlement had to meet several conditions: it had to be planned in such a way that it could be constructed within one day, and later, even within one night, that it could protect itself for as long as it would take for backup to arrive, and it had to be situated within eyesight of other settlements and with accessibility for motor vehicles.

Tel Amal
The first Wall and Tower outpost was erected at the site that later became Kibbutz Tel-Amal in the Yizrael Valley.[6] The members of the kibbutz had formed a community in Tel-Aviv and were searching for land on which to settle. When several of them arrived at Kibbutz Beit Alfa, they realized that the members of that kibbutz wanted to establish another settlement east of their own, where there was a large Bedouin encampment, so that it would not be the most remote settlement. Although the land surrounding Kibbutz Beit Alfa had been bought by the KKL-JNF from Arab landowners in Beirut, it was being used by the Bedouins as their pasture grounds every winter and could not be settled upon. The members of Kibbutz Tel-Amal set up an encampment near Beit Alfa and began to cultivate the land. With the outbreak of the Arab Rebellion of April 1936, their attempts at settling the land were thwarted when the Bedouins set fire to their camp. These attacks led the people of Kibbutz Tel-Amal to initiate lengthy discussions with the residents of Beit Alfa and other settlements in the area regarding possible defense methods against the Bedouins, who were armed with ‘shiny British rifles.’ A formula was devised for the erection of four shacks surrounded by sandbags. This promptly developed into double walls built as molds and filled in with gravel up to the height of the windows. ‘In addition to that we aimed to erect observation posts in the corners’ – so wrote one of the members, Yehezkel Frenkel, ‘and near the huts to dig defensive fortifications.’[7] The solution generated two objections: the first declared that this does not provide sufficient defense in the area in between the huts, the second, voiced by the carpenters, maintained that the walls would not withstand the pressure of the gravel. Following further calculations it became apparent that with little additional cost it might be possible ‘to surround the huts with a yard and around the yard erect a wall and an observation tower with a light projector… [to] make a double mold and fill it with gravel.’ Shlomo Gur went to consult Yohanan Ratner, and returned with a ‘a drafted plan of a rectangular wall with four defensive positions at its corners’ (Frenkel). The proposal was transferred to the Regional Committee, which accepted the idea and declared that ‘we are at the beginning of a new era of fortified walls, in spite of our neighbors’ dismay.’
Following the success of the Tel-Amal experiment, Wall and Tower operations were carried out throughout the country. Tel-Amal did not remain for long the farthest outpost – Kibbutz Sdeh-Nahum was set up and within a year dozens of such outposts were set up throughout the country, ‘sometimes seven outposts in a single night,’ recounts Gur, who participated in the organization of some fifty such operations. The nocturnal expeditions were always assisted by existing settlements in the area, and were coordinated by the Zionist Leadership.

Sustainable Occupation

From any possible military or political aspect, the historical importance of the settlement offensive and of the Wall and Tower settlements was immense: there is no doubt that without those 57 Wall and Tower outposts spread in strategic places in Galilee, the Jordan Valley, Yizrael Valley and the Neguev, the fate of the state of Israel in 1948 would have been entirely different. The Wall and Tower outposts set along the “N” plan materialized the borderlines of the State of Israel until 1967 and shaped its only consensual form.
The success of the settlement offensive defined the state’s strategy in the days to come. Settlement has became one of the IDF’s main missions and soon after the army’s constitution in 1948, Ben-Gurion created a special military unit (“NAHAL” - Pioneering Fighting Youth) combining combat military activities and settlements tasks all over the country. As he explained to the soldiers in the new unit’s inaugurating parade, the strategy was clear: “Not with silent stone fortifications but with the labor and creation of a living human wall, the only wall that is able to resist the enemy’s weaponry. The only sustainable occupation resides in building.”[8]

History
Although as a metaphor, the Wall and Tower project holds a mythical status in the ‘general history’ of the State of Israel, despite the active role this metaphor plays as a symbol of sacrifice, dedication and heroism in the civic education of every Israeli Jew, and despite its current incarnation in the tragic chronicles of our times – Wall and Tower is blatantly absent from the canon of Israeli architecture, which has been busy over the past few decades with fabricating a dubious narrative of the ‘Tel-Aviv Bauhaus’ and with the selective historicization of the ‘White City.’ While putting all its efforts into canonizing the Israeli International Style, Israeli adrikhalut has ignored not only one of the most architectonically unique elements of the thirties, the only one that is entirely relevant to its situation today, but also the sole element that received international acclaim in the thirties.

Pavilion
It is therefore not surprising that in 1937, one year after the establishment of Kibbutz Tel-Amal, a model of Wall and Tower was chosen for the Palestine/Eretz-Israel Pavilion at the World Exposition in Paris – the one remembered in architectural history as the exposition that granted the golden medal to the German pavilion of Albert Speer.
There are many similarities to be found between the idea of Wall and Tower and the modern pavilion – a building type most familiar to us from international fairs and Expos. The modernist canon is packed with pavilions and prototypes whose technology holds the potential of aggression, invasion and intrusion: the ready-made houses of ‘Voisin,’ Le Corbusier’s prototypes – the ‘Citrohan’ (1920 – 1922) that was meant to ‘travel’ to various types of landscapes, and the ‘Cabanon’ (1950) at Cap Martin, with which he was able to intrude into the life of Eileen Gray; the colonial residence machines of Jean Prouvé – the prefabricated, demountable ‘Tropical House’ (1949) and ‘the House of the Lone Settler in the Sahara’ (1957); the various prototypes of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion (1928-1945), his Geodesian Domes and, later, in the sixties, their move from the hippies’ communes in California to the battlefields of Vietnam.
Like the pavilion, Wall and Tower is characterized by its mobility (or potential mobility), by careful logistic planning, by prefabrication and the possibility of rapid construction and dismantling, and most notably, by an assertive, dominant and spectacular presence. However, while the pavilion, as a ‘rhetorical’ building-type, a platform for ideas and manifestos, was a ceremonial expression of modern architecture’s industrial utopia – a kind of allegory of prototypes – the Wall and Tower project was a concrete implementation of it. Wall and Tower is what happens when you let the pavilion escape from the architectonic zoo, when you allow the prototype to freely multiply itself: it turns into the ultimate machine of invasion.

Oxymoron
Wall and Tower almost allegorically expresses the characteristics and dilemmas of the Israeli built environment, revealing the tensions between its simultaneous impulses and internal contradictions. It is the site of all the Israeli oxymorons – ‘offence through defense,’ ‘intrusive siege,’ ‘the camp as a home,’ ‘introverted expansion,’ ‘permanent temporality,’ ‘house-arrest.’ The figure of the oxymoron is carved deep into the genetic code of the Zionist project itself and has accompanied it since Theodor Herzl wrote the novel Altneuland (‘The Old New Land’) and since the concrete translation into Hebrew (the living dead language)[9] of his vision into the city of Tel-Aviv. Not to mention the fact that the figure of the oxymoron stands at the root of the concept of Israel as a ‘ Democratic Jewish State.’

