Daily Excerpt: The Subversive Utopia (Sakr) - Introduction
Introduction
This book examines the critical role of modern architecture and individual architects in shaping and transforming national Israeli symbols, especially in the Old City of Jerusalem. It is generally held that Israeli national symbols image Zionism as a pioneering movement awakening the Jewish nation from a stagnant Diaspora tradition and restoring to it its biblical origin in Palestine as a sovereign progressive Jewish state. The opening section of the book analyses pre-1967 designs by architects including Baehrwahld, Geddes, Mendelsohn, “Bauhaus” practitioners, and Rau, each of whom attempted to construct a National Jewish style in Palestine. The analysis reveals the elusiveness of the hard-sought national Jewish style, and the problems inherent to the search. The Diaspora’s memory was still too vivid to be discarded, especially in regard to the Old City of Jerusalem. Indeed, the “official” Zionist memory’s suppression of more than two thousand years of Jewish experience hindered the crystallization of a national Jewish architectural style. In fact, several Israeli cultural historians recently pointed out that traditional Judaism played a role in transforming Zionist memory and symbols. Liebman and Don-Yehia delineated three phases of the transformation. In the first phase, Zionist-Socialism negated Jewish tradition (i.e. the Diaspora) in order to invent its own unique symbols. The second was a “Statist Zionism,” which--although still as dismissive toward Diaspora tradition as before--nevertheless selectively appropriated and secularized its symbols. The third phase is marked by the current ideological crisis of Israel’s secular Zionist project, manifested in the increasing influence of traditional Judaism and the reinterpretation of its primary symbols.
Useful as it is in correcting an oversimplified essentialist view of Zionist culture, several architectural projects documented in this dissertation call into question such a generalized stratification of Israeli culture into distinct periods, as they do not readily conform to it. In fact, rather than simply follow the official phased transformation of Zionism, these projects anticipated, and in some cases even instigated it, as this study demonstrates. Highlighting moments of tension between official Zionist-state memory and its presumed architectural representations, the introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the subsequent analysis that forms the body of this work. This analysis calls into question a presupposition of existing scholarship on nations and national identity--that national symbols are forged, consolidated, and disseminated by cohesive state institutions, collective power-structures and ruling elites. Here, precisely, lies the significance of Louis Kahn’s design of the Hurva synagogue and the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City (1967- present), as a primary case study. Louis Kahn’s design distinctly shows that the shaping of national symbols and memory is a process contested not only by competing state institutions, but also by marginal elements, and in this particular case, by individual architects.
The present study pieces together and scrutinizes previously unaddressed archival documents, drawings and accounts describing intentions, interpretations, events, policies, and projects in the Jewish Quarter which have commonly been regarded as unrelated, in order to unearth a crucially unrecognized aspect of Kahn’s Hurva design. This study lays out a secret history of Kahn’s “double construction of metaphor,” which progressively unfolded both during and after the official end of the design. It specifically analyzes the interplay between the dual metaphor of Kahn’s Hurva and competing traditional and national symbols of the Old City of Jerusalem, such as the old Hurva, the Western Wall, and most importantly, the mythical Temple and the Dome of the Rock. The study reconstructs the significant impact of the transformation of Kahn’s design into an authoritative symbol. Indeed, correlating Kahn’s complex design intention and metaphorical formulation with changing public perception and national self-image, as represented by the conflicting power structures of the state, yields unexpected insights into the magnitude of its continued formative influence. This work fully discerns the cultural impact of Kahn’s design through analysis of subsequent archaeological excavation, planning, and designs for the Jewish Quarter and its structures, including the Hurva synagogue, the Cardo, and the Western Wall, proposed by Denys Lasdun, Moshe Safdie, Bugod-Krendel and others.
Kahn’s legacy in Jerusalem demonstrates that a single architect’s design configuration can encapsulate such a charged power of myth and symbol that it modifies or even revolutionizes the construction of collective identity and memory in the modern nation-state. Contemporary social studies dismiss such a possibility outright, and ironically, even architectural discourse underestimates the capacity of the individual architect to renew or transform social reality. Changing this perception merits an account at some length.
The perceived magnificent failure of the modernist avant-garde project in the beginning of the twentieth century informs contemporary discourse’s underestimation of the revolutionary role of the architect. The avant-garde portrays an architect who can single-handedly shape culture according to his creative free will, fusing social life with his art. For example, the influential figure Van de-Velde affirmed the power of the individual architect to create a new national style, dispensing with tradition and styles of the past. a position commonly associated with the Art Nouveau movement. Art Nouveau’s remarkably short life span, however, and its architects’ eventual retreat into neoclassical and nineteenth-century imagery, seemed to belie the claim of the architect’s culture-free will. Similarly, shortly before and after the first World War, modernist avant-garde groups such the Glass Chain, in their quest for a universal utopian community, proposed architectural imagery deliberately assaulting what they saw as the symbols of a decadent bourgeois society. The avant-garde’s unilateral assault on traditional symbols, however, unleashed reactionary nationalism and State totalitarianism, as in Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain.
