Be it the Muslim enclave with its carpets or the Jewish enclave with its monobloc chairs and prayer stands, both are situated within a larger enclave that is the Cave of the Patriarchs itself. The typified objects used to define these enclaves bolster a unique characteristic—they are, in fact, flexible enclaves. The exceptional condition of the cave is evident through a meticulous decoding of its enclaves, each characterised by a different visual and material language. An image of the Jewish enclave devoid of chairs, scattered prayer stands, below, manifest the occupation of space. In contrast to the monobloc chair, these stands are not inconspicuous to the point of transparency – they emanate a Jewish air of erudition. Conversely, but in a way that strengthens the forensic argument, the Muslim enclave, highly guarded by Israeli soldiers (sitting on black monobloc chairs), is surrounded by police fences. Even more convincing is the heap of carpets: effectively two-dimensional in their conventional use, here they appear with a three-dimensional bulk, as if attesting to the unusual situation in which they are found. While militarised in nature, the layers of these variable enclaves enable the actual users of these spaces to empower their stance through spatial design. This complex dialogue between the statutory agents (planners, government representatives, and military and police forces) and the religious believers praying in this intricate site imbues this controlled space with Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere. 7 Mundane objects, in their complex nature, serve an active role in negotiating, defining, and maintaining flexible and temporal spatial boundaries.
Ifat Finkelman
Soldiers arranging monobloc chairs near the Western Wall for an upcoming ceremony.
(f) The cavern furniture and equipment
The governorate is responsible for the cavern’s furniture. All the existing furniture is the governorate’s property. Bringing furniture onto the premises without the governorate’s permission is forbidden. — Shamgar Report, section 3G
3 design situations:
significant transparency
Following Gadamer’s concept of the hermeneutic situation and highlighting the role of the designers of space, one might consider the circumstances of the Cave of the Patriarchs as ‘a design situation’ 8 — a reframing of a design action through the use and interpretation of the various design partners. Muslim or Jewish believers use objects vis-à-vis their presence in temporal and ever-changing spaces to take a stand against each other while all along maintaining a complex choreography mirroring that of Israeli government agencies. This complex dance mirrors people’s actions reflected through mundane objects, themselves devoid of such capacity. The complex rearrangement of space at the Cave of the Patriarchs echoes the agenda of thinkers trying to tackle politicised urban space,
such as Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau. As part of the Situationist movement (1957–72), Debord encouraged urban citizens to reflect and understand the place and functions of the city in their lives: ‘Despite occasional differences in its ideological and juridical disguises, it is one and the same society—marked by alienation, totalitarian control, and passive spectacular consumption—that predominates everywhere. One cannot understand the coherence of this society without an all-encompassing critique informed by the opposing project of a liberated creativity, that is, the project of the dominion of all men over their own history at all levels.’ 9 Debord identifies the potential of individual use in an urban setting, yet at the Cave the potential of this use is much greater — much
Border police guarding an enclave of mundane objects in the Men’s Section during a Jewish exception: the Isaac Hall, the Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque. Ifat Finkelman
6 Mary Douglas, ‘A History of Grid and Group Cultural Theory’. Lecture, University of Toronto, 2007 http://projects.chass.utoronto. ca/semiotics/cyber/ douglas1.pdf 7 Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006), pp. 1–25 8 Jonathan Ventura, “Design Situation,” in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design , ed. Clive Edwards, online edition, forthcoming. 9 Guy Debord, ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art’ [1963], trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents , ed. Tom McDonough. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. p 159
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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