The Israeli ‘Place’ in East Jerusalem

What makes a home identifiable? A country and a culture recognizable? These are questions the “Sabra”, the first generation of Israeli born architects wrestled with as the nation of Israel became a reality. The Jews of Diaspora came to Israel from all over the world, and brought with them many different styles – but none could be said to be “Israeli”. Pushing back against the uniform modernity of the “international style”, the “Sabra” architects turned to the local Arab architecture for inspiration – noting that it just plain worked. While this appropriation of the Palestinian vernacular architecture might seem strange for Israel to do, considering the history of strife with Arabs peoples, the author proposes it might make sense in three different ways: Through the biblical context in which Israel, from antiquity, also has claim to this land and architecture. Through the indigenous lens – in which this is just simple, effective, shelter. And lastly through the broad brush of a regional “Mediterranean” architecture.

Toward a Critical Regionalism

Critical Regionalism is touted by the author as the “only way sustain architecture as a critical practice.” And by and large what he seems to mean by that is that critical regionalism is the only liberative architecture left and is the tool we have to “resist the domination of universal technology” and the “relentless onslaught of global modernization”. The Author identifies the practice of critical regionalism as the mediation of modernization and universal civilization through use of a deconstructed culture. This is can achieved through a variety avenues including: the bounded space-form, nature, and the tactile.

Global Modernism and the Postcolonial

While the historiography of modernism and modern architecture is one of a euro-centrist ideological narrative, efforts are underway to repaint the picture to one of “global modernism”. A visual comparison of Le Corbusier’s door at Chandigarh with Julie Mehretu’s Migration Direction Map serves as an allegory for this process. Critical to this process is the de-colonization of not only modernism, the colonies, but also the west as the “west”. The “west” being a construct like the “orient” that holds onto ownership of “universal reason, science, democracy, world heritage and so on.” The physics of diffraction may serve as a better example on the dissemination of modernism than the euro-centrism hub-and-spoke method. Modernism is a global inheritance and should be received and recorded as such.

Critique of Critical Regionalism

I would critique Frampton’s example of Jorn Utzon’s Baegvald Church, in Copenhagen, Denmark, as a piece of critical regionalism as being any different then the universalist, abstract, architecture of modernity. Frampton goes into great detail over how the inside section of the Baegvald references, per utzons words, the “pagodas” of china, and how well they have been secularized to remove any symbolism of the “orient” or “spiritual” references. I fail to see how this secularization and dilution of a “cultural sacred form” is any different and any more meaningful than the universalist aesthetic of production that Frampton seems to be fighting against.

Building Application

Pedregulho Housing Complex, Rio De Janiero

The Israeli “Sabra” were not the only architects and people wrestling with a national identity.  Post-colonial Brazil went through much a similar process, with 90% of their infrastructure being built in the 20th century.  The political powers and architects of Brazil though embraced modernism (many of them being educated in Europe have eased this process) and set about building their national identity and ideology.  The Pedregulho housing complex is one of the most architectonic celebrated buildings of Brazilian modernism and was to represent a future for Brazil’s working class.

Takeaways

• The importance of architecture and space in Identity and placemaking
• Vernacular just works – there’s something to be said for techniques and methods that have been around for centuries
• Critique is an important part of culture and adds a balancing effect
• History is written by those in power and is open for critique