books by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan
After seizing Jerusalem's eastern precincts from Jordan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1... more After seizing Jerusalem's eastern precincts from Jordan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel unilaterally unified the city and plunged into an ambitious building program, eager to transform the very meaning of one of the world's most emotionally charged urban spaces. The goal was as simple as it was controversial: to both Judaize and modernize Jerusalem. Seizing Jerusalem chronicles how numerous disciplines, including architecture, landscape design, and urban planning, as well as everyone from municipal politicians to state bureaucrats, from Israeli-born architects to international luminaries such as Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, and Bruno Zevi, competed to create Jerusalem's new image. This decade-long competition happened with the Palestinian residents still living in the city, even as the new image was inspired by the city's Arab legacy. The politics of space in the Holy City, still contested today, were shaped in this post-1967 decade not only by the legacy of the war and the politics of dispossession, but curiously also by emerging trends in postwar architectural culture. Drawing on previously unexamined archival documents and in-depth interviews with architects, planners, and politicians, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan analyzes the cultural politics of the Israeli state and, in particular, of Jerusalem's influential mayor, Teddy Kollek, whose efforts to legitimate Israeli rule over Jerusalem provided architects a unique, real-world laboratory to explore the possibilities and limits of modernist design—as built form as well as political and social action. Seizing Jerusalem reveals architecture as an active agent in the formation of urban and national identity, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about Zionism, and the crisis within the discipline of architecture over postwar modernism, affected Jerusalem's built environment in ways that continue to resonate today.
Papers by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan
Contested Zionism – Alternative Modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in Mandate Palestine 1
Routledge eBooks, May 15, 2017
This paper examines the creative persona of Erich Mendelsohn's seemingly incompatible bodies of a... more This paper examines the creative persona of Erich Mendelsohn's seemingly incompatible bodies of architecture in Europe, Palestine and the U.S. The limits-of existing formal analysis to explain his architectural shifts were the impetus for investigating the architectural position that facilitated not only Mendelsohn's iconic architecture in Germany, but its appropriation to Palestine as well. Beside his artistic ambience, is also Mendelsohn's religious faith, national identity and political convictions. Mendelsohn was part of the Jewish post-assimilated generation in Germanyhe extended this experience to the art of building. This extension was facilitated intellectually by Martin Buber's (early) teaching about the creative Jewish yearning for unity. The paper focus on how Mendelsohn's consistent architectural and political position discloses itself first in the industrial West (Germany), where it engaged the striving architectural debates of the period, and then in the Orient. In Palestine, where he took part in the "cultural Zionist" agenda, he remolded Modern Architecture into a non-Western country.
The Journal of Architecture, Jul 3, 2020
'envelope buildings'. As the focus of Wertheimer's industrial development shifted from product to... more 'envelope buildings'. As the focus of Wertheimer's industrial development shifted from product to transaction, the design of these buildings had to accommodate uncertainties regarding their programme, tenants, and possible changes in the future. Zarhy's insistence on the meticulous articulation of building envelopes maintained a level of control that was unprecedented in modernist architecture and contemporary developments in Israel and abroad. This article follows the evolution of Zarhy's envelope buildings in these projects. It exposes their peculiar trajectory from the apex of technical sophistication and formal articulation to their eventual degeneration. In the Israeli context, this decline of the envelopes reflects changes in macroeconomic circumstances and managerial philosophy. These addressed the need to strip down the cost of projects with the onslaught of the turnkey scheme, which would characterise Wertheimer's development from the 1990s onwards.
