Text by Rafi Segal, Photography by Gili Merin
With the changes in Israeli society that followed the 1967 Six-Day War – during which Israel conquered the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, thus more than doubling its size – came massive urban expansion and architecture of a new kind. Rafi Segal traces how the design and construction of a single project, Zvi Hecker’s Ramot Polin housing complex on the outskirts of Jerusalem, came to embody and yet defy this nationwide change.
The unification of Jerusalem under Israeli control in 1967 prompted a national building project of urban expansion through the construction of new neighbourhoods and settlements on Jerusalem’s surrounding hilltops. These aspired to echo the historic architecture of the old city of Jerusalem and thus establish a direct visual connection between the old and the new. The resulting architectural style of stone façades, arches and other “old Jerusalem” vernacular elements was so dominant that in some cases it led to the dressing of modernist pre-fabricated concrete slab buildings with local stone and arches.
With the focus on the physical and symbolic expansion of Jerusalem came a paradigm shift in Israeli architecture that turned away from the modernism of the 1960s in favour of the “post-modern” Jerusalem architecture of historicised stone façades. Architectural interests also changed – in material: from 1960s exposed concrete to Jerusalem local stone; in form: from abstract geometric expressions to traditional historicism; in construction methods: from pre-fabricated industrial building to traditional mason work; and structurally: from the exposed structures of modernism to concealed and hidden structural systems.
»Ramot Polin can be seen as a last attempt to resist the new wave of historicised architectural postmodernism in Israel at that time.«
Needless to say that this paradigm shift left no room for the earlier experimental architecture of the 1960s of which Alfred Neumann, Zvi Hecker and Eldar Sharon were the strongest propagators.
The pre-fabricated Ramot Polin housing complex designed by Zvi Hecker in the early 1970s can be seen as a last attempt to resist this wave of historicised architectural postmodernism (which quickly became mainstream), in favour of an alternative architectural path of new expression and form. It was an almost impossible task. Refusing to accept the old city vernacular as a model for this new complex, he drew on other metaphors, including the form of an open hand. This can be seen in the five-fingered structure of the neighbourhood’s layout, as the topography and landscape enter as public space the voids between the “fingers”. In keeping with the hand analogy, the number five reappears in the form of the dodecahedral solids that constitute the volumetric units that create the spatial pattern of the Ramot building’s main façades.
»Echoing the wild rock formations of Jerusalem’s hills, the project resembles a series of exaggerated wall-like structures.«
Echoing the wild rock formations of Jerusalem’s hills, the project seems to resemble a series of exaggerated retaining wall-like structures and in such a way engages with the landscape like none of the other new “historicised” Jerusalem neighbourhoods built at the time.
Architecturally, the Ramot project followed Alfred Neumann’s space-packing approach: a stacking of repetitive spatial elements as a means of creating a deep building envelope to function as a “filter” for the strong Israeli light and climate. This system naturally lent itself to pre-fabrication since the overall building was conceived as an assembly of repetitive units, of room-like size, which could easily be produced from pre-cast concrete elements. The staggering of the buildings’ floors enhanced the expression of this stacking while creating balconies open to the sky, a programmatic requirement that enabled the designated tenants – Polish Orthodox Jews – to practice the “Sukka” ritual, in which a temporary hut is built under open skies during the week of the holiday Sukkot.
Rafi Segal is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT. His practice and research engage in design on both the architectural and urban scale, with realised and ongoing projects in Israel, Egypt and the US. His work has has been reviewed and exhibited internationally, most notablely at KunstWerk, Berlin; Venice Biennale of Architecture; MOMA in New York; and at the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Urbanism Biennale. Segal holds a PhD from Princeton University and two degrees from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology: MSc and BArch. Among his current projects is the design of a new communal neighbourhood for a kibbutz in Israel and curating the first-ever exhibition on the life and work of Alfred Neumann (1900-1968).
Ramot Polin spoke a different language of architecture to all the other Jerusalem neighbourhoods built at that time, in form, expression, association and through the concepts it drew on. While the project set out to demonstrate that the rigidity often associated with pre-fabricated construction techniques can be overcome to produce non–conventional (and non-orthogonal) forms, by the time of its completion this argument was no longer relevant. Rather than a catalyst for new and original expression, post-1967 Israeli architecture was now valued for its ability to mimic old forms and create a direct link with past styles, reflecting a cultural preference supported by political-economic forces and a change in the country’s labour source.
Israel’s government-supported pre-fabricated building industry, which developed throughout the 1950s and 60s in response to a lack of skilled manual labour and the desire to maximise efficiency in producing housing for new citizens migrating to the country, was highly advanced by the end of the 1960s. But the conquering of the West Bank provided cheap, skilled, Palestinian stonemasons and, as a result, the national pre-fab industry declined sharply. In fact, halfway through the construction of the Ramot Polin project the Ministry of Housing replaced the construction company supplying the modular elements with a new one, to finish the work using conventional building methods. This change in the manner of construction led Zvi Hecker to discontinue the original design and produce a completely different one for the remainder of the project.
Therefore, through the architecture of its two building phases, Ramot Polin, upon its completion in 1985, evidences, in a single project, a profound shift in Israeli architecture, namely the end of attempts at new expression and the rise of a nationalist style “historicised” in order to prevail and further conquer. I
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