Program
Wall and Tower is the program and the mold of Israeli adrikhalut. As the metaphor of the Israeli practice of fait accompli, Wall and Tower is the fundamental paradigm of all Jewish architecture in Israel, and it germinated all the future characteristics of Israeli adrikhalut as well as, to a large extent, of the Israeli City: hasty translation of a political agenda into the act of construction, occupation of territory (surfaces) through settlement (points) and infrastructure (lines), the high priority given to the buildings’ security functions and military capabilities (both defensive and offensive,) and informed use of modernity – organization, administration, prefabrication, logistics, and communication.
As time went by and new settlements were founded using more sophisticated means, the two essential functions of Wall and Tower – fortification and observation – held fast and repeated themselves on every scale. They dictated the location of the new settlements on the peaks of mountains and hilltops and the technological effort of the Israeli space program. They molded the entire landscape as a network of points, as an autonomous layer spread above the existing landscape, transforming the country by dividing it not according to natural, territorial and cadastral divisions, but according to dromological divisions, according to the speed of transportation and the lines of infrastructure. Thus we find in the Occupied Territories today two countries superimposed one on the other: on top, ‘Judea and Samaria,’ the land of settlements and military outposts, bypass roads and tunnels; and underneath, ‘Palestine,’ the land of villages and towns, dirt roads and paths. Ultimately, the essence of Wall and Tower had a decisive influence on the way Israelis perceive the space in which they live, which in turn maps out the values themselves: the observers versus the observed, a Cartesian ghetto versus a chaotic periphery, a threatened culture versus ‘desert makers’ (in the words of Ben-Gurion), city versus periphery, future and past versus present, Jews versus Arabs.
The cross between hasty settlement through military or para-military means in civilian camouflage, seclusion of ideologically homogenous community behind fortifications and panoptical observation on the surroundings has repeated itself countless times since the days of Wall and Tower. The ‘settlement point’ system has been implemented in national master plans throughout Israel’s history, such as the plan drawn up in the seventies for Judaization of the Galilee, and the current “spontaneous” expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories. In all these cases, a large degree of ideological and social homogeneity was retained – whether through an existing core of founders, or through mechanisms that filter new residents according to social or economic criteria. Whatever the reasons for this homogeneity – security, ideology, or economy – the repetition of this settlement pattern, in which there is a distinct congruence between geographic area and social status, ideology or ethnic identity, has been one of the most prominent characteristics of the built Israeli landscape.

The Wall
Although it never had recognized borders, the State of Israel never seized to search for them in order to define itself geographically and socially. The history of Isarel is paved by a huge number of plans detailing possible borderline scenarios. The map of the State of Israel bares different representations of this quest: the pre-1948 “historical” international borderline, the 1949 temporary borderline, armistice green line, the 1967 cease-fire purple line, the 1974 forces’ separation blue line, the 1996 Peace Borderline. The physical expressions of those borderlines could varie from the barbed wires of Jerusalem’s demarcation line, to the “Fatma gate” of the “Good Fence”[10], from the bunkers of the “Barlev line”[11] to the electronic “separation fence” that is today under construction in the West Bank. A similar desperate quest for borders, limits, contours and separations characterizes also all the other scales of Israeli landscape and built environment. If the phenomena of gated communities is a relatively new to most of the western countries, in Israel it is quite normal to find villages, town and cities surrounded with a physical borderline: walls, fences and barbed wired fences, not to mention the symbolical “Eruv” borderlines defining the limits of the “Shabat zone”.[12] This impulse is even seen in the architectural scales - in urban environments (Tel Aviv, for example) where almost every building is surrounded by a fence enclosing a yard which very often remains unused and neglected, and even in the Israeli middle class suburbia that unlike its American model, is characterized by the drastic separation of the private.
Much has been said and written about the link between external threats on the State of Israel, whether real or imagined, and the formation of social unity and national cohesion. In Wall and Tower, we are shown exactly how this link is established: the priorities of the Wall and Tower outposts stipulated that first the wall was to be built, then the observation point and only at the end, the houses themselves. In total contrast to its ambitions of expansion, the Wall served in fact to perpetuate the ghetto mentality and the impulse of enclosure. The seclusion within the wall separates the settlement from its new environment and defines the new community not only as those who choose to live ‘inside,’ but as those who are under potential threat from outside. Shlomo Gur himself admitted that one of the reasons that Tel-Amal searched for land on which to settle was in order to prevent the dismantling of the kibbutz. This same principle holds true on a global scale as well, since the State of Israel’s self-definition depends on the fact that it was established first and foremost as a shelter for Jews threatened with extermination by the Nazi regime. The organization of Israel’s land is also based on this principle, as the degree of communal unity is directly connected to the imminence and intensity of external threats.

The Point

As a strategy, Wall and Tower realized the impulse for expansion through territorial conquests by establishing new ‘settlement points,’ a term that in itself hints at the fact that the ‘point’ on the map was more important than the ‘settlement’ itself. The location of the settlement as part of a greater strategic plan was of greater importance than its actual existence, and the location was determined according to optimal vantage points.
In Wall and Tower, the settlement point on the map is indeed a point within a strategic network of points. The Wall and Tower network was spread out in such a way that every outpost had eye contact with another, enabling the Towers to transmit messages through Morse code using flashlights at night and mirrors during the day.
The settlement point was first and foremost an observation point: erecting the Tower was the whole point.

The Tower

The Tower was the spearhead of industrialization and modernity not only because of its logistical and technological characteristics, but also because it transformed the entire environment into an object under the scrutiny of industrial and instrumental observation. This vantage point had its own accompanying technologies such as the binoculars and the light projector, and was organized as a systematic project that had to be managed and manned. Beyond the military implications of this vantage point, in terms of Virilio’s ‘I see, therefore I kill,’[13] The constant panoptic observation policed by the vantage point of the ‘tower’[14] determined the overpowering relations between the Wall and Tower settlements and their surroundings even before the actual cultivation of the land and its economic exploitation through agriculture or development.
As an initiative whose intention was to organize the logistics of the gaze, Wall and Tower transformed, literally from one day to the next, the territory, which it occupied. Henri Lefebvre characterized the agrarian time and space as a heterogeneous combination of variables such as climate, fauna and flora, while claiming that the industrialized time and space tends towards homogeneity and unity.[15] Despite the fact that the landscapes where the Wall and Tower outposts were located have always been an agrarian frontier, this organized observation point was sufficient to transform the territory into a industrialized space. Only a few such panoptic observation points had the power to unify an entire agrarian region – to eradicate, through the strategic threat, the complex economic and cultural differences that distinguished between the Arab Bedouins, farmers and urban population in the thirties. The very instrumentalization of the territory through the gaze invested the landscape with scenarios and schemes, threats and dangers, infuses places and objects with tactical possibilities, and situates them within a strategy and unifies them into one ‘political’ space.[16] It transformed the landscape into a battlefield, a scene of conflicts, a frontier – in other words, into a city.

The Camp and the Domain
As an almost dimensionless point in space, Wall and Tower is more an optical instrument than a place - an all-seeing eye that cannot see itself. But nevertheless, with its Wall, its Tower and its four shacks, Wall and Tower is a rough draft of a place.
Regardless to its resemblance to the European medieval urban imagery, Wall and Tower sketches in the most concrete manner the very scheme of the Israeli place: the Camp and the Domain.
Used by all the settlement organs, the term the Camp and the Domain expresses the scheme of the Israeli place as a division of the settled territory between two main functions - lands to be settled upon physically, and lands to be exploited. This term has shaped the Israeli attitude towards territory: the military logic that resided at the basis of the territorial relationships between the Camp and the Domain can be only compared to the economical logic that created divisions between the Urban and the Rural elsewhere. The concrete translations of the Camp and the Domain concept on the ground, either in the form of a Kibbutz or in that of a Moshav, imposed architectural solutions where the Camp is perceived as a coherent unified entity surrounded by the vast unbuilt Domain cultivated collectively (in the Kibbutz) or separately (in the Moshav). But above all, this division, which was very characteristic to the rural settlements, is at the very basis of one of Israel’s biggest social injustice: unlike other Western countries, where the social structure is based either on the social tradition (Europe) or on the economic practice (USA), the Israeli class system was based on the distribution of the country’s most precious resource - land. In that sense, the settler may be placed on the summit of the social pyramid. If in the first days of the State of Israel his prestige was only political and symbolical, soon enough it could be translated to material forms. Even today, the question of the Domain - who owns it, and what to do with it – seems no less complex and problematic than the question of Israeli borders, and it is still a source of one of Israel’s biggest debates.

Camp
‘The camp is your home – guard it well’ – this slogan, posted in countless Israeli military bases, can be seen as the essence of this program. If the camp is our home, and if it must be guarded, the fate of the camp’s residents is to become prisoners of their own gaze.
The efforts of settlement involved a series of tasks, some of which were military and tactical, while others were civilian and strategic. This dualism was expressed in slogans such as ‘one hand on the plough, the other on the sword.’ Despite the military means often used, a civilian appearance has always been, and still is, one of the Zionist Enterprise’s most important strategic objectives. This is the reason why Wall and Tower and the later mechanisms of settlement left the status of the place and the residents themselves in doubt. In every type of politically motivated settlement enterprise in the country, whether or not backed by the institution, there exists a paradoxical mixture of a civilian and military operation: a military operation, camouflaged in civilian clothes, recruited civilians under the patronage of the army.
‘Civilianization’ is the transformation of the soldier into the pioneer – who is able, if need be, to change his clothes and transform back into a soldier at any time – and the transformation of the camp into a home is the description also assigned to the transformation of the para-military outpost into a permanent settlement. This is the reason why the apparent preservation of normality, of routine civilian life, has always had to be backed by military and tactical operations, which in the long run demand much higher funds than the act of settlement itself: in Israel, the mundane is a strategic weapon.

Image
In Homa Umigdal, the image is one of ‘work in progress,’ a permanent construction site, a production line. The hyperactivism of transformation and construction was in absolute contrast to the passivity of the land. The Land of Israel was a virgin land to be possessed. The land of Israel was perceived as a clean slate, a tabula rasa, as raw material awaiting the sculptor. This perception lived on in the State of Israel, which became a place of perpetual motion from the temporary to the permanent and back again, a place whose core essence was not its permanency but movement and change. If one day the ‘right of return’ is granted to the Palestinians, it is very doubtful whether the returning refugees will find their way home – that is, if it still exists. Contrary to the illusions of permanency with which we are usually provided by urban and pastoral landscapes, and contrary to the static impression left by historic settlement patterns, the new Israeli settlement pattern has always been perceived as a dynamic process, focused on its power to transform rather than on becoming a permanent reality. Modern Zionism was fused by the inspiration of the industrial and colonial initiatives of the nineteenth century. If compared with Herzl’s vision of ‘The Canal of the Seas’-– the construction of a man-made canal which was meant to replace and eventually close off the Suez Canal – Wall and Tower was a humble act of industrialization of the environment, the large-scale operations came later. The State of Israel initiated immense transformations in the geography of the country: seas were dried up, roads were laid down, a network of infrastructure was spread out, ports were dug, forests were planted, deserts were made to blossom, towns and cities were founded. In Israel, every view of the landscape is merely a single frame taken from one continuous documentary film. Every photograph is only a coincidental image in an endless saga. In the same way, every built object is perceived according to its circumstances; always as a single coordinate on the long path of construction or ruin.

Trojan Horses
Wall and Tower initiated an original tradition of local Trojan horses, machines of infiltration and other types of ambulatory, temporary, political and hyperactive objects: the tent in the outpost and the mobile home in the settlements. These banal objects are ostentatious not because of the way they look, but rather because of their outward display of their potential for mobility, expansion and transformation; because they threaten to transform the temporary into the daily, the daily into the permanent and the permanent into the eternal; because of the way they represent all these possibilities in the landscape in order to transform the land itself into an arena of struggle and power.

Spectacle
There is no doubt that the mere appearance of new settlements was a spectacular event, an act of creating something from nothing, a spectacle of light[17] – the nocturnal and daylight signaling, the trajectories of tracer bullets and the echoes of explosions. Shlomo Gur saw in his invention only a prosaic answer to the problems of the new settlement: in his interview with Ariela Azulay he claimed to be indifferent to the their visual effectiveness. The type of interpretation done here would be entirely alien not only to the axiomatic perception he had of his system, but also to his character as a ‘man of action.’ But from the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the simple fact that in many of the Wall and Tower settlements operations, Gur himself was accompanied by the photographer Zoltan Kluger and his team from “The Oriental Company of Photography”.[18] Kluger’s wages where paid by the “Keren Hayesod”.[19] In addition to that, the Wall and Tower settlements of Ein-Gev and Massada/Shaar Hagolan were the subject and the location of the first Hebrew Technicolor film ever shot in Israel, “Spring at Galilee”, by Efraim Lisch (13 minutes, 1939),[20] that was produced and financed by the KKL-JNF. In a similar manner, the KKL-JNF financed and promoted the first Hebrew Opera “Dan the Guard” that celebrated the first days of the Wall and Tower settlement of Hanita. The opera was based on Sh. Shalom’s play “Shootings at the kibbutz” (1936) and was adapted in 1939 by the composer Marc Lavry and the newly immigrant writer Max Brod (!). The opera was performed 33 evenings in Tel Aviv in 1945.

The Mold
However, as is usually the case in Israeli architecture, the actual object is much more powerful than any image or metaphor. The real spectacle of Wall and Tower did not stem from the way it looked but from what it was, from what it did. It was, first and foremost, a wall; beyond the fact that the wall was a program, and was destined to become an ‘ideology,’ it was a plain wooden mold of 20 centimeters filled with gravel. The wall was a premonition of things to come, because whoever is able to fill the mold with gravel will not hesitate to fill it with other materials. Beyond the fact that it was an ad-hoc protective wall, whose job it was to prevent infiltration of unwanted visitors and to provide protection from bullets, the wall was a technological presentation and a logistic tour de force: it was the promise, the non-explicit threat of the concrete.

