Author: Yael Fuhrmann-Naaman

Elad Horn

Elad Horn is  Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion in the Big Data in Architectural Research Lab (BDAR), supervised by Dr. Or Aleksandrowicz. Elad’s research in the fields of History of Architecture and Digital Humanities examines the ways economic and spatial transformations in Tel Aviv-Yafo in the 1980s and 1990s generated new architectural idioms. 

Elad’s latest book, PoMo – Architecture of Privatization (2021), with Dr. Jeremie Hoffmann, documents the evolution of Tel Aviv-Yafo’s architectural landscape in the wake of Israel’s transition towards neoliberalism at the end of the 20th century. 

Assoc. Prof. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan is Associate Professor of history and theory at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where she heads the Aronson Built Heritage Research Center. She received her PhD from MIT, and leading research institutes such as CASVA, the Getty/ UCLA Program, the Israel Science Foundation, and the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan, supported her research. Her work on inter- and postwar architectural modernisms, including Erich Mendelsohn, I. M. Pei, “United Jerusalem”, “Whitened Tel Aviv,” critical historiography, and heritage has been widely published. As the head of the Technion’s Architectural Program she led the transition required for implementing a new curriculum of M.Arch studies. She was the president of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN), and co-chaired its conference “Histories in Conflict”. Her awards winning book Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification will be followed by the Israeli volume of Reaktion’s series Modern Architectures in History.

Assoc. Prof. Dafna Fisher-Gewirtzman

Dafna Fisher-Gewirtzman is an Assistant Professor (PhD), the Chair of the Architecture program at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and a visiting scholar at CUSP-NYU. She serves as Academic Director of the VisLab, the immersive virtual reality visualization laboratory. Her research focus is on the field of visual analysis and simulation and development of novel, automated architecture design tools based on potential residents’ perception of space, directed toward the development of sustainable built environments. In addition, she leads research in the area of adaptive re-use architecture documentation and analysis. Her research is financially supported by the Israel Science Foundation and JOY VENTURES. She is a UNESCO fellowship recipient and a laureate of the prestigious Yanai Prize for Excellence in Academic Education. Her work has been published in leading professional journals and presented in numerous international conferences and universities around the world.

Prof. Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art

Prof. Florian Urban is Professor of Architectural History and Head of History of Architectural and Urban Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. He was born and raised in Munich, Germany, and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Berlin, an MA in Urban Planning from UCLA and a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from MIT. Before joining the Mackintosh School of Architecture, he taught at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin Technical University and worked for the German Federal Institute for Research on Construction, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR). Since 2009 he has been the Book Reviews Editor-in-Chief for the journal Planning Perspectives. He is the author, among others, of Neohistorical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970–1990 (2009), Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (Routledge, 2012), The New Tenement: Architecture in the Inner City since 1970 (Routledge 2018), and Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland: Transformation, Symbolic Form and National Identity (Routledge, 2021).

Prof. Stephan Trüby, University of Stuttgart

Prof. Dr. phil. Stephan Trüby (* 1970) is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Theory and Director of the Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart since April 2018. Previously, Trüby was Visiting Professor of Architecture at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe (2007-09), Head of the postgraduate study program “Scenography/Spatial Design” at the Zurich University of the Arts (2009-14) and Professor of Architecture and Cultural Theory at the Technical University of Munich (2014-18). His publications include Exit-Architecture. Design between War and Peace (2008), The World of Madelon Vriesendorp (2008, with Shumon Basar), Germania, Venezia. The German Entries to the Venice Architecture Biennale since 1991 (2016, with Verena Hartbaum), Absolute Architekturbeginner: Schriften 2004-2014 (2017) and Die Geschichte des Korridors (2018). He is a permanent contributor to the journal ARCH+.

Housing under authoritarian neoliberalism 

Dasha Kuletskaya 

For the first two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Belarusian government refused to back neoliberal reforms in most economic sectors, including the housing market. The strong state control of the economy led to a common perception among international organizations and scientists that neoliberal shift never happened in Belarus has remained the ‘museum of socialism.’ However, this perception no longer holds: I argue that since 2009 Minsk has been experiencing a neoliberal shift in housing, where the authoritarian state has been playing a major role in removing barriers to profit extraction. Taking a large contemporary housing development as an example, I will show the interconnection of housing-as-policy, housing-as-market, housing-as-finance, and housing-as-design. I argue that the strive for profit maximization reshaped the urban layout and architecture of this development, which can be read as the built evidence of various practices of investment minimization. Furthermore, I argue that architecture is not just a built manifestation of these practices. As a professional practice, it contributes to this change in a twofold manner: by deploying its’ design expertise to extract maximum profit from the urban space and by providing seductive visual material to sell this space to the population, both as real apartments and as a political project. 

 

Dasha Kuletskaya: Architect, teaching and research associate in the Department for Building Design and Realization at the Faculty of Architecture, RWTH Aachen, Germany. She holds B.Sc. in Architecture from Technical University of Vienna and M.Sc. in Architecture from RWTH Aachen. In 2021, she received the IDEA League Research Grant to conduct a research stay at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. Dasha’s research focuses on the questions of land, finance, real estate, and architecture, and the production of housing in the context of global capitalism. In her doctoral dissertation project, she focuses on the recent transition in the housing market in Minsk, Belarus. Before starting her PhD, Dasha worked as an architect at several design offices in Vienna, Moscow, Aachen, and Cologne.

