11/11/2019 Are Politics Built Into Architecture?

- The New York Times

Are Politics Built Into Architecture?

By Alan Riding

Aug. 10, 2002

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The concept of building the State of Israel was long central to the Zionist dream. But after
Israel's independence in 1948, the phrase took on a more literal meaning: Israel now also
had to build the villages, towns and cities that would turn it into a modern, prosperous and
secure land. As a result, urban planners and architects assumed a central role in defining the
physical appearance of the new nation.

A half-century later, this slice of history helps explain the intensity of a dispute currently
dividing Israeli architects. Some argue that by designing and constructing Israeli
settlements in the occupied territories, the architectural profession has, perhaps unwittingly,
contributed to escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Others respond that architecture
is neither political nor ideological and, as such, has nothing to answer for.

The catalyst for the debate came last month when the Israel Association of United
Architects vetoed a catalog and canceled an exhibition that it had commissioned to
represent Israel at the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin from July 22 to 26. It

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decided that the catalog, titled ''A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture,''
would damage Israel's image abroad by presenting a uniformly hostile view of the Israeli
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Uri Zerubavel, president of the association, blamed Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, the two
young Israeli architects who edited the catalog.

''They used our resources, they used our public name to make one-sided political
propaganda,'' he said in a telephone interview from Tel Aviv. ''If you are a political party, you
can do what they have done. But the association is apolitical. It has members on the left and
on the right. Imagine if we did an exhibition praising the settlements.''

Mr. Segal and Mr. Weizman, in turn, said they were surprised by what they called the
association's ''extreme reaction.''

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''We were picked in a competition of 10 firms of architects,'' Mr. Segal said by telephone from
Tel Aviv. ''We suggested the theme and even mentioned some of the writers who would
contribute to the catalog, so they knew ahead. But when they saw the whole work, they
suddenly got cold feet and didn't want it.''

The architects have won strong support from Esther Zandberg, the architecture critic of
Haaretz, an independent daily, who accused the association of exercising ''harsh political
censorship.''

''The catalog is a rare work in its power and importance for the community of architects and
town planners in Israel, who usually separate 'pure' professionalism and 'dirty' politics,'' she
said. ''The catalog shows clearly that this option no longer exists.''

In truth, architecture has always been inseparable from politics in a broad sense. No less
than, say, the Egyptian pyramids, Europe's great Gothic cathedrals were conceived as
expressions of power. Similarly, both Albert Speer's grandiose design for Hitler's Berlin and
1960's efforts to bring social improvement through public housing were politically inspired.
But in Israel, Ms. Zandberg said, architects ''seem never to have examined their actions
critically.''

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In the English-language catalog for ''A Civilian Occupation,'' half a dozen architects do just
that, although its fiercest criticism of the settlements in the occupied territories comes from
a journalist, Gideon Levy, a columnist in Haaretz. ''They are almost always up there, the
settlements, dominating the plateau, challenging, provoking, picking a fight,'' he writes.
From everywhere, he continues, ''you can spot the settlement on the hilltop, looming,
threatening, dreadfully colonial.''

The cover of the 96-page illustrated catalog, which shows a red silhouette of the West Bank
that resembles a pool of blood, is also arguably provocative. But most of the essays avoid the
language of a political tract. Rather, Mr. Segal and Mr. Weizman note in a foreword, the
catalog's purpose is to analyze how ''the mundane elements of planning and architecture
have been conscripted as tactical tools in the Israeli state-strategy.''

Indeed, well before the 1967 Six-Day War led to the occupation of Arab lands, settlements
away from the coastal cities were intrinsically linked to Israel's security. Thus, from the late
1930's, the architectural model for the kibbutz was ''homa umigdal,'' or ''wall and tower,'' a
small enclosed settlement that combined ''fortification and observation'' and served to
''perpetuate the ghetto mentality,'' Sharon Rotbard, an architect and university lecturer,
writes in the catalog.

After 1948, notes Zvi Efrat, another architect and university lecturer, Israel then set out ''to
put into practice one of the most comprehensive, controlled and efficient architectural
experiments in the modern era.'' What became known as the Sharon Plan was drawn up by
architects and planners led by Arieh Sharon, one of numerous Jewish graduates of the
Bauhaus who fled Germany for Palestine before the war and whose influence can still be
seen in Tel Aviv.

''The pressing national task assigned to Sharon and his team of planners,'' Mr. Efrat writes
in the catalog, ''was providing temporary housing solutions for the masses of new Jewish
immigrants and settling the country's borderlands, in order to stabilize the 1948 cease-fire
lines, prevent territorial concessions and inhibit the return of Palestinian war refugees.''