Notes
[1] My Grandfather, the late Benjamin Plascow, was always proud to remind me that he had been the first wounded of the “Events” of April 1936. He was stubbed in his chest in Jaffa Road on his way back from his work in Jaffa port. A tin cigarette box (which is today one of my family’s dearest objects) saved him from a much more serious injury.
[2] In that respect, see Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman’s essay “The Mountain”, where they describes the Zionist and Israeli settlement project as a continual move from the valley to the mountain.
[3] Shlomo Gur-Gerzovsky (1913-2000) was a founding member of Kibbutz Tel-Amal and became a sort of national ‘project manager’ following his success as the founder of Homa Umigdal. Before the establishment of the State, he was responsible for planning the defense constructions of many settlements including those of the Old City in Jerusalem. Following the establishment of Israel, he was charged with the country’s first Grands Projets: the Hebrew University, the National Library and the Knesset building in Jerusalem.
[4] Yohanan Ratner (1891-1965), a trained architect and a former Red Army officer, was the chief architect and strategic planner of the Hagana, the pre-state predecessor of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF.) He later became a general in the IDF. As a member of the central command during the War of Independence, Ratner was the only general who received Ben-Gurion’s permission to retain his non-Hebrew family name. Later he served as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture in the Technion in Haifa. As a teacher and dean in the 1950s, Ratner was considered a reactionary and one of the more ardent opposers of modernist architecture.
[5] Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael (Jewish National Fund) was established in 1901 during the fifth Zionist Congress in Bazel, in order to purchase land in Palestine - Eretz-Israel for the Jewish people. This organization became the most important factor in the land system of the country and untill today: KKL-JNF is the main proprietor of lands in the State of Israel, and owns more than 90% of them. As an organ of the Zionist movement, KKL-JNF became one of the state’s most important instruments to make sure that lands in israel would remain under Jewish (and no “Israeli”) ownership.
[6] The account of settlements and the quotations come from a conversation between Shlomo Gur and Ariella Azoulay, the main points of which were exposed in Azoulay’s book: Ariella Azoulay, How does it look to you? Tel-Aviv: Babel, 2000, pp.27-35; 10 Years, a Tel-Amal booklet,1946, p.30; Yehezkel Frenkel, ‘How we arrived at Homa Umigdal’ in 40 years to Homa Umigdal, a Tel-Amal booklet, p.21; Shlomo Gur, the man behind Homa Umigdal (a monologue recorded by Zeev Aner in The days of Homa Umigdal, editor: Mordechai Naor, Idan Series, Yad Ben Zvi Press, Jerusalem 1986, pp. 47-50.
[7] Yehezkel Frenkel, ‘How we arrived at Homa Umigdal’ in 40 years to Homa Umigdal, a Tel-Amal booklet, p.21.
[8] David Ben Gurion, a speech in front the soldiers of the NAHAL soldiers, 13 November 1948. An army for defense and building in On Settlement – an anthology, 1915-1956 , p. 104 , Hakibbutz Hameuhad, Tel Aviv, 1986.
[9] Altneuland was published in 1902. In this futuristic novel, inspired by the tales of Jules Verne, Herzl follows the adventures of a young Jewish intellectual from Vienna, Dr. Friedrich Lowenberg, who meets a mysterious character by the name of Kingscourt. Lowenberg and his companion decide to dissociate themselves from the decadent European lifestyle, and settle on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. On their way, they pass through the Land of Israel and find it in a state similar to the one Herzl found during his historic visit to Palestine in 1898. After ten years on the island, Lowenberg and Kingscourt decide to resume their travels. They return to the Land of Israel and discover ‘Altneuland’ – the old-new land that had been built and settled according to Herzl’s program in his book The Jewish State. The first translation of Altneuland was edited by Nachum Sokolov and was published in 1904 under the biblical title Tel Aviv, borrowed from the Book of Ezekiel. This is what perhaps made Tel-Aviv, which was set up five years later in 1909, into the only city in the world to be named after a book.
[10] The “Good Fence” is the title that was given to the borderline between the State of Israel and the “security belt” of South Lebanon since the Litany operation in 1978 up to the IDF retreat in 2000.
[11] The defensive fortification line along the Suez canal, conceived in the late sixties by the IDF chief of staff, general Haim Barlev.
[12] The “Eruv” is a religiuous symbolical borderline made of a wired line that contours every village, town and city in Israel. The “Eruv” defines a unified zone in which one can carry personal things during the Shabat.
[13] In this connection, one cannot ignore the work of my teacher, Paul Virilio, especially his book Guerre et Cinema, Cahiers du Cinema – Editions de l’Etoile, Paris, 1984 (War and Cinema, London and New York: Verso, 1999).
[14] See Roland Barthes’ renowned text ‘The Eiffel Tower’ and Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish for more on the way observation from a tower ‘intellectualizes’ a landscape. Ariella Azoulay links this birds-eye view to another project of Shlomo Gur: in 1937, Gur took a series of photographs of the roofs of Jerusalem’s Old City, in order to plan the defense of the Jewish Quarter. Azoulay, who gives a detailed description of these photographs in the introduction to her published conversations with Gur, interpreted them as a model of ‘the official eye of the State of Israel’ (Azoulay, How does it look to you? p.28.) The mythological slogan spontaneously invented by a tired IDF soldier a moment after conquering the Hermon Mountain in 1973, who called it ‘the eyes of the state,’ should also be noted in this context.
[15] Henri Lefebvre, ‘Espace et Politique’, in Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit a la Ville, editions Anthropos, 1968, p.207
[16] This is a concrete example of Lefebvre’s claim ‘a landscape that has undergone instrumentalization becomes a political landscape’ – Lefebvre, Espace et Politique, pp. 277,278.
[17] See Paul Virilio’s explanation of the link between the light projectors of anti-aircraft defense mechanisms during the Second World War and the emblem of 20th Century Fox, as well as other spectacular expressions such as Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light in Nurnberg.
[18] For A detailed account on Kluger’s activity during the period of Wall and Tower, see: Oded Yedaaya Towards a Social Fuction: on Zoltan Kluger’s Photography in the period of Homa Umigdal, Kav 10, July 1990, pp. 13-19. According to Yedaaya, Kluger was born in Hungaria in 1895 and emmigrated to Germany in the Twenties, where he worked in the Berliner Illustriert Zeitung. In 1933 (or 1934) he emmigrated again to Palestine/Eretz Israel with another photograph Nahman Schiffrin and together they established “The Oriental Company of Photography”.
[19] The Keren Hayesod (The Foundation Fund), today known also as “Keren Hyesod – United Israel Apeal” is part of the Jewish Agency. Founded in the Zionist Congress in London on July 1920, The fund is one of Israel’s largest fund raising organization and is active all over the world except the USA.
[20] In order to really appreciate the effort of the KKL-JNF in producing Spring in Galilee, it is important to remember the technological competition that took place in the same period between the American Technicolor and the German Agfacolor. The first German color film Die Goldene Stadt by Veit Harlan (the director of The Jew Suss) was shown to the public only in 1943. Virilio, Guerre et Cinema, pp. 10-11.

Notes on the essay
a) The origin, the insights, the writing and the research for this essay began in the mid 80's within the framework of a simple 2nd year project on vernacular architecture at the Ecole Specpiale d'Architecture (Paris).
since 2002, The essay has been published in numerous books and publications in English, French and Hebrew.
It appeared in English for the first time in 2002 in "A Civilian Occupation" a catalogue edited by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman for the Israeli presentation at the UIA congress in Berlin. Shortly before the distribution, the catalogue was censored by the Israeli Association of Architects and the 7000 printed copies of the catalogue were scrapped. (For a review of the catalogue and the coverage of this "affair", see Alan Riding's NY Times article from August 2002 "Are Politics Built into Architecture?") The catalogue was republished a year later, in 2003, with two new prefaces by Paul Virilio and me under a form of a small book by Babel (Tel Aviv) and Verso (London), in French by Babel and Les Editions de L'Imprimeur (Paris), in the catalogue of the exhibition "Territories" curated by Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke at the KunstWerke art institut of Berlin, and in the book "Cities of Collision" edited by Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rienietz and published by Birkahauser in 2006. The Hebrew version of the essay appeared in "Sedek" Magazine #2 in 2008.
b) All the photos were taken by Zoltan Kluger between 1936 and 1939

Capitalism for Everyone: A Double Class Villa, Ordos 100, New Ordos

2008-12-16T11:00:00.042+02:00

Lot #090, New Ordos, Inner Mongolia, People's Republic of China

"Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself."
Mao Tse-Tung, Red Book, p.17

"The servants shall be treated with respect."
Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 1923

"A villa for every worker!"
Shimon Peres (paraphrasing Henry Ford), an electoral campaign slogan, early Sixties

