Book Review: The Subversive Utopia (Sakr)
"a deep and sometimes disturbing investigation"
- David Vanderburgh
This reader’s first visit to Israel was in 2012, for a program evaluation at an Israeli university. In the course of that visit I spent a day in Jerusalem. It was unforgettable. I had known people of all three monotheistic traditions, but had never seen a place where they all converge and diverge in such fervent sensorial splendor. Hearing the church bells and the call to prayer at the same time was simply moving. It was also a tangible and explicit introduction to the complex intercultural history of the place.
2Yasir Sakr’s The Subversive Utopia: Louis Kahn & the Question of the National Jewish Style in Jerusalem is a deep and sometimes disturbing investigation into this cultural, political, and religious congeries. The architect Louis I. Kahn burst into the post-1967 context with ideas for the “restoration” of the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed during the 1948 conflict with the Arab Legion. His project was never realized, but according to Sakr it had a significant afterlife, influencing subsequent proposals by well-known architects such as Isamu Noguchi and Moshe Safdie, notably in relation to the Western or Wailing Wall. And after Kahn’s death, the Hurva again became the subject of a competition, over which the Kahn project cast a long shadow, attracting such international architects as Richard Meier, Aldo Van Eyck, and Denys Lasdun.
Read the rest of the comprehensive review of Yasir Sakr's book in Architecture beyond Europe HERE.
Read more posts about Dr. Sakr and his book HERE.
(photo with Betty Lou Leaver, MSI Press Managing Editor, at Dr. Sakr's flat in Jordan)
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