MSI Press Blog

  Today's book back story is about The Subversive Utopia by Dr. Yasir Sakr. From the publisher: In early 2006, through a mutual friend, while living in Jordan, the owners of MSI Press (at that time, not yet an incorporated business) met a young professor of architecture, Dr. Yasir Sakr, at his home where his young son, Abdelrahim, was present. Abdelrahim was about five years old and pretty much the same as 5-year-olds everywhere.  Yasir had a book idea, based on his dissertation. The topic was to share research he had accomplished on the National Jewish architectural style in Jerusalem and the influence of Louis Kahn, an American architect born in Estonia when that country was part of Russia and transported to the US when his parents emigrated and whose design for the Hurva Synagogue, while never adopted did influence subsequent design for the synagogue and other sacred buildings.  The typesetting of the book was a challenge, fitting immense drawings into small book page...

  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 Pennsy...

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 experi...

  "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. 2 Yasir 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 pr...

The Subversive Utopia   examines the critical role of modern architects in shaping and transforming national Israeli memory with special regard to Jerusalem. Using as a background the attempts of various architects since the 19th century to construct a national Jewish style, the author focuses his analysis on Louis Kahn’s design of the Hurva synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem. Th is study scrutinizes and pieces together discrepant archival documents, drawings, and accounts of intentions, interpretations, events, policies, and projects in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Th e book reveals an unrecognized crucial interplay of Kahn’s Hurvah design  with the competing traditional and national symbols of Jerusalem, such as the old Hurvah, the Western Wall, and most important, the mythical Jewish Temple and the Dome of the Rock. Th e drastic impact of Kahn’s idiosyncratic design on shaping Jerusalem and its national memory is traced through subsequent arch...