By using ‘the book will kill the edifice’ as an epigraph for his White City, Black City , what Sharon Rotbard really means is: this book will kill the edifice. 2 The edifice, in this case, is the modernist white raiment which Rotbard says has been used to smother the inconveniences of Israel’s history; in particular, it is white Tel Aviv imposed on black Jaffa. The self-conscious whiteness of Tel Aviv is taken to begin with its founding myth of a perfect democratic initiation on what Rotbard calls a ‘virginal dune’ near Jaffa. Here, sixty-six families are said to have divided up the land by a ‘seashell lottery’ in 1909, the first local materials to be used in the making of this national home. This is not quite ex nihilo , as Rotbard proposes, because it is the story told by European Jews claiming a return to long-neglected rights. Seer of modern Israel before it existed, Theodor Herzl called for an ‘old-new land’ – Altneuland (1902) – fixing its right as timeless but detaching any specific obligations. So ‘first a book, then a city’, as Rotbard puts it, Tel Aviv came to think of itself as a Bauhaus piece, reflecting the white sands in a way Hugo could not have foreseen. Others see it as a different sort of brutalism. The book raised an edifice. That grey concrete didn’t seem so white to later visitors like Jean Nouvel (‘do you see white? I don’t see any white’) didn’t seem to matter. The whiteness could be written in. Tel Aviv was commemorated in catalogues such as Michael Levin’s White City and films like Boas Berr’s Air, Light & Utopia , and finally consecrated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, specifically as a white city, in 2003. All this seems to miss what was written out. Rotbard wants to reinstall the black city in memory: the disfavoured neighbourhoods missed off maps; the failing orchards bought from Arabs by early Jewish settlers (as they failed they showed whiter in the monochrome photography of the time); and the hundred-thousand Arabs who seemingly melted into the beaches during the 1948 war. The white city was only possible with the clearance of its footings. Here the book and the edifice have become entwined, and Rotbard thinks only correcting its history will force an acknowledgement of architecture’s silent speech – the better to argue with it.
So in White City, Black City architecture is dragged into history and conversation, maybe malgré lui . It is foremost a story where buildings have only walk-on parts. With more than a nod to Franz Fanon, the meaning of the colours comes from people, the buildings reflected (on) in their light. The importance of writing about architecture is something Israelis like Rotbard have been fighting for – in words – since the schism of architects over the censoring of A Civilian Occupation in 2002. Prepared by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, with Rotbard as one of the contributors, the catalogue was set to accompany an exhibition making conspicuous the role of architecture in Israel’s project of domination; the lauding of Tel Aviv’s ‘International’ Style and the concrete enclosure of the Palestinians were almost simultaneous. Despite its initial support, the Israel Association of United Architects claimed that the catalogue’s ‘ideas’ were ‘not architecture’ and destroyed five-thousand copies. But enough people disagreed for it to be published by other means. The edifice tried to kill the book. Nevertheless, the actual result was a multiplication of books and words and exhibitions – a second tower of Babel, as Hugo puts it. Rotbard’s book, and later Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land , were nothing if not provoked. There is a sense, though, in which the ‘not architecture’ claim was correct, but it missed the point that it is essential to architecture to be open to the non-architectural – open to people, and therefore open to history. 3 Buildings that are designed to be dead already, or for the quality of their anticipated death – as in Albert Speer’s theory of ‘ruin value’, which Rotbard says is the key to the Etzel Museum commemorating Israeli paramilitaries – are therefore in a deeper sense ‘not architecture’.
33
1 Victor Hugo, Notre Dame of Paris . Charles William Eliot (trans.): Harvard Classics. 1917 2 Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Babel Press, 2005 (Hebrew): Orit Gat (trans.): Pluto Press, 2015 (English) 3 For the difficult connection between Zionist architecture and Nazism see Black City, White City , p.43. Compare Raymond Geuss, ‘Politics and Architecture’ in A World Without Why . Princeton University Press, 2014
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator