Daily Excerpt: The Subversive Utopia (Sakr) - Preface

 

Excerpt from The Subversive Utopia by Yasir Sakr -

Preface

It’s been 35 years since, as an undergraduate student, I first toured the new Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. As I walked its streets, observing its new architecture and urban space, the Quarter simultaneously attracted and alienated, impressing upon me a mysterious schizophrenic perception. For many years I was unable to explain this contradictory experience. Little did I know then that 10 years later, in 1988, my new job as an archivist in the Louis Kahn Collection at the University of Pennsylvania would yield the clues I needed to understand the Quarter’s ambiguous allure. I could not have predicted then that I would one day articulate the experience of the Jewish Quarter in such a way that it would shape its perceptions by Israeli architects and scholars among others. It’s been almost 20 years since I finished my PHD dissertation at the School of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania. Following its release, my dissertation helped spark a flourishing literature—articles, books, Ph.D. dissertations, and on-line media–on modern Israeli architecture, and Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter,1 Many of these works, to varying degrees, assimilated the interdisciplinary architectural/ethnographic approach, critical vocabulary, and themes of my study of the search for a Jewish/Israeli national architectural and cultural identity since the 19th century. The interplay between the architectural/archaeological reconstruction of the Old City of Jerusalem, its Jewish quarter, the Western Wall, and most importantly the Hurva Synagogue on the one hand, and Israeli memory on the other, as explored in my study, has become particularly instructive as a blue print for subsequent studies to appropriate and elaborate.

Few of these studies grasped the true significance of Louis Kahn’s Hurva synagogue design and its decisive impact on the process of constructing an Israeli national memory. The historical studies that selectively represented my study haven’t yet tapped its core thesis. This study highlights Louis Kahn’s obscure mode of architectural design, which employed schizophrenic double-negation—a mode of evoking a sense of the sublime, destroying it, and recreating it simultaneously, condensing the cycle into a cataclysm of perception imposed upon the beholder moment by moment–as a viable design process geared toward a distinct powerful social impact. Conceived as a practical history, my thesis aims to enhance an understanding of the dialogic nature of design and draw the attention of individual marginal architects to the potential subversive power of their design interventions. To make it available to a broader audience, which includes scholars of Louis Kahn as well as practicing architects, I elected to publish my dissertation entirely as is, as a book without any changes to the text aside from fine tuning in terms of language and illustrations, and an added epilogue, which touches upon what has occurred on the grounds of the Hurva since I first completed this work.

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