Borrowing from both Soviet and British experience in building new towns, the government
built agricultural settlements clustered around a central village and served by a regional
town. Eliezer Brutzkus, a member of the Sharon team, described the strategy for populating
them. ''Truth be told, these results were obtained against the free will of the settled subjects,
namely the immigrants, through a method whose underlying principle was 'straight off the
boat to development regions,' '' Mr. Brutzkus wrote in 1964.

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Then, after 1967, a new strategy was applied to the occupied territories. In their analysis of
the West Bank, which includes a map locating all the settlements in the area, Mr. Segal and
Mr. Weizman identify three types of ''civilian occupation,'' starting with the agricultural
settlements in the arid and underpopulated Jordan Valley that were designed, they write, to
establish a ''security border'' with Jordan.

After a string of Labor governments made way for conservative Likud Party
administrations in 1977, the focus switched to the mountain ridge of the regions referred to
biblically as Judea and Samaria where, Mr. Segal and Mr. Weizman argue, religious groups
believed they were re-occupying the biblical ''Land of Israel.''

''The settlements of the mountain strip shifted the stimulus of expansion from agricultural
pioneering to mysticism and transcendentalism,'' they write.

Finally, from the early 1980's came the accelerated settlement of areas close to the pre-1967
borders, which permitted a spillover of population from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And here,
Mr. Segal and Mr. Weizman note, ideology was less important than quality of life. ''For the
price of a small flat in Tel Aviv settlers could purchase their own red-roofed house and
benefit from massive government subsidies,'' they write.

Thomas M. Leitersdorf was involved in designing two new cities in the West Bank, Maale
Edummim in Judea and Emanuel in Samaria. In an interview in the catalog, Mr. Leitersdorf
concedes that ''the decision of Ma'ale Edummim's location was, without doubt, political.'' Yet
he said he never viewed his own role as political. ''To tell you that an architect influences
politics?'' he asks. ''He doesn't. The whole story of Judea and Samaria could have been
different, but this is on levels that are neither in your hands nor in mine.''

In their essay, however, Mr. Segal and Mr. Weizman argue that architects played an
important role by designing settlements as strategic outposts on hilltops across the West
Bank. This location, they write, produces ''sightlines that function to achieve different forms
of power: strategic -- in its overlooking of main traffic arteries; control -- in its overlooking of
Palestinian towns and villages; and self-defense -- in its overlooking its immediate
surroundings and approach roads.''

Further, they say, from those hilltops, settlers can contemplate biblical sites. ''Within this
panorama, however, lies a cruel paradox,'' the two architects write. ''The very thing that
renders the landscape 'biblical' or 'pastoral' -- its traditional inhabitation and cultivation in
terraces, olive orchards, stone buildings and the presence of livestock -- is produced by
Palestinians, whom Jewish settlers came to replace.'' They add, ''The Palestinians are there
to produce the scenery and then disappear.''

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Mr. Zerubavel said he saw no redeeming qualities in the catalog. ''When I first saw it, I
didn't sleep all night,'' he said. ''Instead of showing the development of Israeli architecture,
questions of topography and climate, it is an anti-Israeli, one-sided presentation, with
totalitarian graphics, pictures of soldiers and tanks, every page about Israeli occupation. We
could not accept it. We are an association of architects, not a political party.''

Mr. Zerubavel, who said he had twice refused invitations to design settlements in the West
Bank ''for private political reasons,'' noted that 15 of the association's 20 council members
had endorsed the decision to withdraw the catalog from circulation. ''I get letters, faxes and
e-mails every day supporting our decision,'' he added.

But he said he was upset that Mr. Segal and Mr. Weizman had held onto some 850 copies of
the 5,000 printed. ''When I ask Eyal Weizman, he said he had taken a few as souvenirs,'' Mr.
Zerubavel said. ''A few is 50, not 850.'' He said the association had not yet decided what to do
with its remaining 4,143 copies. However, the Tel Aviv-based Babel Publishers has now
decided to reprint the catalog for distribution abroad and may also publish a Hebrew edition.

Mr. Rotbard, who also edits an architectural series for Babel, said the catalog should be of
interest to people not engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. ''This is a moral dilemma
facing all architects,'' he said. ''Some who work for big corporations or large real estate
operators create things just as monstrous as the architecture of the occupied territories. The
catalog makes us think about the political dimension of all architecture.''

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