Summary of “Home Planning and Gender in Mandatory Palestine”

In this essay, Sigal Davidi discusses the discourse on home planning in Eratz Yisrael in the late 1920s and 1930s, specifically focusing on the design of kitchens as a women’s issue. Davidi’s main focus throughout the piece seems to be Lotte Cohn, a female architect who moved to mandatory Palestine in 1921 and advocated for women’s input on home designs. Cohn believed that to maximize the efficiency of kitchen work and save time for women to pursue their own interests and needs, kitchens should be larger. However, her ideas were not particularly accepted until later in the 1950s, due to the context of several competing notions and social factors.

After 1933, the influx of Jewish immigration to Palestine created a massive demand for housing, especially in cities like Tel Aviv, and despite a surge of construction, the demand couldn’t be met. New ideas from Germany came with this mass immigration, which influenced local debates and introduced modern ideals. However, these early discussions almost entirely ignored the intersections of gender and domestic planning. Companies like the Histadrut and Rassco really just focused on creating functional housing for workers and immigrants. Back in Germany, the Frankfurt kitchen was designed to be a modernist and functionalist advancement– it was only 70 square feet, and isolated kitchen work which rendered women invisible. In Palestine, Erna Meyer introduced the idea of this working kitchen as something that would help advance the capable and rational image of the “New Jew.” Women architects found lots of opportunity for work in Palestine on urban projects and public buildings but were still associated with domesticity and weren’t always taken seriously in their contributions to the discourse.

Re-enter Lotte Cohn, who lectured at the Histadrut in 1944 and once again proposed enlarging kitchens to lighten the load for women and improve the function of these spaces. Although Elizabeth Coit, an American architect, had proposed the same idea 2 years prior; and although leading male architect Ariah Sharon also recommended making kitchens bigger at the same conference, Cohn’s ideas were glossed over in favor of Alexander Klein’s designs that emphasized the importance of a large living room and a small working kitchen.

Summary of “An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism”

In this article, Monique Eleb explores the idea of “habitat,” which changed in the early 1950s thanks to architects in Morocco. Michel Ecochard, who led the Service de l’Urbanisme in the protectorate, was a guiding force in this since his team contributed to the phenomenon of the functionalist discourse shifting southward while offering new and unusual levels of consideration to local customs and lifestyles. The idea of “habitat” moved away from the very logical, machine-driven ideas of functionalism and accounted for cultural contest. Ecochard explored creating adapted housing for Muslims, Jews, and Europeans that considered the differences between the groups. He also created a grid system for designing housing. Subsequently, the ATBAT team in Casablanca advocated for collective housing inspired by vernacular architecture in the rural south. The innovations of the Service de l’Urbanisme also relied on architects from GAMMA who were the Moroccan arm of CIAM. In 1953, ATBAT-Afrique created 3 radically new collective housing units that incorporated elements of traditional casbahs while adhering to a modern style. Overall, these buildings and Ecochard’s explorations aimed to design housing “for the greatest number.” While these advances aimed to question universalism, certain Muslim groups still viewed the adapted habitat as a form of colonial paternalism. Yet from the western perspective, adapted architecture was intended to encourage inhabitants to slowly accept modernism and the education it provided.  The dichotomy between universalism and incorporation of regional elements was nevertheless complex, as even Ecochard focused on universalist approaches for housing for Europeans and regional approaches for others.

Summary of “The Right to the City: From Capital Surplus to Accumulation by Dispossession”

Here, David Harvey argues the importance of the right to the city as a collective human right. By this, he further explains that he means the right to change the city to match our needs and desires. However, this right is often neglected. The re-shaping of cities is inextricably tied to urbanization, and thus to capitalism. Urban landscapes are self-contradictory in their illustration of progress– while parts of cities exemplify immense wealth and innovation, we cannot ignore the fact that this is juxtaposed with extreme poverty in what the United Nations calls “a planet of slums.” Harvey explains that the daily task of the capitalist is to end the day with more money and reinvest the profit or consume it in the pursuit of pleasures. Perpetuyal reinvestment causes surplus, and urbanization is one process that can absorb this surplus. An example of this in history was the reconfiguration of Paris beginning in 1853, which was led by Napoleon Bonaparte and Georges-Eugene Haussmann, and absorbed an immense quantity of labor and capital. The new status of Paris as the “city of light” went hand in hand with crass consumerism as a vehicle for reabsorption of surplus capital. In 1942 in the US, an article appeared in an architectural journal that analyzed Haussmann’s methods while pointing out his mistakes. It was written by Robert Moses, who reformed the whole New York metropolitan region in the same sense Haussmann reformed Paris. His creation of soulless suburbs played a role in the discontent that led to revolt in 1968. The same year, Lefebvre wrote that the urban process was imperative for the continuation of capitalism and therefore bound to be a focus of political and class struggles, but also that it was slowly obliterating the divide between town and country. The right to the city is thus also the right to influence the development of rural areas. In tandem with urbanization, every city is also experiencing the growth of slums. The concept of “new urbanism” emphasizes the “boutique lifestyle” of consumerism, but as cities are reconstructed in this image, it’s the poor and underprivileged who are displaced and forgotten. To counter this, we must democratize the right to the city, removing it from the hands of the few, and define a social movement to protect the right.

Critical Response

I thought it was unfortunate that women’s opinions were so ignored in the housing developments of mandatory Palestine. Not only does the existence of Eratz Yisrael raise issues of colonialism, but sexism as well. While women were able to practice as architects in Palestine alongside their male counterparts, it was disappointing to me to read that their ideas weren’t really listened to, and their opinions weren’t taken into account when it mattered. The whole discourse around kitchen layouts felt pointless considering that the ideas of women who were highly qualified to speak on the matter were entirely ignored. As an architect, Lotte Cohn had both the domestic expertise attributed to women of the time and the design education of an experienced professional. As a woman, it’s frustrating to think about the gender inequalities that have been so prevalent in history and persist in our present. While I was glad to learn Cohn’s ideas gained traction in the 50s, I was surprised this didn’t happen sooner.

Application & Interpretation

Reading “An Alternative to Functional Universalism” got me thinking about Le Corbusier’s influence on Japanese architecture. In his design for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, he largely stuck to universalist forms despite working with Japanese architects. The structure features his signature geometric concrete forms and feels very brutalist, with little to no indication of Japanese vernacular. Thus, it represents a lack of adaptation, in contrast to what Ecochard advocated for in his designs. This poses the question– is it worse if a Western power creates a design in a non-Western country that has no reference to its cultural context? In this particular case, does the context of the building as a gallery for Western art negate any responsibility for the architect to consider local vernacular? Further, does Ecochard’s notion of adapting modernism to fit the local culture really ease the transition, or does it still come across as paternalist? The persistent influence of Le Corbusier in the works of Japanese architects suggest they were receptive to universalism, but it’s interesting to consider the contexts.

Take-aways

• While women architects had reasonable opportunities for work in mandatory Palestine, their opinions were still treated as inferior to men’s and they were still relegated to the domestic sphere in many ways.
• “Adapted habitats” provided an alternative to universalism that aimed to modernize the non-Western world more slowly.
• The right to shape and reshape the city is a human right, but it’s traditionally been coveted by the hands of the few.
• With reform, we can protect the right to the city for all.