Constructing a Sense of Place

Architecture and the Zionist Discourse

Haim Yacobi, Haim Yacobi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351949330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'architecture

While it is widely recognized that architects and their architecture play a key role in constructing a sense of place, the inherent nexus between an architectural ideology and the production of national space and place has so far been neglected. Focusing on the Zionist ideology, this book brings together practising architects and academics to critically examine the role of architects, architecture and spatial practices as mediators between national ideology and the politicization of space. The book first of all sets out the wider context of theoretical debates concerning the role of architecture in the process of constructing a sense of place then divides into six main sections. The book not only provides an innovative new perspective on how the Israeli state had developed, but also sheds light on how architecture shapes national identity in any post-colonial and settler state.

PART I
RESHAPING TERRA NULLIUS

Chapter 1

Contested Zionism – Alternative Modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in Mandate Palestine¹

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

In memory of Royston Landau²

Introduction

In preparation for the 1994 celebrations of the ‘Bauhaus in Tel Aviv’, the newly renovated city was painted white. To its numerous visitors, Tel Aviv boasted the largest concentration worldwide of 1930s modernist buildings. The impact of this ‘live museum’ was compounded by numerous exhibitions and street-festivities that promoted the Mandate period ‘International Style Architecture’ as a national heritage (Figure 1.1). Scholarship was crucial to this campaign: a large number of new publications focused attention on architects who shaped the built landscape of the Jewish population in Mandate Palestine known as the Yishuv.³ The pattern emerging from these studies is of a perfect fit between modern architecture and Zionism.⁴ Both Le Corbusier and the leaders of the Zionist movement, the argument goes, were simultaneously ‘creating something out of nothing’.⁵

This chapter challenges such depictions of a neat juncture between modern architecture and Zionism by exposing the profound ideological tensions embedded in the architectural production of the 1930s. I illustrate this tension by pointing to the difference between the work of the Tel Aviv architectural circle – known by the Hebrew word for ‘circle’, Chug – and the architecture of Erich Mendelsohn in Palestine.⁶ I propose that the architecture of the Chug reflected the ideology of the socialist leadership, which was inspired by Herzl’s political Zionism. By contrast, Mendelsohn’s architecture gave form to Martin Buber’s interpretation of Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism.⁷ These affiliations corresponded to different strands of architectural modernism: the Chug espoused an international ‘new architecture’, while Mendelsohn developed a localist modernism with Orientalist touches. They both expressed very different positions regarding the desired national identity of Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine, and the modern architecture that could best express such identity.

Figure 1.1 The logo of the 1994 ‘Bauhaus in Tel Aviv’ celebrations

During the 1920s and 1930s modernism and Zionism were plural movements still debating their eventual forms. Both were ultimately reduced to a type of official story, which rendered them indispensable to the myth of statehood. In order to unify an official narrative about the origin of Israeli architecture historians advocated a visual reading of modern architecture as a formal style. This approach, which was established in the famous 1932 ‘International Style’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,⁸ underlined the 1984 pivotal exhibition ‘White City: International Style Architecture in Israel, a Portrait of an Era’.⁹ The exhibition’s new emphasis on the formal properties of the country’s existing modernist buildings presented to the bourgeois Israeli of the 1980s and 1990s a tangible past of physical objects rather than an ideology no longer in vogue. Once popularized as a style, this modernist vernacular was re-politicized as a visual emblem of ‘the modest’ Zionist spirit which produced it.¹⁰ The ‘portrait of an era’ thus confirmed the hegemonic ideology that had formed the State of Israel. Moreover, it suggested to Israelis alternative architectural roots in Tel Aviv. After six years of Palestinian uprising and a growing internal conflict between secular and religious factions, the 1994 ‘Bauhaus’ or ‘International Style’ celebrations provided the secular bourgeoisie with a reassuring architectural heritage.

The popularity of the Bauhaus in Israeli consciousness echoes an active agreement between a leading architectural trend, a national ideology, and a historiography which binds the two.¹¹ The Chug is an example of such a bond. It was formed in 1932 by young members of the Yishuv, who returned to Palestine after acquiring architectural education and apprenticeship in Europe. Being integrated into and reflecting the socialist leadership of the Yishuv helped the Chug to institutionalize modern architecture in Tel Aviv and beyond. In order to gain such a powerful position they needed a clear message, which eventually subsumed the initial diversity of the group’s members. The architecture promoted by the Chug became that of the newly founded state by the end of the British Mandate in 1948, with Arieh Sharon, a Bauhaus graduate and a Chug founding member, as its head architect.

Unlike the Chug, Erich Mendelsohn openly disapproved of the mainstream socialist ideology. His practice in Palestine between 1934 and 1941 was sponsored by the circles of the World Zionist Organization on the one hand, and the government of the British Mandate on the other. The volume of his built work in Palestine was outstanding in comparison to other modern masters in those years. While Le Corbusier was drawing visionary plans for Algiers and Mies van der Rohe was designing hypothetical ‘Court Houses’, Mendelsohn was constructing villas, hospitals and colleges, which vastly affected the Zionist landscape.

