Category: workshop I – Individual Practices

Odelya Bar-Yehuda

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In this research, I examine how current real estate advertisements promote new high-rise neighborhoods in Israel. The “high suburbs” now realize governments’ housing programs, and contractors build them in many urban outskirts. Such Public-Private ventures reflect the local neoliberal framework that rose in Israel in the 80s’ together with adaptation of the postmodern terminology in architecture practice and discourses. In the last decade new neighborhoods are built with a large number of towers, and contractors promote and market tower-apartments as real estate
asset. This recent evolution, I argue, brings market images to the nation-wide Israeli context, with meaningful impacts on architecture practices and public discourses.
By analyzing the adds’ graphics and rhetoric, I show that contractors and advertisers aimed at popular desires, often emphasizing the apartments as economic opportunity, highlighting their luxurious standards. Most adds portray the neighborhoods’ landscape as a generic spectacle – shown from a bird’s eye or from high apartments’ windows and balconies. While views of public spaces and street level are rare, many images focus on private spaces and portray apartments’ interiors in detail. By interviewing architects of selected new high-rise neighborhoods, I aim at probing the impact of these images on their design, and at conceiving the implications of the current market on Israeli architects’ practice.

 

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Odelya Bar-Yehuda
MA student, The David Azrieli School of Architecture, The David and Yolanda Katz, Faculty of Arts, Tel Aviv University

Supervisor: Prof. Talia Margalit

 Yael Sofer, Tal Alon Mozes

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In 1977, with the establishment of the Tel Aviv Foundation, a new era of building new gardens and restoring old ones started. Pastoral islands of nature and repose, along with modernist-style public spaces, were replaced with new parks that emphasize activity and visibility. Playgrounds and sports facilities, plazas, fountains and a variety of pavements took the place of the decorative shrubs and dusty kurkar paths. In addition, the municipality’s landscaping department, headed by Avraham Karavan, who designed the city’s gardens and landscapes until the early 1970s, gave way to a new generation of landscape architects who brought the spirit of the period to the city. 

The lecture examines this turning point in the development of public parks and open spaces in Tel Aviv via several frameworks: 

– The vision of Shlomo Lahat, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, to position the city as a center of commerce and industry, education and culture, arts and leisure, and the establishment of the Tel Aviv Foundation. 

– The impact of neo-liberal trends as a multidimensional, abstract arena with no specific connection to place and population. 

– New postmodern trends in landscape architecture liberated the field from modern rational design in favor of landscape architecture of spectacle and complexity based on new materials and contemporary aesthetics. 

– The expression of these tendencies in Tel Aviv during the 1980s and 1990s in various open spaces such as urban boulevards, neighborhood parks, open public spaces, and more. 

Between Gan Hatikva (Garden of Hope), which was inaugurated on the day of Herzl’s death, and Katherine Louis Park commemorating the name of the park’s donor, Tel Aviv’s culture of gardens and open spaces has changed. A change that reflects the spirit of the era and its economic, cultural, and stylistic aspects. 

 

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TAL ALON-MOZES is a landscape architect and Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. She holds a MLA degree from UC Berkeley and a PhD from the Technion. Her areas of interest include the landscapes of the past: histories of the designed landscapes of Israel; the landscapes of the present: green infrastructure for contemporary Israel; and landscapes for the future: landscape architecture pedagogy. Among her published works are two edited books on Israel’s modern landscape architects, and numerous articles representing her diverse areas of interest.

 

YAEL SOFER is a landscape architect, graduate of the landscape architecture program at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and has more than 20 years of experience. She also holds a Master’s degree in Management of Educational Systems from Gordon Academy. Among her projects that are considered groundbreaking in their field is the master plan for the urban nature area along Ha-Yarkon Park and planning for historical gardens, combining preservation and regenerations in Ramat Gan. Since 2016 Yael has been a landscape architecture lecturer at the Technion and studies for Ph.D., directed by Prof. Tal Alon Moses, on the historic urban landscape in urban regeneration.

Idit Shachnai Ran

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In the first decades of the kibbutz movement, the layout of the typical kibbutz reflected the modernist aspiration for comprehensive and total planning, in search for a new spatial structure that would express the social values of the kibbutz and, at the same time, shape all aspects of the members’ lives. The kibbutzim were planned based on modernistic tools such as masterplan and zoning; the buildings were built in the spirit of minimalism, modesty, and functionalism. Ultimately, the idea of the kibbutz came to be firmly linked to modernistic architecture. However, during the 1970s, subsequent to political, economic, and cultural processes, both at the local and global levels, the kibbutzim underwent substantive spatial changes, which loosened this association.

The proposed lecture will elucidate the processes whereby the kibbutz parted ways with modernist architecture and the values associated with it, by juxtaposing the changes in the practices of kibbutz planning with those in the construction economy in the country at large. The kibbutz planning system, as formulated in the 1940s, was a broad and centralized mechanism that mediated between the kibbutzim and the state institutions. Yet, the processes of spatial change that occurred in the kibbutzim during the 1970s were unsystematic and decentralized. The collective planning system had failed to redefine the common goals and values to serve as a basis for total planning. In contrast to the past, these changes were implemented in each kibbutz separately and were propelled mainly by local decisions and individual initiatives.

By the 1970s, a new generation of architects influenced by contemporary architectural theories had become increasingly involved in the planning of kibbutzim. In the planning departments, a rift evolved and gradually widened between those young architects and the veterans who followed modernistic approaches. The disagreements were by no means limited to esthetics: They were substantive and fraught, heralding the disintegration of the fundamental idea behind the kibbutz movement. They challenged the concept of the “kibbutz” as a “type,” and the relevance of its core values. At a time when the economic prospects for the kibbutzim were veiled in uncertainty, the young architects designed huge, unstandardized, expensive edifices. In many cases, the construction of such a building contributed to the kibbutz’s economic collapse.

The typical spatial model realized in the kibbutzim at the beginning of the 20th century mirrored social values such as equality, and the priority of the collective over the individual. In the nascent Israeli State of the late 1940s, these notions were perceived as idyllic. In that sense, the spatial changes in the kibbutzim during the second half of the century can be seen as part of the transformation of the country’s social order. All in all, the spatial reorganization of the kibbutz marks the advent of a new and different order, which is now less transparent and less easily identifiable.

 

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Idit Shachnai Ran: Architect, lecturer, and cultural researcher. Idit holds a master’s degree in cultural studies and a doctorate from the Faculty of Architecture and Town-Planning in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Idit’s research employs an interdisciplinary approach that combines qualitative research with tools and knowledge derived from architectural studies and the theoretical perspectives from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with the physical space of the kibbutz and the changes it has undergone in the wake of political, economic, and social processes, mainly in the 1970s. Idit teaches in the faculty of architecture at the Technion and at the Tel Aviv University.