Not necessarily in that order.

Summaries:

The Israeli ‘Place’ in East Jerusalem,  Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

Nitzan-Shiftan seeks to show how professional discourse legitimizes Israeli settler society. Lifta serves as influence for the settling generation, towards an Israeli ‘place” but still clearly references Palestinian culture. By 1967, Team 10 + other architects: emphasis on vernacular architecture defined by life rather than creatives for buildings. “What is different in our time” reframed to “what is always essentially the same?” 

Maqom: encounter between man and the place where he is: tension between text and the territory. Sabras borrow “nativeness” from other places: slang, attire, cooking… seeking to define. The new culture of the colonizer relies on the identity of the colonized for its connection to define the new “authentic” identity- tension! The sabras seize locality in Jerusalem: aiming to cement the perception of unity constructing “facts on the ground” Israeli adoption of palestinian symbology is the opposite of historical (Roman) phenomena. 3 strategies for “Israelizing” the arab vernacular:

1. “Biblicizing” the Landscape: Preserving Old Jaffa, the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall within Jerusalem-  standard examples of living no longer generic, but an embodiment of Jewish history, thanks to architect and archaeologist coordination in the green belt around the old city.
2. The noble savage and the origins of architecture: Safdie fusing the modern with the ancient via “two instruments” one vernacular and one technological, using historically “devoid” palestinian refugee villages with modernism methods. 
3. Mediterraneanism by Ram Karmi- 1977: use of historical mediterranean architecture as a hierarchical guide for the built environment, from house to system- divesting from Arab / palestinian influence 

Postscript: Political pitfalls of “localist” focus- “dark tendencies that are fundamentalist in essence”- Younger generation turning to modernism or “gray modernism”- major lapse of provincial responsibility. 

Toward a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance, Kenneth Frampton 

Firstly, citing Paul Ricoeur- History and Truth: “Every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. There is that paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources”. Frampton proposes 6 principles of architectural resistance: 

1. Culture and civilization: Contemporary practice: So focused on optimized technology, falling into either a “high-tech” production obsession approach or compensating to cover it. Loss of the dialogue between civilization and culture, where now everything is defined by “means and ends” Dissolution of cities defined by culture: homogenizing high rise and the “serpentine freeway”
2. The rise and fall of the avant-garde: The aftermath of WWI- science, medicine, technology coalescing- seems promising to the public. Results in a strategic withdrawal for the avant-garde from the “project of totally transforming the existing reality… as long as the struggle between socialism and capitalism persists”. Frampton posits art has become only for entertainment, or commercial- “towards pure technique [skill] or pure [depiction].”
3. Critical regionalism and world culture: By exercising self consciousness, critical practice can mediate universality with elements “indirectly” from peculiar elements of a place used judiciously. Both have an impact on the proverbial “us” and by considering both we usher in both to carry on, with all the attached conflict. Synthesis: Utzon’s Bagsvaerd church. Concrete, universal, and shell vault evoking sacredness, idiosyncratic. Secularizing the sacred form- named religious symbols absent- approaching collective spirituality.
4. The resistance of the place-form: City planning has become about allocated land use and the distribution networks between them. Heidegger rears his head yet again: “…only defined boundary permits a built form to stand against it, and to withstand in an institutional sense the influence of the “Megalopolis”. The power of a place being tied to its political, institutional, and physical dimensions.
5. Culture Vs Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form: Layering the modern and the regional culture by “building the site” as opposed to bulldozing a site flat. By working with the site, potential to “embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place”. Tectonics as elevating construction techniques to art form.
6. The visual vs the tactile: “The tactile and the tectonic jointly have the capacity to transcend the mere appearance of the technical in much the same way as the place-form has the potential to withstand the relentless onslaught of global modernization.” 

Global Modernism and the Postcolonial- Vikramaditya Prakash, Maristella Casciato, and Daniel E. Coslett

In this excerpt, the authors aim to revisit the canons of modernism and the work to decolonize that canon using postcolonial and other theoretical frameworks. 

In global history, the authors cover the slow unlinking of the history of modern architecture from colonialist eurocentrism. The same avant garde that ushered in the modern presented it as an “inevitable consequence of historical events” and a “repudiation of that history… to universality”. Even through this contradiction, the authors argue the root of modernism’s strong influence is a pervading notion to unify. The contrast between expressions of modernism and the depictions of unity in Corbusier’s door and Mehretu’s map present the “real” nature of modernism: self-assured and utopian vs. negotiable contentions and fractal. There is a distinct gap between history “as it was” and “as it is told”, and thus the need for postcolonial critique. 

The attempt by the West to distinguish itself with terms like “Renaissance” is actually isolating. The postcolonial approach strives to both represent the non-west and free individuals from designation of West. Conversely, non-west architects still apparently need to justify themselves when using the modern forms. White architects from the metropoles practiced in the former colonies, these countries’ “Postcolonial leap-frogging” aimed to attain benefits of industrialization without adopting the problems of their former linked metropoles. 

Finally, in the “partially known to come” prospect of the future, the authors emphasize the importance of Influence. Whether from the origin or the peripheries, both have as much from entropy as they do causality.

Critique:

While Nitzan-Shiftan covers the influences through a thinly-veiled “impartial” history, there is a bleak reality through Israel’s cultural development that models the Colonizer appropriating the colonized. Forcing oneself back into a country on religious grounds and then not even having a cultural backbone to support it without borrowing from the people they just displaced is somehow worse than the roman approach of converting the newly conquered land into a decidedly roman satellite. If one cannot identify with the land one is claiming heritage and nativeness to, how legitimate can such a claim be?

“Only architecture ‘of the place’ could identify Israelis with the territory to which they wanted to belong and possess.”

Application:

Kenneth Frampton references Heidegger and the definition of barriers as crucial to defining a space. This is taken further by Arendt, who uses this prerequisite to emphasize the how and need for expression through Urban forms: an (institutionally) resistant architecture is dependent on a clearly defined domain- perimeter block, atrium, forecourts become important “pseudo-public realms”, places with latent potential. I believe an excellent example of the power of the “in-between” realms is Metropol Parasol or “Las Setas” in Seville, Spain. Containing history in roman ruins in its roots and reaching towards the sky and future in aspirational form and material, This structure contains multiple small spaces of gathering and offers one massive one to the citizens of the otherwise cramped old town Seville. The plaza beneath “Las Setas” has been the site of several political demonstrations and inadvertently become the symbol of local social activists. 

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Takeaways:

• Culture borrowed is stolen
• To define a barrier is to define that against it
• The contradiction of the avant-garde: Modernism is an “inevitable consequence of historical events” and also a “repudiation of that history… to universality”.