The defeat of Modern “avant-gardism” was more pointedly manifest in many of its key figures’--such as Gropius--adoption of the Neue-Sachlichkeit vision, which decidedly shunned any utopian pursuits in favor of an alleged unmediated realism and functionalist expression of economic, social, and technological infrastructures. Their new realism was a prelude to what became identified as an “International Style,” as corporate capitalism appropriated the avant-garde’s machine-shaped and abstract forms, reducing them to a standardized, mass-produced and widely circulated transnational formula. This disregard of the multitude of local conditions and national memories created later widespread disillusion with the International Style.
In reaction to the perceived failure of the avant-garde utopia, an opposing tendency increasingly dominates the current architectural discourse. This new vision variously poses tradition, social and economic structures, and their representative institutions (such as nation-state ideologies and religions) as participants in an a priori hegemonic reality and language whose omnipresent authority can hardly be challenged by marginal groups, including the individual architect. Accordingly, contemporary discourse considers architectural design, and metaphor in particular, mere vehicles or instruments of collective communication, often used to disseminate the social control of these institutions. Current architectural theory and historiography is thus increasingly preoccupied with the expectation, reception, and interpretation of the patron--and to a lesser degree, the user--of the architectural project, and their respective collective ideologies or power structures. Such a discourse leaves little room for consideration of the intentions and imagination of individual architects. By way of analogy, Roland Barthe sums up this tendency in his oft-quoted declaration of “the death of the author” in literature. Consequently, a number of responses have emerged in current architectural practice and theory.
Robert Venturi offered a well-known alternative in his essay “Post-Modernism,” which affirmed the architect’s impotence before the hegemonic collective national and capitalist economic structures of reality. The architect can only satirize this predicament through a parodic manipulation of architectural form, which Venturi treats as a mere instrument of collective communication. Venturi does so by liberally dislocating, fragmenting, and distorting symbols of the past in synthesis with those banal ones of the present commercial vernacular, flattening them all as an appliqué element applied to his normative “decorated shed,” which virtually conforms to the open plan of the “International Style.” It is thus of little surprise that Venturi’s critics censured the ways in which his “Post-Modern” historicism trivialized and desecrated the traditional or local symbol. In the name of acknowledging the plurality and otherness of national communities, what ‘Post-Modernism’ actually accomplishes is to defuse the emerging resistance of these communities to the advances of the homogenizing International Style and its western capitalistic master narrative.
Deconstructionist architecture, as expounded by architects like Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi, pushes the historicism of “Post-Modernism” to its extreme. This style appropriates the ideas of French philosophers like Derrida who, in contrast to Western Humanism, assert that the subject (in this case the architect) is inherently fragmented, disfigured, and decentered, which would render any consideration of his will or exploration of his social responsibility a thankless task. Architects like Eisenman celebrate formalist nihilism as an appropriate mode of design thinking. Eisenman achieves this by shunning metaphor in favor of metonymy, exclusively seizing upon the means of architectural representation--the elements of composition such as geometry and structure--as an end in themselves, only to later fragment and destroy them. In doing so, he challenges the claim of conventional social reality upon unity, stability, and finality, and its utilitarian or iconographic communication through architecture. That being said, Deconstructionist architecture, in many ways, recycles early modernist architectural vocabulary and symbols, especially Russian elementarism and Dada rhetoric. In so doing, though Deconstructionists like Eisenman eschew metaphor, the movement paradoxically vindicates the indispensable role of representation and metaphor in architectural thinking. There exists, moreover, a mismatch between the anti-metaphor rhetoric of Deconstructionist architecture, and the way its philosophical sources posit the omnipresence of metaphor, in its obliteration of the distinction between the signified and signifier.
By polarizing formal and social, subject and object, maker and national user, metaphor and metonymy, in each case excluding one in favor of the other, these architectural trends fail to observe a crucial and complex potential relationship between the architect and his design on the one hand, and social reality and its collectivist power-structures— especially the nation state—on the other.
