Reading Summaries

“The Israeli ‘Place’ in East Jerusalem” by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

This article assesses the interaction of global modernism, regional style, and conquest in the formation of an Israeli-specific architecture.

“Gray modernism” was common in Israel in the 1940s and ’50s. It was meant to turn away from the “oriental” and “bourgeois” architecture of Palestine. However, a new generation of Israeli architects found this style to be unconvincing, “doing violence” to the local landscape. They wanted to inject a sense of place into their architecture in order to find a physical and symbolic home in Israel.

They found that one of the best ways to do this was to actually look back to the local Palestinian architecture for inspiration. When Israelis seized East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967, they were tasked with presenting one unified city through buildings. Palestinian vernacular provided the blueprint.

The obvious contradiction here is that in order to symbolically claim the land for themselves, Israeli architects sought inspiration from the very people they had displaced.

They justified this in three ways. 1) They “Biblicized the landscape” by focusing on old Jerusalem and its architecture (the Wailing Wall and the newly excavated Jewish Quarter) as Jewish cultural heritage. 2) They utilized the familiar notion of Darwinian evolution. In combining vernacular forms with modern technology, they were taking the next step forward. 3) They reframed “Palestinian architecture” as “Mediterranean architecture,” focusing on commonalities with broader regional ideas.

As a postscript, since 1967, Israel has largely shifted back to modernism as true “Iraeli” architecture.

“Toward a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance” by Kenneth Frampton

The essay starts by asking whether the movement toward modernity necessarily entails abandoning regional style. A lot of modern culture is pretty tacky, and so it would be beneficial to find a way to preserve regionalism while still gaining the benefits of science and technology. How do we do this?

Modern cities (the Megalopolis) have become soulless reiterations of the same high-rise buildings tucked between ribbons of freeway. Worse, utility has ceased to be the means to an end and is now thought of as having meaning in itself. Arendt says, “Utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.”

Modernism has blasted its way through the 19th and 20th centuries, trampling over all resistance from the likes of Gothic revivalism and the Arts and Crafts movement. Post WWII, science, technology, and modernism by extension brought us to the brink of destruction, and therefore can’t be drawn on as a stabilizing force. Just as regrettably, post modernism turned to pandering and brought the end of the avant garde.

In response, Frampton proposes a strategy of critical regionalism. While we have to guard against devolving into populism, critical regionalism offers us the best of both worlds. Urbanization needs a sense of place in order to be potent (per Heidegger’s conception of space). We can achieve that through incorporating topographical reference, tectonic architecture, full spectrum light, and tactile materials. This allows reference to place without becoming sentimental.

“Global Modernism and the Postcolonial” by Vikramaditya Prakash, Maristella Casciato, and Daniel E. Coslett

We’ve heard that simply adding “non-West” works to the cannon doesn’t solve colonialism. So what do we do instead?

The first step is to recognize the impacts and tenets of colonialism, both obvious and subtle. For starters, European modernism saw itself as far more inevitable than it probably was. Any given work is contingent on a whole string of happenstances. In assessing history, we need to look for blind spots and incorporate truly diverse voices to mitigate partiality.

Further, we need to challenge the West’s conception of itself in addition to its conception of the non-West. It posited that it was on a relentless march toward progress and that it was the purveyor of rationality. We should challenge this, although interestingly, the idea of self-critique may itself be tied up in western conceptions of rationality.

While modernism is clearly tied up in colonialism, it isn’t as straightforward as we might think. In many cases, avant-garde ideas actually spread faster in colonies because they met resistance in Europe itself. In other cases, post-colonies embraced certain forms of modernism and tried to leapfrog the painful industrialization seen in Europe. Lastly, modernism gave some on the “periphery” the ability to talk back to colonizers using modernist standards.

In summation, things are complex and the future is unknown. The best that we can do is incorporate many voices in our understanding of the past and recognize the vast range of eventualities in our future.

Critical Response

The thing that I found striking in comparing the three readings is just how nebulous our path forward is. Let me be clear from the outset: I think that’s a good thing.

History tends to appear straightforward and inevitable. After all, it has already been settled by the time it gets to us. 19th century industrialization, the World Wars, the modernist movement all happened, and they can be summed up as succinctly as one would like. It’s easy to miss all of the competing interests, chance occurrences, and natural variation that these big ideas hide.

I appreciated our reading on postcolonialism for its stress on thorough historiography. We can theorize all we want, but without gathering good, nuanced information, we’re not going to arrive at anything particularly helpful.

I also appreciated the idea of critical regionalism as a way to offer a sense of place and identification without resorting to cheap imitation. In a way, we can rely on sensitivity to local ecologies to get us most of the way toward a rich and varied architecture.

I think the Israeli architects ran into local ecologies when they were trying to create a symbolic home for themselves. Vernacular architecture is very good at responding to its immediate surroundings. There are some widely applicable principles that modern technology has enabled, but even so, place can dictate form if we let it. So it’s no wonder that Israeli architects and Palestinian fellahin came up with some similar solutions.

We don’t need a universal style to come up with good architecture. We may not even need a universal style for efficient architecture. Maybe we can make technology and information available and let happenstance take care of the rest.

Application

UC Innovation Center by Alejandro Aravena/ELEMENTAL

I can’t imagine calling this building “sentimental,” “soulless,” or “placeless.” These were some of the critiques levied by our authors this week, and through the “rigorous use of common sense,” ELEMENTAL and Alejandro Aravena avoided all of them. So says Alejandro Aravena.

In a lot of ways, this building looks modern. Concrete is the primary building material. It is based on a grid of columns. It is unornamented and relies on its form for visual interest. It is also mostly scaleless when viewed from the exterior.

However, it looks nothing like many other takes on modernism that are adjacent to it in Santiago. It is a clear critique of the surrounding glass-skinned office buildings. The architects instead chose to invert the norm, placing the concrete mass on the exterior and the glass skin inside. They did this in response to the climate. Deep window penetrations allow filtered daylight in without directly warming the interior, and the exterior mass helps regulate fluctuations in temperature. ELEMENTAL claims that the building uses about one third the energy per cubic meter as a comparably scaled, glass skinned office.

This building comes close to Kenneth Frampton’s ideal. Use modern technology and ideas that are in wide circulation in conjunction with the realities of a given location. The end result is contemporary without lacking character or a sense of place.

Takeaways

• Modern architecture has a lot to offer. We just need to be aware of the narrative surrounding it.
• Attention to place is the key to richness in architecture.
• There is nothing inevitable about architecture or any work of architecture.
• Any one perspective is partial at best.