Haim Yacobi - Architecture, Orientalism, and Identity: The Politics of the Israeli-Built Environment - Israel Studies 13:1 (original) (raw)
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Architecture, Orientalism and Identity: a Critical Analysis of the Israeli Built Environment"
This article critically examines the role of architecture in the construction of national identity. Through critical analysis of architectural representations, I study the interrelations between the production of the architectural object and the practice of construction of Israeli national identity. The existing body of knowledge that supports this article claims that the creation of national identity is a socially constructed process which involves a variety of practices including education, music, and army service, as well as designing the built environment. It is important to note that the realization of such practices does not occur as a natural process, but rather as a result of power relations embodied within the national sphere.
Architecture, Orientalism, and Identity: The Politics of the Israeli-Built Environment
Israel Studies, 2008
This article critically examines the role of architecture in the construction of national identity. Through critical analysis of architectural representations, I study the interrelations between the production of the architectural object and the practice of construction of Israeli national identity. The existing body of knowledge that supports this article claims that the creation of national identity is a socially constructed process which involves a variety of practices including education, music, and army service, as well as designing the built environment. It is important to note that the realization of such practices does not occur as a natural process, but rather as a result of power relations embodied within the national sphere.
Shores of the Mediterranean: Architecture as Language of Peace, 2005
Salama, A. M. (2005). Architectural Identity in the Middle East: Hidden Assumptions and Philosophical Perspectives. In D. Mazzoleni et al (eds.), Shores of the Mediterranean: Architecture as Language of Peace. Intra Moenia, Napoli, Italy. PP. 77-85. ISBN# 88-7421-054X. The built environment conveys and transmits non-verbal messages that reflect inner life, activities, and social conceptions of those who live and use that environment in association with the actions and values of society. Societies however tend to re-evaluate the meaning and desirability of built environments rather rapidly. What was visually acceptable some years ago becomes now unacceptable and what was considered eyesore while ago has become valued and acquired meaning overtime. Identity goes beyond the visual appearance of the built environment and involves meanings of those built environments to the people who created them and to the people who occupied them. The search for an architectural identity seems to be a preoccupation with countries that have cultural richness and multi-layers of history. Intellectuals, architects, and designers in those countries find themselves dealing with a paradox needing to project a certain image of themselves through their built environment. In the Middle East, identity has been an issue in debate for over three decades, more so because of this region’s cultural uniqueness and plurality. However, it is this cultural uniqueness that has made it a tough quest and has – in many cases – culminated into sacred symbolism that is painful to behold or comprehend. The questions I am raising here are philosophical in nature, and have been raised by many before with no clear answer. However, such questions are rephrased in a manner derived from recent practices of architecture in the last decade. Is it necessary to refer or resort to cultural or religious symbolism in architecture to reflect a Middle Eastern or Arabian identity? Or should architecture embody the collective aspirations of Middle Easterners or Arabs? On the other hand, there are many who have questioned the need to define an architectural identity at all, claiming that it merely displays a lack of “self-confidence” as a region or as a group of nations? Reviewing the recent practices and searching the recent identity debates reveal that we still seem to be at odds with the issue after several decades of independence. In response to this confusion, I believe it is critical to examine the subject in philosophical terms and elucidate some hidden concepts. The discussion of the issue of identity in general and in the Middle East in particular would be irrelevant if concepts such as imageability, legibility, critical regionalism, and environmental meaning are not debated and somehow theorized. This paper aims at raising questions of some hidden assumptions and philosophical perspectives relating to these concepts. Critical issues that pertain to identity crises in the Middle East are debated. A classification procedure of architectural trends in Egypt is conducted to establish the link between philosophical perspectives and actual practices.
2005
This book signifies the emergence of a dynamic local interdisciplinary discourse, still in its infancy (i.e. since the late 90s), about the political dimension of the built environment in Israel. This discourse deals with the relationship between the Zionist ideology and the built environment and refers to hegemonic, ethnic, and stratified national practices governing the allocation of lands and housing. The discussion revolves around the analysis of Zionist political practices that brought forth specific spatial and social processes in Israel. Recent works have questioned the canonical understanding of values and standpoints underlying the practice of the Zionist Movement's leaders and of the State of Israel in its first days. Alongside this, the challenge of fundamental presuppositions in the historiography of the Zionist Movement and the State of Israel also appears through several art exhibits and architectural shows. Revolving around these same issues, these exhibitions have reexamined architectural, artistic, and cultural representations that have served the governing regime.