Silencing Palestinian Architectural History in Israel: Reflections on Scholarship and Activism
International journal of Islamic architecture, 2021
Architectural Histories, 2018
This introduction to the special collection 'The Meaning of "Europe" for Architectural History' r... more This introduction to the special collection 'The Meaning of "Europe" for Architectural History' raises issues about the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, in particular the significance of 'Europe' for the production of architectural knowledge. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the European Architectural History Network, we invited scholars to join us in rethinking one of our founding questions, namely, how to interpret the inextricable ties between knowledge and geopolitics, an issue that arose from the naming of our network. How can we unpack the significance of 'Europe' for our scholarly domain today? What is the role that the idea, legacy, and institutions of Europe play within the new distributions of global power, and how does it currently affect the production of architectural knowledge? We dedicate this special issue of the EAHN's peerreviewed, public access journal Architectural Histories to these questions. Our questions pertain to the development of our disciplinary culture in and beyond the Age of the Three Worlds, to borrow Michael Denning's definition of 'that short half century between 1945 and 1989 when it was imagined that the world was divided into three-the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world' (Denning 2004: 2). The idea that 'Europe' as a geographical construct was split during this period between two 'worlds', and gradually retreated from controlling the 'third', testifies to the ambivalence and contingency of what we consider Europe. On the one hand, for the proliferating studies on ' other modernisms' 1 that go 'beyond Europe', 2 Europe continues to be the powerful foil against which knowledge is produced. On the other hand, the rise of our own network responded to the hegemony of the American Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), indicating the shifting powers within the First World and across the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, from the EAHN's first meeting in 2006, we debated whether the 'European' in our name refers to cultural identity, to a geopolitical construct, or simply to its bureaucratic registration in Europe. From the start we acknowledged the significance of Europe's fragile and dynamic boundaries for our discipline. Papers in this collection continue to raise similar questions: Do these boundaries include the colonial expansion to Asia
The Israeli “Place” in East Jerusalem
Birkhäuser Basel eBooks, Jul 16, 2007
How does new territorial control become inexorable fact?1 How does such fact, based on confiscate... more How does new territorial control become inexorable fact?1 How does such fact, based on confiscated land, turn into “a national home”? How does this “home” embody the Israeli “place” even as Palestinians contest possession of the genius loci? This essay examines the legitimizing professional discourse of the Israeli settler society. It focuses on the architectural practices that empowered the first Israeli-born generation-the generation entrusted with Israelizing Jerusalem after the 1967 War. In its efforts to localize Israeli architecture, this generation faced a double-bind. On the one hand, it criticized the high, developmental modernism that had hitherto shaped the state; on the other, it sought a situated modern architecture inspired by the Palestinian vernacular (and thus belonging to the Arab “other”). This impasse provokes intriguing questions in postcolonial theory about how colonizers appropriate the culture of the colonized in order to define an authentic national culture of their own.
Cities, Jun 1, 2005
The paper focuses on the 1970 encounter between Israeli planning officials and an advisory commit... more The paper focuses on the 1970 encounter between Israeli planning officials and an advisory committee of architectural luminaries, which unraveled a fundamental conflict between two visions for the city of Jerusalem. The Isarelis advocated high-modernist vision-functionalist, progressive, and geared toward everyday life-thereby stressing the role of the city as a civic capital. The committee emphasized instead post-WWII revised modernism-a focus on memory, community, and place, as well as visual imagery-with the aim of establishing Jerusalem as a universal spiritual center. Throughout, the international committee advocated post-Second World War modernism in the name of universal values anchored in the contemporary porfessional debate-the crisis of the modernist city. The second part of this paper consequently argues that it was this apparently neutral professionalism that enabled the international committee to exercise far-reaching influence on the politics of space in Jerusalem.
Strategizing Difference: East, West, and the Debate on Urban Design in Post-’67 Jerusalem
INHA eBooks, Sep 4, 2005
ABSTRACT This paper discusses the tension between East and West not as an essentialized dichotomy... more ABSTRACT This paper discusses the tension between East and West not as an essentialized dichotomy but rather as a field of power in which different parties strategize difference for professional and political ends. It argues that such strategies were operative during the 1960s and 1970s formative debate on urban design, for which Jerusalem became a testing ground after the 1967 War. The shift to design methodology on an urban scale enabled Euro-Americans, Israelis, and Jordanian-Palestinians to mobilize the cultural difference between them in order to affect the spatial politics of this contested city.
In this paper, we outline a computational framework to capture an intricate relationship between ... more In this paper, we outline a computational framework to capture an intricate relationship between tangible and intangible cultural heritage-architecture and the multiple narratives pertaining to it, to unfold multiple histories as a means for a deeper, more comprehensive preservation of contextual heritage. Deploying a set of digital and computational tools, we present a cross-disciplinary method to produce environments infused with history, and at times overlapping narratives. The framework presented here aims to combine text and spatial data, using both Natural Language Processing and Semantic Segmentation, towards integrating seemingly divided epistemologies of heritage. We ask how we can use computation to enrich current cultural practices and what is at stake in deploying such tools. To explore these questions, we discuss a case study of Wadi Salib, an historical and conflicted neighbourhood in Haifa, Israel, and attempt to assess our framework's ability to render a historical tour through this multi-layered site. Finally, the paper identifies several pitfalls and key challenges for future research.