1.
The existence of a class society is a necessary condition for the making of a villa.
The villa is a residential building type designed for the upper classes. It demonstrates pleasures and wealth; it expresses and promotes values such as luxury, privacy, exclusivity and comfort; it symbolizes the middle class' longing and fantasies, its gaze upward in the class hierarchy; it is the adequate built representation of high class.
In order that a house could be regarded as a villa, it should be able to isolate itself from its surrounding, to appropriate exclusively its own property and to have its environment cleared as much as possible of other architectural or urban noises in order to stand as a singular, unique phenomenon.
Although villas are designed to meet the upper classes' needs, demands and aspirations, in most cases they are also inhabited by other members of the society. The size and the complexity of this building type, as well as its heavy infrastructures and high standards of comfort, suggest that many of the domestic tasks would be performed by other people than the villa's inhabitants: the meal will be cooked by the cook, the lawn will be mowed by the gardener and the bed will be made by the maid. Sometimes, in order to fulfill their tasks, the workers must live in the villa or in the villa's compound, thus becoming not only the proprietor's workers but also his tenants and neighbors.
Wherever and whenever it may be, this aspect of the villa re-introduces into the very interior of the house the social tensions of the city and its class struggles. For centuries, the complex in-door drama between the served and his server, the upstairs and the downstairs has been one of the favorite subjects of world's literature, art, theatre and cinema; But when it comes to the architecture, this aspect of the villa has tended to be taken for granted, ignored, silenced or dissimulated. The reason for this is that the everyday tasks and routines of the villa have to be performed spontaneously, automatically, invisibly. The cooked meal, the mowed lawn and the made bed should be perceived as little miracles, as effects with no apparent causes, events with no consequences. Therefore, the personnel's quarter in upper classes' houses is often located in a discrete part of the building or its compound – in the basement, at the attic, in a remote wing, behind the laundry room, near the garage.
Le Corbusier, who was far to be suspected for being a socialist (in one of his first book's chapters he even suggested that modernist architecture could prevent a socialist revolution[1]), might have been one of the only modern architects who had ever referred to this topic. When he promised that in his revolutionary "Citrohan" villa the servants shall be treated with respect, he at least acknowledged the existence of servants in the villa and the need to keep them happy in order to maintain a public order. In many of his built villas he tried to keep this promise.[2] But too often, and despite their sincere aspirations and discourses in favor of social progress, when they had to design villas, many modern architects helped their clients to sweep this issue under the carpet, and to dissimulate it under euphemisms such as "friends' rooms" or "guests' rooms", thus denying the very existence of a class system within the dwelling. The need to hide this problematic issue is an essential part of any villa program: as a typical architectural expression of the liberal economy, the villa "rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace".[3] Or in other words: the villa exhibits wealth, but hides its social price, labor.

2.
This social tension between classes, which is inherent in any villa's program anywhere on the globe, becomes even more acute when the villa is located in the socialist People's Republic of China.
As it may be found in any villa's program, the program of the Ordos100 project includes, among its many other ingredients, small housing facilities for a "worker".
One may add to this the carefully branded envelope of the whole Ordos 100 project: the location of the new neighborhood within the "cultural park" at the outskirts of the new city of New Ordos besides a new contemporary art museum, a "gourmet restaurant" and a "boutique hotel"; the luxurious program of the villas (entertainment center, gym, swimming pool, extra bedrooms); the 100 "international architects" flown to Ordos in order to erect, in total liberty of expression, new houses on the dunes (like in Tel Aviv); the massive media coverage and the role and the presence of the neighborhood's master plan designer Ai Weiwei.
In that sense, the participation in this project as well as the physical construction of such a villa within this context contributes not only to the importation and promotion of capitalist values in China, but also to the reconstruction of a Chinese class society.

3. In our project, we wished to investigate the possibility of a villa within socialist conditions, to explore the very frontier zone that lies between the professional responsibility of the architect and his social responsibility. Since the existence of a class system has already been embedded in the villa's program, we chose a strategy in which the villa is presented as a moment of hesitation between an unprincipled peace and an ideological struggle, as a site of conflict between architecture and revolution, and as a battleground on which a new class struggle is likely to take place.
We tried a somewhat opposite approach to the traditional villa:
The Double Class Villa exhibits labor and hides wealth. The visibility of its inherent class system seems to us a proper and necessary price for luxury.
We also thought that it would be proper to reduce the gaps between the two classes living in the villa and chose to transfer few elements of the program from the "owner" to the "worker" (why should one need to have 2 living rooms, 2 dining rooms and 2 parking places?), and to equalize as much as possible the living conditions. If capitalist values and rules of games are to be introduced into a socialist society, they have to be distributed as equally as possible, to make capitalism accessible for everyone.

[1] Le Corbusier ended his first book with this statement: "Architecture or revolution. We can avoid the revolution". Le Corbusier, Architecture ou Révolution, Vers Une Architecture, Crès et Cie, Paris 1923, p. 243
[2] On visiting two Le Corbusier Villas in ahmedabadh: Architectural Paparazzi
[3] Mao Tse-Tung, Red Book, p. 417

Credits
Architects: Babel Architectures (Sharon Rotbard, Dan Hasson, Yuval Yasky)
Location: New Ordos, Inner Mongolia, People's republic of China
Architect in Charge: Sharon Rotbard
Project team: Sharon Rotbard, Dan Hasson, Yuval Yasky
Collaborators: Shira Gleitman, Jessy Feng, Igor Shevchenko, Amit Mandelkern, Omer Barr
Structural engineer: Tzuki Rokah, Rokah-Ashkenazi
Photos; Roee Boshi
Design year: 2008
Construction year: 2009
Curator: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China
Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, Inner Mongolia, China

For more information about the Double Class Villa (project description, plans, sections and elevations), see here

ORDOS 100

2008-07-02T20:34:00.028+03:00

Babel (architectures) - Sharon Rotbard, Dan hasson, Yuval Yasky, architects / 2 villas in Ordos 100, Inner Mongolia, China, 1st phase

Tel Aviv, the Last Mediterranean City

2008-04-27T00:24:00.012+03:00

5 and 6 May 2008

Debate at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona)

As part of its series of debates on cities of the Near East, the CCCB is devoting one of the sessions to Tel Aviv, which – along with Valletta and Tirana – is one of the very few cities to have been established on Mediterranean shores since the fall of the Roman Empire. Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 not far from the Arab port of Jaffa, the oldest in the world, and it has over four hundred thousand inhabitants today.

Tel Aviv’s architecture reflects the different layers of its historical development. The “Oriental” style of the first third of the twentieth century, similar to that of Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul and Baku, was followed in the 1930s by the construction of as many as five thousand buildings in the Bauhaus or “International” style, thanks to which Tel Aviv would come to be known as “The White City”. More recently, modern constructions of different business interests and the high-tech industry have transformed the contours of the waterfront area.

Tel Aviv today is the cultural centre of secular Israel, with increasing cultural heterogeneity owing to a major influx of immigrants and an intense artistic, literary and musical life that contrasts sharply with the religious conservatism of nearby Jerusalem. Yet, with the enduring failure to find a stable and just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the adjacent city of Jaffa remains as a constant reminder of this land’s other histories, identities and possible futures.

Fred Halliday, director

Monday, 5 May

7.30 p.m. DEBATE
Speakers:
Yoram Kaniuk. Writer, author of Adam Resurrected (Tel Aviv, Amikam, 1969).
“78 Years in Tel Aviv”.

Sharon Rotbard. Architect, editor and author of White City, Black City (Babel Books, 2005).
“White City, Black City. Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa”.

Moderator: Fred Halliday. ICREA Professor of International Relations at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals – IBEI).

9.30 p.m. FILM SCREENINGS
Territory I (White Lies), Marine Hugonnier, 2005, 8 min. (silent).
This short film, based on a text by the architect Sharon Rotbard, shows how Tel Aviv wishes to be seen as “The White City” of Bauhaus architecture, a myth that has been used to rewrite its urban history and shape an image that is now widely accepted thanks to its designation by UNESCO in 2003 as a World Heritage Site

FOLLOWED BY SCREENING TO BE CONFIRMED.

Tuesday, 6 May

7.30 p.m. FILM SCREENINGS
SCREENING TO BE CONFIRMED.

10 p.m. Alila, Amos Gitai, 2003, 116 min. (original version with Spanish subtitles).
This film portrays the complex relations among a group of residents on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Bordering on marginality, they are trying to survive in an oppressive and destructured social milieu. The film is based on the novel by the Israeli writer Yehoshua Kenaz and was selected for screening at the Venice Film Festival in 2003.

Information:
Simultaneous translation into Catalan is offered.

All sessions are free of charge. Limited seating available.

The CCCB reserves the right to make any changes to the programme in case of unforeseen circumstances.