Haim Yacobi, Constructing a Sense of Place, Architecture and The Zionist Discourse
This book signifies the emergence of a dynamic local interdisciplinary discourse, still in its infancy (i.e. since the late 90s), about the political dimension of the built environment in Israel. This discourse deals with the relationship between the Zionist ideology and the built environment and refers to hegemonic, ethnic, and stratified national practices governing the allocation of lands and housing. The discussion revolves around the analysis of Zionist political practices that brought forth specific spatial and social processes in Israel. Recent works have questioned the canonical understanding of values and standpoints underlying the practice of the Zionist Movement's leaders and of the State of Israel in its first days. Alongside this, the challenge of fundamental presuppositions in the historiography of the Zionist Movement and the State of Israel also appears through several art exhibits and architectural shows. Revolving around these same issues, these exhibitions have reexamined architectural, artistic, and cultural representations that have served the governing regime. This volume, comprised of fourteen essays, looks at the inherent nexus between ideology and the construction of a sense of place, exploring the role of architecture and planning as efficient, yet polemical, practices that serve the hegemonic agenda (p. 1-2). These essays by Israeli architects, planners and scholars are brought together for the first time, discussing the construction of place through its physical and symbolic dimensions that have been generally neglected. Above all, the essays contribute to a discussion about the dialectic inherited in the ideas of the Zionist movement and in the construction of Israel, defined by Gurevitch and Aran (1991) as a place that consists of belonging to two places-the small place and the big place. The sense of locality-belonging to the small place-can be characterized by the ideas of birth, such as, a home, a street, a childhood landscape. On the other hand, the sense of belonging to the State-the big place-is beyond specific localities, being instead a collective idea. The big place is not a direct continuation and expansion of the small place-there is no continuum of home, neighborhood, city, and countrybut rather a leap from the current local reality to an idea. In the essays, this dialectic may be understood from at least three main perspectives. The first perspective, approached from the autonomous discourse of architecture, is manifest in the essays by Alona Nitzan Shiftan, Zvi Efrat, Zvi Elhyani. They address the history and ideology of modern architecture as tools for the revaluation of the self, Jewish culture, nation, and society, pre-state and during
The ‘‘Designed’’ Israeli Interior, 1960–1977: Shaping Identity
Journal of Interior Design 38(3), 21–36, 2013
The concept of a ‘‘home’’ had played an important role during the early decades of Israel’s establishment as a home for all the Jewish people. This study examines the ‘‘designed’’ home and its material culture during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on aesthetic choices, approaches, and practices, which came to highlight the home’s role as a theater for staging, creating, and mirroring identities, or a laboratory for national boundaries. It seeks to identify the conceptualization of the domestic space during fundamental decades in the history of Israel.
Silencing Palestinian Architectural History in Israel: Reflections on Scholarship and Activism
International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2021
During a class on the politics of architecture in Israel, a graduate student approached me with a personal inquiry, asking how to locate her family home in the history of architecture in Israel. She learned during her professional training to distinguish between different architectural modernisms-the interwar modernism that won Tel Aviv its international fame, the bare, efficient, and repetitive modernism of the postwar era, the sleek and elegant high modernism of public buildings, and the blunt Brutalism alongside the revisionist regionalism of younger rebels. She was also familiar with the Ottoman architecture that won Acre, for example, a UNESCO declaration, and was well acquainted with the Palestinian vernacular that was ambivalently admired by Israeli architects for capturing 'the genetic code of the place'. 1 But she grew up in Nazareth, and although she could identify its Old City with the Ottoman vernacular, the house she grew up in, outside the city centre, was clearly modern [Figure 1]. It was built during the 1960s by a prominent architect, and its architecture fell into none of the familiar categories she learned. How can we call this architecture, she asked. Is there an Arab modernism in Israel? This simple question testifies to an entrenched lacuna in the architectural historiography of Israel/Palestine-the architecture of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who constitute 20 per cent of the Israeli population. But this conspicuous absence pertains to a much larger predicament of writing the architectural histories of societies that suffer intense political conflicts. Much of the scholarship on the Middle East, and on Islamic societies elsewhere, is entangled in such dynamics-national struggles and repeated outbreaks of violence. The question is how eruptions of strife shape architectural and urban
Architects for Peace Editorials, 2009
Salama, A. M. (2009). Cultural Identity Manifested in Visual Voices and the Public Face of Architecture. Architects for Peace, May, Melbourne, Australia. _______________________________ While scholars in architecture as an academic and professional discipline may criticize the interest and tendency to place emphasis on discussing building images and facades, I adopt the principle that since architecture is created for the public then examining the public face of architecture is integral to the understanding of the juxtaposition of those images and what they convey and represent. This editorial interrogates a number of discourses on ways in which cultural identity is manifested by debating selected interventions developed within the Arab world. Still, the discussion on whether building images are created as visual voices that attempt to react to the tidal wave of cultural globalization is open-ended. So, there is no claim here that there is a resolution, but an articulation of identity debate as it is manifested in the public face of architecture. Please see more by downloading the article.
On Concrete and Stones - Shifts and Conflicts in Israeli Architecture
Traditional Dwelling and Settlement Review, 2009
Israel is unilaterally building a wall to separate itself from Palestine. Within its confines, its citizens have been led to believe, Israeli society can flourish without interruption. This article challenges this assumption by questioning the impact of the former — the external political border — on the latter — the cultural production of Israeli society. More specifically, it explores the formative effect of the shifting border between Israeli and Palestinian territories on the imagination and production of “authentic” Israeli architecture. In this light, architectural trends such as “Bauhaus,” “regionalism,” and “place,” as well as building materials such as concrete and stone, have assumed political dimensions in Israeli society. Over the last seven years Israeli construction crews have been erecting a meandering concrete wall along the edge of the territory Israel claims for itself. These pale gray concrete slabs are simultaneously one of the world’s most literal, and symbolic, reminders of the importance of the border for a nation’s sense of self. Within their confines, its citizens have been led to believe, Israeli society can flourish without interruption. In this article, I set out to challenge this assumption. My premise is exactly the interconnectedness of the two — the external political border and the cultural production of Israeli society. More specifically, I explore the formative effect of the shifting border on the imagination and production of “authentic” Israeli architecture. Defining a certain body of architecture as Israeli is contingent, following Slavoj Zizek’s reminder, on the communal belief that such a “Thing” as “Israeli architecture” exists. The article recounts the history of the search for such a definition, and describes the state of this effort after two Palestinian intifadas and Israel’s unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza. It then demonstrates how the external political border continuously carves a more subtle cultural border that ridicules these efforts — or, to put it differently, threatens the cohesiveness of what Zizek calls “the national Thing.”