LITMIR.BIZ

      The reconstruction of Kikar Batei Machase, the main square in the Jewish Quarter early 1970s, IP.

      In 1974 Karmi became chief architect at the Ministry of Construction and Housing, which at the time still oversaw most residential construction in Israel and which had gained a reputation for promoting fast and cheap housing solutions in rows of housing blocks. Karmi was the most visible of a group of Israeli architects attuned to the historicist tendencies of the Jerusalem Committee and to worldwide developments in architecture. These architects were mostly young, returning from study periods in elite architectural schools worldwide, and in particular from the hot-house of new architectural ideas, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, from which Karmi himself had graduated. Like many in Israel’s professional class, most of them were supporters of the Labor Party, which between 1967 and 1977 was the executive force behind the colonization of Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories.

      For these young practitioners, the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s – epitomized by the state-sponsored socialist housing blocks of European modernism – was sterile, heartless and lacking an important component, ‘meaning’. These architects had not for the most part returned to Israel out of nationalist conviction but rather because, as young architects, they were happy to be given the opportunity to build, and to engage with issues that were then at the centre of architectural discourse. They may have been aware that their projects were built on expropriated Palestinian lands, and precipitated personal and national tragedies, but they suppressed such thoughts, pretending to engage with these projects in a ‘purely’ professional way.

      Upon taking up his role, in a move echoing that of Storrs, Karmi halted all projects in Jerusalem and set a team of experts to oversee a new citywide planning programme. For Karmi, ‘the search for national identity must be conducted through architecture.’⁵⁰ In the introduction to ‘Israel Builds’ the 1977 official publication of the Ministry of Housing, he explained the shift in the focus of architectural production: ‘We live under the pressure of a shortage of housing … We make every effort to build as much as our budget permits … Still I feel that in all those efforts there is a lack of one component, the component around which Israel came into existence: the establishment of a “national home” … Home means more than just the narrow confines of one’s apartment; it also implies a sense of belonging to the immediate surroundings …’⁵¹ Architecture was to become a central player, no less, in the redesign of territory as a home.

      But where was such ‘meaning’ to be found? According to Karmi, it was located in the particular nature of the nation’s terrain itself: ‘Just as we did not create the Hebrew language ex-nihilo, but built it up on the foundations of the language that was spoken 2000 years ago … so we are not starting [to construct buildings] on a blank sheet of paper.’⁵² Inspiration was sought and found, as Alona Nitzan-Shiftan forcefully demonstrated, both above and below the surface: ‘While architects were seeking locality on the ground, archaeologists sought Jewish history underneath its surface.’⁵³ Above the ground, the fabric of Palestinian vernacular architecture – found in the hillside villages and Jerusalem neighbourhoods – was deemed by Israeli architects to retain not the social-physical typologies that have undergone complex historical development, but fossilized forms of biblical authenticity.⁵⁴ Israeli-built culture has always been locked between the contradictory desires to either imitate or even inhabit the stereotypical Arab vernacular, and to define itself sharply and contrastingly against it. Zionists saw the Palestinians either as late-comers to the land, devoid of thousand-year-old roots or, paradoxically, as the very custodians of the ancient Hebrew culture and language of this land – all this without any sense of contradiction.⁵⁵

      Israeli architects’ attraction to local Palestinian architecture was also inspired by another theoretical framework prominent at the time: the 1964 MoMA exhibition ‘Architecture without Architects’. Its extended catalogue became influential in promoting the integration of principles derived from vernacular buildings into the context of international modern architecture. However, in focusing its attention on the formal dimension of vernacular domestic architecture, the exhibition ignored the political and social developments of the communities that constructed them, being somewhat more inclined to see them as atemporal embodiments of ‘the noble savage’.⁵⁶ In a similarly romantic and orientalist vein, Israeli architects’ fascination with the Palestinian vernacular was blind to the complex socioeconomic development of the Palestinian villages and towns they now studied; instead, they assumed that such housing forms had developed organically, without planning. It was a view encapsulated in an observation by Thomas Leitersdorf, another graduate of the Architectural Association in London, who had returned to Israel from a period of work abroad to plan Ma’ale Adumim, the largest settlements in the West Bank, a few kilometres east of Jerusalem: ‘in terms of beauty they [the Palestinians] are way ahead of us! “Architecture without Architects” – this is the Arab village, and this is its beauty … I look upon the morphology of the Arab villages with envy. The beauty of the Arab village lies in its accumulative and somewhat irrational nature … it is always better than when an architect comes in, the architect only spoils things because the architect has to work logically, and they do not …’⁵⁷ The modernization of the Palestinian village – its development as a complex socio-political entity, the conversion of its agrarian economy into a semi-urban one, the abandonment of traditional stone construction, and even, more ironically, the influence of Israeli culture, economy, architecture and construction techniques – remained largely invisible to Leitersdorf and his contemporaries. But beyond his orientalist perspective, which doomed the Palestinian village to a permanent romantic backwardness, an island of ‘tradition’ within an ocean of ‘progress’,⁵⁸ Leitersdorf has missed the contradiction in his own work: the buildings he designed to overlook the Palestinian villages are what irrevocably damaged them.

      At the end of the ‘reconstruction’ of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem only about 20 per cent of the original buildings were actually conserved. The rest were rebuilt, with more storeys in order to accommodate government targets for larger numbers of residents. At present, more than 4,500 people, a third of them yeshiva students from all over the world live in the Jewish Quarter. Most of these inhabitants are national-religious Jews, many of them from the United States, but several artists and architects, influenced by the culture of ‘return to the city centre’ have also made it their home. An example for the latter type of settlers are the architects Moshe Safdie and Elinoar Barzacchi, later the Chief Architect of the District of Jerusalem, who returned to Israel in 1977 after a period of study and work in Paris and Rome. She recently explained her decision to settle there: ‘I came from Europe and I thought the most wonderful place to live in Jerusalem is in the Old City. In Rome I lived in the Old City. In Paris I lived in Montmartre. Here in the [Jewish] Quarter it looked to me like the most Jerusalemite thing there is, the most authentic, the most multicultural it can be.’⁵⁹