Venue:

CCCB, Sala Mirador (debates) and Auditorium (screenings)
Montalegre, 5 - 08001 Barcelona
+34 93 306 41 00 / http://www.cccb.org/

Architectural Paparazzi: Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabadh, India, 1955 / Le Corbusier, architect

2008-04-26T07:48:00.007+03:00

The clerk at the Mills' Owner House showed me vaguely the location of the villa on the map, gave me the address and a telephone number. I called immediately from his desk.
The person in the other side of the line explained me calmly that the proprietor was out of town for the weekend and if I am interested in visiting the house, I should hang around Ahmedabadh for a couple of weeks and wait until they will have enough people in order to organize a group tour in the villa. I was quite disappointed. We planned to leave the city the next evening for a meeting in Mumbai, and the Sarabhai Villa was the last objective of my Indian "chasse à Corbu".
The next morning I decided to go there anyway, and at least to try to have some good exterior photos. As we have been already expelled by the servants from the Shodan Villa's compound, I was not expecting much. We took a rickshaw and told the driver to take us to the eastern part of the river Sabarmati, not very far from the Calico textile museum. After some inquiries, we found ourselves in front of a gate. It was a large compound reserved for the members of the Sarabhai family, one of Ahmedabadh's richest and most distinguished families (they own the Calico museum too). At first, the guard assumed that we were expected, so he let us in with the rickshaw. We wandered for about half an hour, between extravagant palaces and gardens which were scattered in a middle of a beautiful, old forest, but could not find the villa. We came back to the guard at the gate to try to get some more information. At this point, the guard seemingly understood that we were not invited. He asked us to step to other side of the gate and started to make some telephone calls.

After a while, a servant arrived. A negotiation was engaged. I was not very difficult. Although I knew that 500 rupees could be equal of an Indian worker's one week salary, I told to myself that it is much less than a ticket for a western museum, and in a sense, the Sarabhai Villa could be considered as a western museum.
I gave the money to the servant and followed him. He guided me to the Villa and showed me around. I was allowed to visit only the reception spaces and the roofs and I was asked to take photos only from the exterior.
Guidance was indeed necessary. Hidden in the greenery, the villa is probably the most discrete building in the Sarabhai compound. It is a very simple concrete and red brick building, formed by a one floor open reception wing and a two floors private wing, with additional rooms on the roofs.

The Sarabhai Villa resembles very much to another Le Corbusier house from the fifties, Maisons Jaul in Neuilly, where the space is composed by a structural system made by series of vaults that support the terrace roof. Le Corbusier probably developed this idea from his early 1919 Maisons Monol, a project that he had presented in his first book "Vers Une Architecture". In the Monol project the vaults were made in corrugated steel panels, in Jaul and Sarabhai they were covered by bricks.
Without a doubt, the most striking point about this villa is that all the reception spaces have no doors. The only thing that separates between the interiors and the exterior is bamboo blinds that allow the breeze to pass through the house and control the sunlight. This point is even more striking given the fact that all the walls were covered by one of the most impressive art collection I had ever seen (Chagalls, Lichtensteins, Le Corbusiers), and along the simple, rough flowing spaces were scattered nonchalantly precious and personal objects, and beautiful modernist and Indian furniture.

The planted terrace roof was no less spectacular. Along the stairs Le Corbusier placed a slide pointed into the swimming pool. It was all green, with passages through different parts of the building that created an endless "Promenade Architecturale" and emphasized the blurring of the building into the greenery and its integration in the surrounding.

I asked my guide to be taken to the kitchen. It was a banana-shaped space in the back yard separated from the main building. It had no doors too. It was dark, narrow and sooty and unlike the other parts of the villa, it did not seem clean at all. On a curved free-form stove kneeled another servant and cooked chapatti breads.
In front of the kitchen I discovered the staff quarter. It had the same volumetry as the other parts of the house, but with no bricks. Only concrete.

When I departed, I could not avoid thinking about George Perec's visit in a Frank Lloyd Wright villa in Lansing, Michigan, described in the "doors" chapter of his book "Espèces D'Espaces" (Species of Spaces), which I had published in Hebrew almost ten years ago. This villa had no doors too, and it merged perfectly in its green environment. But the bottom line of this anecdote, says Perec, is moral and predictable: the F. L. Wright villa was located with ten more similar villas within a huge private golf club. The whole compound was fenced. The guards (armed with shotguns, imagined Perec) controlled the only entrance gate.
I could not avoid remembering also Le Corbusier's own words in another book I had published, "Vers Une Architecture" (Toward Architecture). After giving an enthusiastic description of all the virtues of the revolutionary "Citrohan" Villa project, his bottom line was that in the Citrohan, "the servants shall be treated with respect".

Villa Shodan, Ahmedabadh

2008-04-23T06:35:00.000+03:00

living room

Architectural Paparazzi: Villa Shodan, Ahmedabadh, India, 1951 / Le Corbusier, architect

2008-04-21T19:40:00.000+03:00

A photo taken in 15/01/2008, 13:03 at Rubinstein Towers

2008-04-19T21:50:00.000+03:00

While breaking my leg.

Fauzi's contract

2008-04-19T19:32:00.006+03:00

Two houses, south of Tel Aviv, 2000

After the Yom Kippur fast there was an atmosphere of civil war. The demonstration that left from Hatikva neighborhood, turned into a riot and another parade left from Bat Yam and threatened to close Jaffa in a pincer movement. Jaffa was still raising smoke from the first week of the Al Aqsa Intifada. Since the police had closed off all the approaches to Jaffa, the rioters veered off in the direction of the Shapira neighborhood, whose Arab population was composed mainly of collaborators who had been housed in apartments leased by the Ministry of Defense. The rioters flowed into the streets and showered stones on every house suspected of having Arab tenants. It was a miracle that nobody was hurt. When we arrived with the truck the next day, the neighborhood looked as if after a pogrom.

On the Sunday after the stormy Saturday of Yom Kippur, in the beginning of October 2000, the month of the Al Aqsa riots, my wife, my son and I took up residence in a house I had built for us in the Shapira neighborhood. Despite the fact that in architectural terms, the house had in any case been planned to be “unfinished”, it was still very far from actually being finished. And the person who was supposed to finish the house was Fauzi, who was due to arrive with Jamil, Izaat and Yussuf, all of them from Khan Yunis.By Thursday the army had closed the border crossings to the Gaza Strip and the workers started the weekend without receiving their weekly wages. On Friday morning, Fauzi called and said that he hoped that everything would be over in a day or two. When I called him on Sunday, he told me that there had been explosions all night long and that the children were hysterical. I told him not to worry about the work. It was his. In the meantime, the most important thing is to look after the children. We agreed that I would transfer the money via the bank. This was the worst possible solution because the Palestinian Authority took 40% of every transfer, and apart from this, a war had begun and nobody knew if the Israeli bank would actually transfer the money.

