Israelizing Jerusalem : the encounter between architectural and national ideologies, 1967-1977

The victorious Israeli acquisition of East Jerusalem during the 1967 War set off industrious construction intended to turn a modernist Israeli town and an ancient Jordanian city into "a united (and indivisible)" Israeli Jerusalem. This dissertation questions the reasons and venues for the consequent architectural break with high modernism that defined the built landscape of Jerusalem between 1967 and the first political defeat of Labor Zionism in 1977. For Mayor Teddy Kollek, who aspired to legitimate Israeli rule over Jerusalem on cultural and aesthetic grounds, architects were indispensable agents. However, invited luminaries, like Louis Kahn, Bruno Zevi, Philip Johnson and Lewis Mumford, forcefully attacked Jerusalem's modernist masterplan in favor of a spiritual and historical theme for the city. Their criticism became the catalyst for a beautification campaign that intriguingly resembled the British Mandate's "colonial regionalism." It also inspired younger Israeli-born architects whose quest to create an "architecture of the place" was ambivalently modeled after the Palestinian vernacular. By casting this architecture as biblical, primitive or Mediterranean, these architects emerged as interlocutors who mediated national identity into built and lived environment, culminating in Moshe Safdie's integration of archeology, the vernacular and technology in his authorized design for the Western Wall Plaza.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Nitzan-Shiftan, Alona

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mark Jarzombek.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8015

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8015