Nitzan-Shiftan, Alona. 2006. “The Israeli ‘Place’ in East Jerusalem.” In City of Collision

• Israeli built environment appropriated the Palestinian aesthetic after the 1967 War
• Modern yet not modern
• Bigger picture how colonizers appropriate culture to define their own culture

The Search for Place

• Beautiful approach to Jerusalem
• Buildings related to local topography

A Profession Seeking the Architecture of ‘The Place’

• No national home
• Create sense of belonging
• Life dictates form
• Social ethics from European Team 10
• Man and place
• Nativeness from Palestinians

The Ambivalence of Colonial Cultural Production

• Israeli desire to achieve the Arab’s nativeness
• Native architecture mostly Arab
• Debate on Arab habitat caught up in Israeli-Palestinian conflict after 1956.

Seizing Locality in Jerusalem

• After seizure and 1967 War, Israeli planners asked to transform the land
• Unified look to city
• Give oriental character
• Symbols of the conquered found on architecture

“Biblicizing” the Landscape

• New sense of local in Palestinian villages
• Continuity of ancient building traditions

The Noble Savage and the Origins of Architecture

• Designing the Jerusalem Habitat
• Limited resources and devoid of historical depth
• Origin of Jerusalem was biblical, serving to validate peoples’ lives

Mediterraneanism

• 1977, Ram Karmi published “Humban Values in Urban Architecture”
• Define vernacular for national community
• Timeless patterns

The Ethics of Israeli Place-Making

• Very best of Israeli place-making: seeking physical and spiritual right to the land
• Creating place is emotional and symbolic
• Israelize Jerusalem by nationalizing the territory

Postscript

Focus shifted after post-World War II, depriving others of their symbolic ownership of their built environment.

• There is still a tradition of place.
• Modern Bauhaus Style
• Gray modernism
• Redefine a modernist tradition

Frampton, K., 1983. Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance (H. Foster, Ed.), the Anti-Aesthetic; Essays on Postmodern Culture.

Excerpt by Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth

• Universalization can destroy cultures, in essence the nucleus of mankind
• Do we need to jettison the old culture to make progress?
• Science and technology take abandon of a whole cultural past, but then where are your roots?
• Become modern vs. return to sources

Culture and Civilization

• Optimized technology limits significant urban form
• Maintenance of social control
• High-tech vs. compensatory façade
• “Cover up harsh realities of this universal system”
• The rapacity of development is hurting us
• Utility cannot be sole meaning
• Means to an end

The Rise and Fall of the Avant-Garde

• Avant-Garde architecture positive for the Enlightenment
• Mis-19^th century avant-garde adverse to industrial process
• Modernization continues
• Futurism arose after turn of century
• In 1930s, the state is divorced from modernization because people in crisis
• Arts had to prove its value in its own right
• Mass culture by media industry: television
• Mass production

Critical Regionalism and World Culture

• Architecture must distance itself equally from the Enlightenment of progress and the forms of the preindustrial past to be sustained
• Critical Regionalism: meditate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from a place
• Deconstruct world culture, impose limits on optimization
• Necessity for resynthesizing principles drawn from diverse origins
• Case study: Jorn Utzon’s Bagsvaerd Church in Copenhagen (1976)
• Modern concrete outside, spiritual feeling (non-Western architecture) inside
• Local ventilation better

The Resistance of the Place-form

• Cannot maintain defined urban forms
• No clearly defined boundary
• Dwelling needs to be bound
• Place-form dependent upon domain

Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form

• Tabula rasa tendency of modernization = flat datum created by machinery in architecture, this in itself creates a placelessness
• Use of natural light in architecture goes against universal optimum
• “local light spectrum never permitted to play across the artwork’s surface” in galleries
• Light changes with climate and local light gives artworks more complexity, as it should be seen

The Visual Versus the Tactile

• Tactile resilience of place-form has capacity to resist the domination of universal technology
• Body and all the senses experiences space
• Body acts differently with solid floor or friction on steps
• The environment cannot be exclusively interpreted visually

Prakash, Vikramaditya, Maristella Casciato, and Daniel E. Coslett. 2021. “Global Modernism and the Postcolonial.” In Rethinking Global Modernism, by Vikramaditya Prakash, Maristella Casciato, and Daniel E. Coslett, 1st ed., 3–26. London: Routledge

• Postcolonial critiques have fundamentally changed our understanding of the past and present.
• Exploration of global modernization is NOT just a question of including “non-Western” examples in established canons, but rethinking origins and modernist ideas
• Seeks to decolonize and globalize that canon

Global History

• Impulse to unify
• Enamel door of Assembly Building by Le Corbusier
• Utopian aspirations in making of Chandigarh, institutions influenced direction
• Organic entities with intents represented by arrows, but there is no clear center even though each entity has a direction.
• Inevitable gaps in any historiographical project because of simplifications in accounting, louder voices should not be the only ones heard

The Postcolonial Critique

• The whole world is postcolonial
• Why is the West the future?
• West is made-up by Westerners who want to be better than others
• Global history needs to be diverse

Global Modernism

• Modernism is a global inheritance
• Modern architecture a critical part of the exploitative colonial infrastructure
• Modernism impatience, colonies seen as ideal site for innovative practices
• Modernism was not mainstream

Post-postcolonial, or the partially known to come

• Incomplete history
• Hub and spoke model that placed the West at the center and the rest in the peripheries
• The Painting Ball by Analia Saban is a commentary on traditional methods. The ball is made of more than 100 paintings that were dismantled and reassembled into the bound ball.
• One thread pulled, moves others. This is an example of the historiographic re-assemblage process, deconstructive and reconstructive.

Response to Towards a Critical Regionalism:

I have never thought about how creating a flat ground by excavating earth is creating placelessness. I have thought about it in terms of ease and economics with the invention of heavy machinery that can do the job, but not in terms of placelessness. Maybe it’s because most of the houses I see are built on level ground. I liked the phrase Frampton used: When the structure is built on the topography, it has the “capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time.” Connection to place can be subtlety incorporated into a structure by working with, instead of against, topography. The topography most likely has been manipulated before, but when you get it, choosing to incorporate the land instead of removing it, is a big statement. I just said “get it” meaning having the opportunity to be the architect to design the structure. I realize now that “get it” implies ownership and a power over the land instead of a cooperation with and thoughtfulness of the past. Interesting how certain ways of thinking have been ingrained in us through the culture we were raised in.

Application and Interpretation:

Kampung Admiralty in Singapore

• Building: Kampung Admiralty
• Architects: WOHA
• Date Completed: 2017
• Country: Singapore

The Kampung Admiralty shows how natural light and ventilation can be utilized in architecture not only to enhance experiential qualities of artwork as Frampton pointed out, but also to grow lush greenery.  The tactile and olfactory qualities of the space are enhanced because of the plants. The Medical Centre in Kampung Admiralty has its waiting areas washed in natural daylight through a central courtyard. The goal is to promote wellness and healing for residents through these natural experience. Residents can exercise and chat with others in the Community Park. The apartment units are designed for natural cross ventilation and optimum daylight. All of these factors give the residents a sense of connection to the natural environment.

Source: https://www.archdaily.com/904646/kampung-admiralty-woha

Takeaways:

• Culture can be appropriated though architecture
• The balance between modernization and culture should be pursued
• Material choice is important