Challenging the Role of Incentives for Urban Development: The Case of privatized Public Space in NYC and Tel Aviv

Liat Eisen

The use of incentives by the public sector as a means to rely on the private sector to provide public amenities has became a catalyst for urban development in the past three decades. Privatized urban public space is the spatial manifestation of such incentives, which constitutes a platform for a broad debate among sociologists, political scientists, economists and policymakers about the notion and consequences of commodification of urban public space.

This presentation will discuss the role of incentives for urban development by examining the case of privatized urban public spaces in NYC as a result of 1961 zoning resolution and its impact on the proliferation of Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) in advanced global cities.

 

Liat Eisen is an architect, urban planner and a PhD candidate for public and urban policy at the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environmental at the New School. Liat’s research interests include privatization of urban public space, incentives for urban development, spatial politics and conflict resolution in divided cities.

Towards Global Heritage in Hebron Old City

Razi Khader

Amid the popular mobilization of the first Intifada, a group of young scholars from the Hebron Polytechnic, decided to focus their attention on the urban fabric and residences of Hebron’s Old City. Through architectural conservation, the Hebron University Graduates Union (UGU) invested dilapidated structures with architectural values that foster their position as cultural assets. In 1995, this conservation project was endorsed by the Palestinian Authority and led to the transformation of the grassroots UGU into the semi-governmental Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC). The high technical abilities and rigorous professional interventions of the HRC won the highest international recognition, first with the Aga Khan Award for Islamic Architecture in 1998, and two decades later, with the declaration of the Old City as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  

This paper explores HRC’s post-Oslo shift towards the global frameworks of the Aga Khan award and ultimately UNESCO’s World Heritage. I argue that this transition entails a shift from the modest external funds allocated to the UGU into a full-blown transnational market and finance, thus accelerating and systemizing heritage management. From this financial perspective, the PA’s endorsement of this project was not only a diplomatic achievement but also a financial opportunity. It allowed the HRC to participate in the global heritage market by including its rehabilitation project in a national framework, hence eligible candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage List.  I examine how the HRC’s venture onto these global grounds swept Hebron’s Old City into the neoliberal market of heritage and heritage tourism, moreover, how this transnational finance and management affected the tools and dialectics of heritage making in Hebron’s Old City.  

I explore how HRC’s rehabilitation project was economically, ethicaly, and aesthetically realized. First, I examine the conservation praxis through HRC’s architectural practice as the catalyst for the diplomatic approach to heritage market. Second, I draw on primary documents of the HRC and its publicationsc to analyse the heritage discourse and management, leading to the nomination of Old Hebron to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.  

 

Razi Khader has a B.Sc in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, where they graduated summa cum laude. They are currently working on their master’s thesis on the architectural conservation project of Old Hebron, Palestine. Razi has presented papers in national and international conferences, such as the 2021 European Architectural History Network Thematic Conference. Razi and their research earned the dean’s excellence award and the Li Ka Shing Fellowship. Razi is also a secondary teacher and assistant in a history, theory, and criticism course on architecture in Israel in the 20th and 21st century.

Tel Aviv Postmodernism: Urban Facades as a reflection of InstitutionalPlanning in a Neoliberal Era

Dana Silverstein Duani

In the 1980s, Israel experienced a turning point in its economic policy, changing from a socialist policy to a more liberal and capitalist policy and later on to neoliberalism.Reducing governmental intervention and shifting national developmentto the free market, resulting in the privatization of architectural planning. These changes were also reflected in the Tel Aviv’s architecture of the 1980s and 1990s and in the gradual creation of a new local architectural language, Tel Aviv Postmodernism.
This architecture is expressed on the façade designof Tel Aviv’s buildings, andis identified oniconic buildingsand onthousands of residential buildings that were built in those decades andare assimilated into the urban fabric. These consist of new buildings, hybrid buildingswith additions and new neighborhoodsthat reflect dramatic changes that took place in the design, planning mechanism, and architectural culture, following the creationof a professional institutional planning division in the 1980s.
The Planning Divisionimplemented its vision for the cityvia statute, igniting conceptual planning, master planningand regulating on what is supposed to be a market-led development, and also promoting non-statutory planning. They establishedpolicies and design guidelines for private buildings, with a direct effect on the architectural culture and thegradual creation of a new local architectural languagein the city.
This case study challenges the premise and contemporary researchthat neoliberalismincreased privatization of planning. Tel Aviv of the 1980s and 1990s demonstratesthat the cityunderwent a process of growing institutional involvement in planning, rather than afree-market domination and privatization of planning.In this paper I will present the changes that occurred in Tel Aviv’s Planning Division in the 1980s and 1990s and theimpact on the local architectural language by examiningthe processes that occurred, the new plans that were createdand the architectural language that developed.

 

Dana Silverstein-Duani: Architect and a doctoral student in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel. She is a part of Prof. Yael Allweil’s HousingLab: History and Future of Living research group. Her research examines Tel Aviv’s postmodern residential architectural language and urban design process from the 1980s and 1990s.