Indeed, between the two poles of avant-gardism and the conformist Formalist Nihilism, a few more complex visions emerged regarding the social role of the architect in a national context, visions whose full significance has yet to be tapped. Hassan Fathy proposed one of the earliest alternatives to both the Colonial Oriental and International styles: “vernacular or rural historicism.” He fused ancient rural vaulting techniques with the urban medieval vernacular forms of a city like Cairo. Fathy’s synthesis, especially seen in his large urban projects, revealed also his use of Beaux-Arts compositional methods. Fathy argued that his style lent itself to the impoverished economies of developing societies, and to representing their indigenous habits and memories. Despite the populist and reformist socio-economic vision clearly informing Fathy’s mud architecture, his critics conveniently mocked his work as an escapist elitist dream and a retreat from urbanism. They levied against him the apparent failure of his earlier rural projects, citing also the subsequent use of his legacy to fashion the mansions of wealthy patrons. Recently, however, thanks to his disciples’ efforts, his vocabulary became an official style in countries such as Saudi Arabia whose government, undergoing a crisis of legitimacy, felt that Fathy’s “traditional” imagery related better to the masses than their earlier distribution of the abstract International Style. Ironically, this recent metamorphosis induced Fathy’s critics to regard his approach as inherently susceptible to ideological manipulation by nationalist regimes. Yet, as argued in this study, the transformation of a marginal metaphor of opposition into a national symbol need not be regarded as an exclusively negative sign, but on the contrary, can be seen as an undeniable achievement testifying of the architect’s power to shape national identity. Indeed, Louis Kahn’s legacy exhibits this transformation even more distinctly.
In addition to Fathy’s style, Kahn’s primitive or archaic historicism also constituted one of the earlier notable alternatives to the International Style. Its significance lies in its appropriation of the neo-classical rules of the academic Beaux-Arts tradition--especially symmetry--in synthesis with an abstract archeological imagery, to offer a monumental form which proved more fitting than the International Style to represent modern nation states, especially in the developing world. Nevertheless, many historians tend to overlook the social impact of Kahn’s career. They characterize it as an active forgetting or willful withdrawal from the problematic present reality of the modern city and nation state. In this light, historians perceive Kahn’s architecture as an abandonment of utopian social pursuits in favor of a microcosmic illusory world in a hermetically sealed symmetrical monument, turning its back on the city.
These critics, however, fail to offer an adequate explanation as to how such an idiosyncratic private fantasy, indifferent as it is to national memory, can nevertheless hold so great an appeal to a nation-state like Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) that the state adopted his style to shape its most important symbol--the Capitol complex in Dacca. More bewildering is the fact that the construction cost of such a huge complex proved to be an undeniable burden on the economy of a poor country like Bangladesh, exhausting more than twenty percent of the total electric energy of Dacca, the capitol city. While no adequate explanation or study has been forwarded linking Kahn’s design with the socio-political turmoil in that country, the ferocious and violent succession of its post-colonial rival national regimes failed to diminish the influence of the design. Although each of these regimes conceived of nationhood and constructed memory differently, they seemed to cling equally to Kahn’s design as an arbiter of self-image.
Pursuing a proper explanation for such a perplexing phenomenon, and fathoming the social power of the marginal architect, seem to be possible only through a merger of formal and social analyses of the architectural monument, correlating its design intentions and composition with its discrepant social perceptions, diachronic as well as synchronic. Indeed, applying such an interdisciplinary inquiry to an obscure project by Kahn--the Hurva synagogue--illuminates the capacity of a single architect to create social symbols, if not utopia. Furthermore, the study will point to a design process that may enable replication of such an achievement in another national context. Dependent as the nation state may be upon monuments in shaping its self-image and memory, it cannot be impossible that the marginal architect, through his/her mastery and manipulation of the artifice and awareness of its social import, can exercise a discreet but decisive role in defining the nation itself.
Opening with an introductory historical survey of different architectural trends in national Jewish style in Palestine prior to 1967—with particular regard to the Old City of Jerusalem--this work deconstructs the process and metaphorical vision behind Louis Kahn’s design of the new Hurva synagogue, especially with regard to Jerusalem’s national and traditional symbols. The analysis highlights the paradoxical figuration of the double metaphor underlying Kahn’s Temple design and its scheme of rituals. Then in chapter Three, the book documents the public debate surrounding conflicting perceptions of Kahn’s design, including those of the secular nation-state as well as religious institutions. Chapter Four traces the impact of Kahn’s design on the planning and designs for the Jewish Quarter and its structures, including the restoration of the Cardo. Chapter Five traces the influence of Kahn’s Hurva design on subsequent design proposals for fashioning the Western Wall as the national symbol of the state of Israel. Chapter Six examines the renewed campaigns to design the Hurva synagogue under new patronage, focusing primarily on Denys Lasdun’s design commission. The study concludes by wrapping up the analysis of previous chapters, highlighting the individual architect’s formative social role.
For more posts about Dr. Sakr and his book, click HERE.
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