After we had parted from the porters, I took the dog out for a walk. I met Yaacov Giladi: I opened the gate and he took the opportunity to slip inside in order to have a look at the new neighbor. Because of his advanced years (he was over eighty), we sat down. Yaacov had come to Israel from Salonika with his parents in the beginning of the Thirties. They had left a large family there which all perished in the Holocaust. In the beginning they had settled down in the Hatikva neighborhood but very quickly moved to the Shapira neighborhood, where Yaacov had spent his entire life and raised his family. Prior to the founding of the State, the place had been an isolated island in the heart of an area of Arab orchards. Yaacov related that on one summer evening in 1942, he had taken a walk in the street, carrying in his arms his eldest son who was then a year old baby. When he passed by an empty lot between the houses, he heard a single shot that came from the nearby orchard. When he looked back on his child, he saw to his surprise that a huge hole had opened up in the baby’s head. Now he stares with astonishment at an imaginary point on the back fence of my yard and tells me that there was the precise point the shot that killed his baby was fired from. “Never mind”, he says to me, “a long time has already passed. We can console ourselves with the fact that each time, we push them further away. Just think that at one time this wall of yours was the border between us and the Arabs, that there were Arabs from here to Gaza. And today, where are we and where are they”. I looked at my fence and tried to imagine the land stretching away from it – Salame, Yazur, Abu Kabir, Jaffa, Gaza, Khan Yunis. From there you can continue on to Gibraltar. It is possible to contemplate that had my house been built in 1942, maybe Yaacov Giladi’s son would be alive today. But, after all, we bought the plot a little more than fifty years later, in 1995, about a week before Rabin’s assassination. This had been virgin land, part of the orchard that Meir Getzel Shapira, a Jewish land dealer from Boston, purchased in 1924 from an effendi living in Abu Kabir. In contrast to Shapira’s other prestigious project, which would later be known as “A Certain Alley” and “An Anonymous Alley”, this new neighborhood was targeted at the Jewish proletariat that had emigrated to Israel from the Balkan and Black Sea countries, at the black laborers who had come to build the White City. Shapira cut down the orchard and turned the area into a sort of schtetl: he divided the area into small streets with small plots of 250 square meters along them, on some of which he built shacks covered with tar paper. Our plot was situated on the southern border of the neighborhood and was sold in payments to a drawer of water who drilled a well there, built a small shack and sold water to the residents. When the War of Independence broke out in 1948, he fled to America. Later on, the well dried up, the plot was sold by his daughter, and after a few more failed speculative turns, came into our hands. We started to build in the last October of the 20th Century.

Since the War of 1967, Israeli architecture has been a combination of Jewish creation and Arab labor. Below the corporate scale, most of the construction in Israel is carried out by Palestinian contractors and Palestinian laborers, from both sides of the Green Line. In this regard, my house was no exception, even more so since my intention was to build it at half the price of the average construction cost, at $500 per meter, including VAT. As an architect, I knew in advance that this house would be built mainly by Palestinians and I was also well aware of what this means: architects call it “tolerance”. This does not refer to the value of Tolerance as it usually appears in public or political discourse, but to the measure of Tolerance of the architect to the difference between the plan and the execution, and the margin of error that he is prepared to permit the craftsmen. In the nature of things, when relationships such as employee-employer, supplier-customer and contractor-architect are multiplied by the relationship of controlled-controller and occupied-occupier as well, the architectural “tolerance” could be re-charged with political implications. I see all this when I look at my house, because I see the fingerprints of all the people who had built it, most of them Palestinians. When I look at the house, I see their labor, their efforts and their endeavors, and sometimes their mistakes, their omissions and their sabotage as well. As a house of which many parts are in exposed concrete and in clean construction, there is no doubt that the main handprint belongs to Haider, the structure contractor. Haider is an Israeli Palestinian, a superb and clever professional from the village of Zalafa in Wadi Ara. The work with him led to a complex friendship. I cannot write about him. Afterwards Abed appeared, the head of a group of plasterers from the village of Habla near Kalkilya. I chose him because in principle, we set for ourselves the rule “to choose the cheapest offer” (because even terrible work is better than nothing), and Abed’s offer was scandalously cheap. The work started on the right foot. Abed was a man with one blind eye, but absolutely fascinating. He dreamed of building a wedding hall in his village with the money he saved from his work for the Jews. When we signed the agreement between us, I proudly gave him a copy of "A Bed of a Stranger", a poetry book by Mahmud Darwish in the Hebrew translation of Mahmud Hamza Rnaim, which my wife had published in the same period. Abed didn’t know the work of the Palestinian national poet (and so the Hebrew translation didn’t exactly mean anything to him), and from here on, his other faults also began to reveal themselves. He was apt to leave his workers at various building sites all over the Tel Aviv area and to travel between them on public transport. He was never there when needed and his workers did terrible work: they forgot to make weep holes and the lines were always crooked. “It looks like that because of the sun”, he would insist. “It looks like that because you only see it with one eye”, I would laugh at him. One of his workers, a bearded redhead who would pray for hours, was caught at our house one day in a surprise police raid with an out-of-date work permit. To his luck, a moment before he was arrested, the police were suddenly called to another place. My connection with Abed came to a close in a small Intifada: his workers blocked the drains in the yard with concrete and I was left owing NIS 1700. Months later, I dreamt one night that Israel was conquered by the Syrians and the commander of the Syrian occupation Force came to my house (fat, looking like the Israeli politician Fuad Ben-Eliezer and smoking king-size American cigarettes). Next to him in the jeep I saw Abed, smiling at me with his one eye. He had come to collect the debt.

After Abed’s departure, the group from the refugee camp in Khan Yunis was formed: Jamil, who did everything was the first to arrive; after him came Yussuf, his elder brother, who did the hardest tasks with the chisel and pneumatic hammer; then Izaat arrived, who looked like a poet and did the easiest tasks, mainly throwing out rubbish, bringing water and painting; and finally Fauzi arrived, who did the fine finishes and the artistic repairs. Fauzi was the leader of the group, not because he was the strongest, but because he was the nicest. In fact, he wasn’t a boss; he was a sort of spokesman, ambassador. We immediately became friends.

After Abed's workers blocked my drains I was forced to carry out new drillings, under very difficult approach and work conditions. In the end, I managed to find Oren, who was the only one I found with suitable equipment. During the drilling we came up against a concrete lump. I called Yussuf. Yussuf worked a long hour with the pneumatic hammer while stuck in the hole with his head down and his legs up while three Jews stood over him - Oren the drilling man, the plumber Lior who volunteered to give advice, and myself. While Yussuf was in the hole, struggling with all his might to shatter the concrete lump, he could have heard Oren and Lior cracking jokes about the stupidity that, according to them, was embedded in the character of all the Arabs. I made an all too reasoned and polite objection and regretted it. “You Ashkenazi Jews don’t understand anything”, said Oren, who was an extremely handsome Yemenite. I didn’t expect a more conciliatory position from Lior: his father, who also worked on the site, told me that in his youth in Tripoli, Libya, he saw the corpse of his grandfather hanging on a spit at the head of a parade after a pogrom. “Even your Chinese already understand better than you”, he says and calls to Yu and Chin, the two ceramic gluers who came here from the academy for gluing ceramics in Beijing (who had got me used to broken Hebrew and who lived in a deserted Arab hovel in Abu Kabir, or as they called it: “Aku Babir”), nodding and surprising me with their recitation of standard Hebrew: “stupid Arabs”. They laughed and gave Jamil, who had just come from the grocery, a friendly pat. Jamil, on his part, also laughed. Every time he saw Yu, Chin, or any other Chinese, he would double up laughing, just from their appearance.

A month later, in July, a little before the Camp David meeting between Yassr Arafat and Ehud Barak, Jamil came to work one day with a black eye. When I returned home, I told my wife that I suspect we are in trouble. Jamil used to tell me about his private life and the problems in his marriage. He didn’t stop telling me that he would divorce his wife, but I never took him seriously. Neither was I completely convinced by the way he described his marital problems, and I ascribed them more to the fact that he was simply madly horny and had ceased to be attracted to his wife. In any case, one day, in a moment of anger, and after eleven years of marriage and nine children, Jamil told his wife “get lost” three times. He got the black eye from her brothers, who in the nature of things refused “to return her to her mother”. Jamil didn’t leave them much choice. He informed them that, in any event, he was leaving and taking a new wife from Egypt. In the end, the matter was settled with the return of the dowry: $3,000 changed hands and the woman was removed from the house by force. The children remained with him. I was shocked. Jamil was three years younger than me. Even if he wasn’t one of the main beneficiaries of progress (to put it mildly), he was still aware of its existence. He had a television. How could he live with such dark norms? I walked among the workers on the site and asked each of them for his opinion, and it very quickly became clear to me, to my surprise, that I was working with a gang of polygamists. Even the delicate Izaat (whom I was sure that if he had grown up in Paris and not in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, would have become a poet or an artist and not a construction worker), even he had two wives waiting for him in Khan Yunis.

Fauzi was the only one married to one woman, even though nobody had the shadow of a doubt that such a wonderful guy could have succeeded in making even a hundred women happy.

A little more than two weeks after Yom Kippur, Fauzi called again. The money had been transferred safely and what was left of it after the commission the Palestinian Authority charged had been divided amongst the workers. But in the meantime, Fauzi said, his roof had been damaged by a shell. By a miracle nobody was home, but all his wages had gone on repairs and he had no money left, even for flour. He asked me if the work was still his. In a humanitarian outburst, I told him that the work was his. We closed a new contract over the phone and I sent him an advance. A few weeks later his cellular phone was cut off. A year and a half has already passed since then, maybe a little more. We did some of the things ourselves, my wife and I. Some of them I left. Fauzi still owes me a few weeks work. The work is still waiting for him.

Notes

1. This text was originally published in: Zvi Efrat (editor), Borderline Disorder, the catalogue of the Israeli presentation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2002.

2. The photo with the tiger (the house is on the background, in the center of the photo, next to the palm tree) was taken by Gila Kaplan and was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue of "Darom" (South), a Hebrew fiction series edited by Haim Pesah for Babel. The other photos were taken by Orna Marton and me.
3. After the publication of this text, in 2003 or 2004, Fauzi succeeded to pass the checkpoint and worked for two more days. I told him nothing about the text, nor to Haider, who paid me a visit few months later. I spoke with Fauzi few times on the phone. He told me that his daughter had a serious medical problem. I transferred to him one more advance. Over the years, his means to communicate have gradually deteriorated (and my means of paiment too). Then, in 2005, or in 2006, his cel-phone was cut. I have not heard from him since.

Stripes

2008-04-19T05:50:00.003+03:00

Rubinstein Towers, Tel Aviv, completed 1997 / Avraham Yasky & Yossi Sivan, Sharon Rotbard, architects

The "Rubinstein Towers" project was one of my main occupations at Yasky's office, and had been keeping me busy for more than three years.Originally, I arrived there by the end of 1993, shortly after my return to Israel, in order to work in the large team they constituted for the design development of Azrieli towers.

Azrieli Towers was the city's landmark project. It was a three towers composition (round, square and triangular plans) designed by the architect Eli Atyia, and was the winner of a restrained competition organized by the municipality of Tel Aviv joining architects and developers. But after a dispute with the developer David Azrieli, who wished to share the credit on the design, and after a long public controversy and even a longer legal procedure, the project was taken from Atyia and given to Yasky, Israel's largest firm.
At the time, the project was still named "HaShalom Towers" (the Peace Towers) after "HaShalom road" passing nearby, but certainly echoed the Rabin "peace process" of this era. Shortly after the collapse of the peace process, Azrieli easily changed the name of the building and named it after his own.

I worked few weeks on the project. Azrieli was indeed profoundly involved in the design, and sent every night by fax (there were no emails at the time) sketches and comments. After some time I wished to resign from this project.

At this period I met Yasky for the first time. In a discussion he organized one evening, where he presented the office's projects in Tel Aviv, I criticized the design of most of those projects based on what I considered as a simplist and commercial interpretation of certain deconstructivist moves from the Eighties (`this one`, for example).
Yasky was surprised and visibly offended by my comment, but few days later he called me to his office and asked me to be "the house keeper" of the Rubinstein project in Neve Shaanan neighborhood, on the limit of what I called years after, "the Black City". He gave me a rough sketch of the outline of the building and said that I can do everything except changing it since "it was scratched by the legal advisor of the regional committee". Although, as a young architect, I wished to take a project "from scratch", I accepted his offer on the spot. Surrounded by a cacophony of noisy office buildings (especially a horrible Gudovitch building on the other side of the street), I wished that the project would be as calm and as sober as possible. "I'd like it to look as a Swiss medication company's headquarter", I said to him.

At that time, the project was named "HaSharon Towers" after "Hasharon Street" passing nearby, but soon after my own arrival to the project, the client, Avraham Rubinstein, changed it to "Rubinstein Towers". Rubinstein was at his late seventies. He was a small, clever guy ("In his generation", explained me Yasky, "a developer is a contractor with sharp elbows"). Rubinstein had been leading for years a crusade against Tel Aviv's engineering administration, and above all, against the permit department. He used to pun the Hebrew department's name "Agaf HaRishui" and called it "Agaf HaResha" ('Evil department").

Despite its name, certainly echoing Azrieli's landmark project, "Rubinstein Towers" is in fact one building served by three cores, and is probably the shortest office tower in Tel Aviv (13 floors) - a handicap that I tried to correct as much as I could whenever I took photos of the building.

But the main problem of the project was a constraint imposed by an old, forgotten municipal plan, to enable a future extension of the Har Zion Avenue, if and when the old bus station would be shut down. I am probably one of the only people who ever saw this plan. In all the city's later plans, years after the old station had been indeed shut down, this extension never appeared. As a condition to grant him with a construction permit, the "Evil Department" imposed Rubinstein to add to the building's land register a mention of "public pleasure linkage", to ensure the public character and status of the ground level. This condition forced us to coordinate the planning of the basement and ground floor levels according to the different hypothetical phases of the avenue's extension project, and to erect the building over a large span, in order to allow the passage of the future avenue underneath.

In order to solve this structural problem, I convinced the project manager, Uri Madpis, to change the structural engineer, who had provided me with concrete elements' sections of two to three square meters. This change was a unique occasion to work with Shmaya Ben Avraham (1925-2004), one of the giants of Israeli structural engineering (and one of the nicest guys I have ever met), and his team, composed by his partner Moti Cohen and the young engineer in charge, Avinoam Horowitz. In the very first meeting Shmaya changed the structure from concrete to steel. Avinoam had been serving in the Israeli army as an explosive officer. After each working session, we used to start all over again, figuring out the best way to blow the whole thing down.

"Rubinstein Towers" was the first Tel Avivian office building in the Nineties with a "real" curtain wall that goes from the ceiling to the floor. In most of the buildings at this time, the glass served as a cladding material for the spandrels area up to the window's level. This curtain wall was also the first one with the "bull-nose" aluminum clap-on detail. Rubinstein was a difficult client. He couldn't bear the idea that this unnecessary detail will increase the facade's price by 5$ per square meter. In a crucial, endless meeting, I tried to convince him for hours about the visual necessity of the horizontal aluminum stripes for the building's image, showing numerous examples of modern curtain walls from Mies van Der Rohe to jean Nouvel. After three hours I gave up and asked Yasky to join us. Yasky came in, sat near Rubinstein, smiled to him and asked him what is the matter. "Your architect gives me hard time", said Rubinstein, "Those aluminum stripes, they cost me 5$ per square meter and they are good only for the pigeons to sit on them and to shit all over the place". Yasky smiled and replied calmly: "So, Rubinstein, could you please tell me why you are wearing this striped shirt?" Rubinstein looked on his own shirt and indeed, it was striped. He was completely surprised. It was clear that he hadn't been looking at himself in the mirror that morning. "OK, Yasky", he said, "You got me this time. Let's keep those stripes".
This was the last time I saw him. He had a heart attack three days later while visiting one of his building sites.

note: The main user of the building is Bank Hapoalim, who added a giant electricity generator on the back of the building's eastern part, with a horizontal chimney directed to the sidewalk. For the public pleasure, they installed under the building some bycicle parking stands which caused me, literally, a lot of pain.