Mendelsohn shared with the Yishuv the Zionist conviction of establishing a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, and with the Chug the will to build this home in the modern mode. Both parties built prolifically and made significant contributions to the built environment and to Israeli architectural discourse, an influence that extends well into the present. Yet, the complexion of Mendelsohn’s firmly grounded plain volumes, courtyards, and carefully punched blank walls opposes the white architecture of the Chug, with its playful strip windows, curves and piloti (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). This difference illustrates a tension predicted in 1933 by Yohanan Ratner, the head of the Technion School of Architecture and a major military figure. Ratner envisioned a contention in ‘the future development of Palestine architecture’ between ‘the straightforward modern style’ and what he saw as a growing infiltration of ‘Oriental influences’ into the New Architecture.¹² Mendelsohn’s architecture was indeed rooted in Oriental cultural analysis that the Chug rejected. The force of the difference between his architecture and that of the Chug unsettles the neatly constructed juncture between Modern architecture and Zionism.

In the 1960s architectural texts saw modern architecture as the expression of a teleology which began in the 1920s and culminated in the present.¹³ Scholars then felt that Mendelsohn’s work could neither be ignored nor be followed by mainstream Israeli architects. They were therefore convinced that his influence on Israeli architecture had reached a dead end.¹⁴ The emergence of an art-historical discourse that packaged the modern architecture of the Mandate period as an historical style drastically changed the reception of Mendelsohn’s work during the 1980s and the 1990s. Paradoxically, this new official reading of Israel’s architectural heritage included Mendelsohn’s architecture in Palestine as a major contribution to the International Style legacy despite his many efforts to denounce ‘internationalism’ in architecture.

Figure 1.2 Zeev Rechter, Engle House, Tel Aviv, 1933

Figure 1.3 Erich Mendelsohn, Schocken library, Jerusalem, 1937, a detail of the exterior

As these examples show, any discussion of modern architecture in the 1930s tangles with history and ideology. This chapter, by arguing for a dialogue between modern form and the social, political and ethical convictions of the Zionist project, draws attention to the variety of opinions and intense debates in the 1930s about architectural forms vis-à-vis the revaluation of self (Jewish culture, nation, society and religion) and other (the Orient and the ‘Arab’). Such exposure divests the International Style of its all-encompassing claim over modern architecture in Mandate Palestine.

A National Movement and an Architectural Movement

Modern architecture matured during the 1920s as a multifaceted avant-garde. Its advocates promoted technological progress, clean and bare aesthetics, functionalism and efficient means of production. The Modern Movement in Architecture, which was founded in 1928, saw in these merits a jumping board toward a universal architectural expression, an attractive position to socialist movements from Weimar to Moscow. These same characteristics triggered the rejection of modern architecture by most nationalistic regimes. Indeed, this kind of architecture denied the existence of a history describing a territorially bounded ethnic and linguistic community, a necessary prerequisite for the cultivation of national ideologies. It is not surprising that hardly any of the post-World War I national regimes of Europe, the birthplace of modern architecture, embraced this architecture as their national expression.

Yet, in Palestine it was precisely the national instinct, which provoked Jewish immigrants to gather as an ethnic and linguistic community that led architects and ideologists alike to embrace modern architecture as the appropriate expression of Zionism. They clung to its attributes of progress as well as to its lack of identity with forms associated with European nations. Moreover, Jewish architects found a potential for the new vernacular of the East in the association with Oriental forms, thus transforming the object of Nazi contempt into a virtue. Standard texts on Israeli architecture establish its origins in the early experiments with modernism.¹⁵ During the 1920s, the story goes, the battle for national expression opposed Orientalists (Baerwarld) and Modernists (Kaufmann). By the 1930s, ‘the second decade of Israeli architecture’,¹⁶ modernism had become the visual mould for the Zionist project.

Zionism

The early Zionist movement consisted of two dominant ideological strands: the political and the cultural. Inspired by Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl, political Zionism saw the pervasive phenomenon of xenophobia manifest in anti-Semitism. Jews, they thought, provoked a ‘reasonable fear’ of the unfamiliar. The inevitable failure of emancipation was their premise; they believed a political solution was essential for the acceptance of Jews on an equal footing with other nations. Concerned with the problem of the Jews rather than with Judaism, they did not insist on Palestine as the sole territorial possibility.

Cultural Zionism, on the other hand, led by Ahad Ha-am, took on the identity crisis of modern Judaism. An emancipated and secular Jew, Ahad Ha-am attempted to reconcile his loss of religious faith with a community traditionally crystallized around religious notions. He overcame this apparent incongruity by replacing the cohesive element of religion with the modern construct of nation: religion was now assumed to have an instrumental value in enforcing the essential being of the Jews as nation. Secularized Judaism became the seed-bed for Zionist identity. If the original nationhood was formed in the land of Israel, then its revitalization must take place on that same land.

Reacting to anti-Semitic discrimination, political Zionism minimized differentiating features: the goal was to become a nation like any other, within a community of nations. Ahad Ha-am did not believe this total political solution to be feasible, however. His formulation of cultural Zionism is indebted to his anticipation of potential Arab-Jewish conflict under political Zionism’s regime. Rather than laying the foundation for a nation-state, pioneering Jews in Palestine were assigned in his mind the role of a spiritual core for the world’s Jewry.

The political achievement of the 1917 Balfo...