Layered networks
Routledge eBooks, Sep 20, 2021
Seizing locality in Jerusalem
Taylor & Francis eBooks, Feb 16, 2010
Thresholds, 2005
Dudu Geva. Yosef the Hero' This essay was written in conjunction with the Neuland project that wa... more Dudu Geva. Yosef the Hero' This essay was written in conjunction with the Neuland project that was exhibited in the Israeli Pavilion at the 9th Venice Biennale of Architecture. Neuland was created and curated by Ganit Mayslits and Udi Kassit and featured projects by six teams of architects. White City-White Land Numerous street banners and huge advertisements in all major Israeli newspapers recently announced that "The people of Tel Aviv are walking around with their heads held high". "Now," the message continued, "the whole world knows why!"' The secret is the modernist core of Tel Aviv, and its stamp of authentication was UNESCO's declaration of the downtown 'White City' as a World Heritage Site, The celebrations were grand: A week of official ceremonies, exhibitions, and cruises inaugurated a campaign whose joy and pride testified to an almost desperate desire to remold the history of the Zionist project, to choose from it the virtues the world should seethe dream, the Utopia, the white fleeting vision, the Bauhaus imprint Implicit in these celebrations was a plea to forget the painful cost of implementing the dream It was a quest for pause, for beauty, for making news with modernist urbanism and enlightened preservation instead of occupation and terror In the midst of the
Leisure between the First and Second Worlds
Routledge eBooks, Jun 22, 2022
Artistic Interventions as Guardians of Palestinian Minority’s Heritage
Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of t... more Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of their homes, destroyed their villages, expropriated their land, and denied their right to return. This paper focuses on the impressive remains of two villages - Ayn Hawd and Kufr Birim - in order to examine how Israeli and Palestinian artists, by means of their disciplinary operations, intervened in preserving physical edifices or suppressed narratives. The first is Ayn Hawd, on whose remains of which Marcel Janco, a famous Jewish Dada artist, established an artists’ colony. He prevented the destruction of the village, restored and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. The second is Kufr Birim – a closed military zone situated in a national park – where Palestinian artists perform, regularly yet temporarily, site specific art interventions. They belong to a larger group of activists who renovate the church and perform religious, educational and cultural events in situ. In both cases, the artistic actions advanced an oppositional ideology within the dominant institutional apparatus that safeguarded the minority heritage. We propose to examine how art intervention deciphers the site through a different toolkit, and thus succeeds to expand the boundaries of preservation and approximates towards an experimental practice. Can preservation select its addressees? And if so, can we still consider it an act of preservation? The paper challenges the dominant practice with an alternative approach to transcultural heritage, based on interdisciplinary research tying together contemporary art theories, architectural heritage and political philosophy of sites in conflict.
Holy green: silwan, design knowledge, and the 1967 making of Jerusalem's Old City Walls National Park
Planning Perspectives
One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, at the hea... more One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, at the heart of which lies the City of David archeological site. Much scholarship focuses on the contemporary tensions that arise from its two contradictory identities: an East Jerusalem Palestinian residential community and a Jewish symbol of a mythical past. This article, by contrast, explores a largely overlooked historical moment that has been key to the shaping of these dynamics: the declaration within merely six weeks after the 1967 war of an Israeli national park around the Old City Walls. The article explores how an unrealized British colonial plan for a green belt around the historic walls of Jerusalem was updated in 1967 by Israeli landscape architects using cutting-edge North American environmentalist ideas. Their blueprint, we argue, was crucial to the shaping of the ‘holy basin’s’ spatial logic, landscape imaginaries, and legal structures, necessary to understand the current turn of events. In this process, we highlight the centrality of incorporating longer-term perspectives in the study of contemporary urban realities, bringing into closer dialogue scholarship on present-day urbanism with historical studies of planning and cities.
Before | After: Thresholds Roundtable: The History and Legacy of <i>Thresholds</i> Journal
Thresholds, 2022
Cybernetic Methodologies for Flexible and Generative Architectural Systems - the case of Fun Palace and Pattern Language
eCAADe proceedings
Artistic Interventions as Guardians of Palestinian Minority’s Heritage
Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of t... more Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of their homes, destroyed their villages, expropriated their land, and denied their right to return. This paper focuses on the impressive remains of two villages - Ayn Hawd and Kufr Birim - in order to examine how Israeli and Palestinian artists, by means of their disciplinary operations, intervened in preserving physical edifices or suppressed narratives. The first is Ayn Hawd, on whose remains of which Marcel Janco, a famous Jewish Dada artist, established an artists’ colony. He prevented the destruction of the village, restored and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. The second is Kufr Birim – a closed military zone situated in a national park – where Palestinian artists perform, regularly yet temporarily, site specific art interventions. They belong to a larger group of activists who renovate the church and perform religious, educational and cultural events in situ. In both cases, the artistic actions advanced an oppositional ideology within the dominant institutional apparatus that safeguarded the minority heritage. We propose to examine how art intervention deciphers the site through a different toolkit, and thus succeeds to expand the boundaries of preservation and approximates towards an experimental practice. Can preservation select its addressees? And if so, can we still consider it an act of preservation? The paper challenges the dominant practice with an alternative approach to transcultural heritage, based on interdisciplinary research tying together contemporary art theories, architectural heritage and political philosophy of sites in conflict.
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books by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan
Papers by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan