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 experi