Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Today is the opening in Minneapolis of the month-long multi-media exhibit on the Separation Wall that  I’ve mentioned before. One component of Dialogue on the Wall is the projection of my Israel/Palestine photos on the 10-foot wall built inside Form + Content Gallery. I’m looking forward to seeing it next week when I get to Minneapolis to participate in the related August 23rd panel discussion.

The primary exhibit organizer is architect Jay Isenberg, whose originating focus was the role architecture plays in conflict. Before Jay contacted me in May about using my photos, I had been vaguely aware of architectural implications, and I’ve been looking forward to learning more when I get to Minneapolis. Yesterday, Ziad Amra, a Minneapolis Palestinian activist I hope to meet at the panel discussion, sent Jay and me a link to a fascinating four-year old interview in Cabinet Magazine Online with Israeli architect Eyal Weizman. The magazine explains:

A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, a catalogue and exhibition originally created by Israeli architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman as their country’s official entry to the 2002 World Congress of Architecture in Berlin, is a ground-breaking examination of the character of building, planning, and community in the West Bank. Abruptly cancelled last summer on the eve of the Congress by its commissioning organization, the Israel Association of United Architects, the project has stirred strong opinions in Israel

It’s a long interview, touching on many different topics — the development of Israeli settlement policy, the role of the mountaintop overlooking Palestinian villages, the origin and symbolic role of red roofs, the use of pine trees to reduce grazing, internal Israeli political factions, the selective use of Ottoman and Jordanian law to justify Israel’s actions, the architect’s political role, and much more.

Here I’m including one excerpt, partly about the shape of Ariel, which I pondered during my two recent West Bank visits while passing it from the highway below. In this photo I took in 2004 from the highway below, Ariel overlooks Palestinian orchards.

The full interview is worth reading.

Most other maps of the West Bank show the settlements as points. They show the location, perhaps the number of settlers in them. But by actually showing form, we were trying to make a connection between the very organization of matter across the landscape and human rights violations. So it’s not only the fact that settlements are there, but it is the forms of the settlements—their shape, and size—that are contrary to human rights. For example, if you look at Ariel, which is an urban settlement located west of Nablus, it has an elongated banana shape. This is something you don’t see in a map where it’s depicted as a point. And you ask yourself, “Why was the settlement built like that?” If a student of ours came up with a plan of a city like that, we would say, “You must be joking! It maximizes traffic, does not allow pedestrians to walk, does not serve the population.” So there must be other considerations involved. You start breaking down the formative forces that operate on the form of this stain on the map. On the one hand, the settlement wanted to stretch itself as long as possible along Route 505, which is one of the most strategic east-west arteries, an artery that Israel believes would have an armed column going down it in the event of a Jordanian or Iraqi invasion from the East. So the settlement spreads thin as long as possible along that road. On the other hand, it creates a complete wedge across the north-south axis and separates Salfit, which is a regional Palestinian center, from the villages to its north that rely on it for their economy. Another thing that it does is envelop Salfit and prevent it from growing in the direction it would like to. All these are done by formal manipulations, decisions taken by architects and planners—something that shows that we have here a policy of negative planning.

In architecture lingo, we call this weak form. Weak form reacts to a kind of force field that operates around it. Imagine a drop of water that is running on a particular surface and it reacts to the surface—in this case, to topography, but also to the temperature of the surface, its slope, air flow, etc. There are many political and strategic forces that stretch the forms of the settlements one way or another. The very forms embody the momentary balance of forces that created it. What Rafi Segal and I did at our office was to try and read backwards from the form of the stain on the map in order to recreate and understand the forces that manipulated it. With this method of observation, you can see the objectives of the planner. This is our point: It is not only that the settlements are there. If that were the only case, you could argue that it is not the responsibility of the architect and only of the political decision that placed it. But when the form is designed in a particular way to achieve strategic and national goals—bisect a Palestinian road, surround a Palestinian settlement, or to try to create a wedge—the architect is engaged in negative planning, a reversal of his professional practice—like a medical doctor involved in torture. This approach establishes architecture, just like the tank, the gun and the bulldozer, as a weapon with which human rights could be and are violated. The mundane elements of planning and architecture are placed there in order to disturb and dominate, and when an architect is designing in order to disturb the growth of other things, he’s not acting as an architect.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.