Even the most stimulating topic can test one's enthusiasm after a while. After a few days writing about "Transborder Water Issues" -- among the most interesting and politically critical aspects of the Israeli water sector -- I decided to take a break and travel a bit. Along the way, a few other opportunities popped up.
The last day in March was the occasion of a "mini-symposium" hosted jointly by Tel Aviv University's Schools of Psychological Sciences and of Neuroscience. The presenters discussed recent experiments concerning behavior and endocrine functions, particular the production of dopamine. Knowing nothing about the topic except what I read in Awakenings, I didn't expect to follow too much of these talks. But each of the speakers was engaging in her or his turn: Yael Niv (Princeton), Nathaniel Daw (also Princeton), and Peter Dayan (Max Planck Institute Tübingen).
Most striking (and not a little bizarre) was the VR setup that Daw's colleagues set up for mouse subjects:I don't philosophically object to animal-subject experiments, but I was struck by the baroque Rube-Goldberg-ness of the trail.
On the evening of the next day, Isabelle and I sought to look outwards, towards the starts. Just two days before the Israeli space gizmo "Genesis" was scheduled for LOI (Lunar Orbit Insertion), Tel Aviv University's astronomy department held a public event on the roof of a downtown shopping center: Astronomy on Tap, part of a global series of similar events. What we didn't expect was the huge crowd of 20- and 30-somethings, since in our experience these kinds of events cater to kids, not adults. We also didn't expect the talks to be given indoors. Next time, I hope, we'll get to see something "live" in the sky.
The day after, I was able to make the final edits on my article about the National Library of Israel for the Review of Middle East Studies. The piece will now be sent to the typesetters. Working with the journal's editor and editorial staff has been a pleasure, and so I have only a bit of residual apprehensive about the response to my piece. My piece deals with the topic at hand, with only a few passing references to politics. Considering the journal's reputation, however, my light touch might be considered controversial. No matter; it's an interesting topic, and I'm pleased with my final draft.
Taking a break from my course preparation has allowed me also to begin planning my next project, concerning the design of Jewish centers on college campuses. (A draft abstract has been accepted for inclusion in a special issue of Arts journal.) The premise of my paper will be to review the history of such Jewish centers and to describe, in detail, the thought behind three very different buildings: Yale's Slifka Center, Duke's Freeman Center, and UCSD's Glickman Hillel Center, now in the advanced planning phases. It turns out that the architecture itself may not be the "main story." Rather, the way that the design process interfaces with planning and fundraising -- even in retrospect -- has become a hot-button topic as donations and their donors come under increasingly close scrutiny.
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A trip late in the week to Nazareth was suggested by pictures of concrete architecture, the subject of an upcoming symposium to be held in Tel Aviv and Be'er Sheva next week. In particular, images of a synagogue featuring a spaceship-like saucer-shaped roof were too good to resist. The building was located in Nazareth "Ilit" (Upper Nazareth, a Jewish neighborhood), and so I thought the trip would be a good opportunity to visit the historical Arab city, too.
Jumping on a bus up to the Galilee turned out to be just a matter of walking to the corner and waiting a few minutes. I was the sole passenger on a comfortable bus, with great wifi...
The 90-minute trip to Nazareth passed by plenty of familiar sites, including the prison at which I served as a soldier for two years at the end of the last millennium: Armageddon.
As a matter of fact, "Armageddon" is not a nickname, just the Greek "New Testament" version of the Hebrew "Megiddo," a town with a long ancient history and, today, an archeological site not far from the prison. The prison itself was established by the British, a testament to their skills at military occupation and -- maybe -- their sense of humor.
The bus passed also by Israel's most celebrated "postmodern" building (at least among projects by serious, well-known architects), the Nazareth District Court House by Nadler Nadler Bixon Gil. This was an experiment tried once, then discarded, by the same architects that designed the "concrete confection" of a library in which I work each day.
But I didn't come for late-1980's/early 199o's architectural pastiche. I came instead for the "real thing": elemental concrete modernism. Alighting from the bus, and walking to Nazareth Ilit's hill-top park, I found what I was looking for...!
From this first glance, I knew I had arrived. But the architect's intended approach was obviously not through a hole in the wall where visitors are guided today. Rather, the synagogue was intended to be part of a memorial in remembrance of the Holocaust. so The architect designed both a museum structure and the prayer hall, each accessible from the plinth upon which the "flying saucer" sits...
The architect of this project was Nahum Zolotov, who completed around the year 1967. Zolotov was responsible for other concrete synagogues elsewhere in Israel, including the Central Synagogue in Be'er Sheva. The formal clarity of the design, especially when seen from the plinth itself, is unprecedented. Architect and historian Zvi Efrat has opined that...
The walls are made of crude stone, topped with a plate of concrete. It has rough materialism – bare concrete, which can be touched. It is a sensual synagogue.
The building characterizes the sabra construction, compared to the Jewish construction in the Diaspora. Jewish construction is like a chameleon – wherever the Jews were they adapted themselves to the atmosphere and culture , assimilating into the environment.
Synagogues abroad have nothing unique, no language. The sabra constriction, on the other hand, reflects a local language. It is direct, authentic, and sincere. It is exposed, not flamboyant and not decorative... The foundation is bare so we can understand how the structure was built. There is a sense of drama in light and shade games and a drama on the plasticity. The raw stones, the non-plastered walls and the raw material at the synagogue are characteristic of the straightforwardness and bluntness of the strong and physical Israeli." (LINK)
Less clear is how to engage the forms and spaces as a worshipper, especially so many years (and so many changes) later. How the hell do you get into the building?
Turns out the answer is subtle, and not at all disappointing, but totally at odds with how the religious conservatives that have inherited the building have used it. From the plinth, one is expected to descend via large, stadium-like stairs into a courtyard adjacent to the prayer hall. From here, one can easily enter either the hall itself or the ancillary spaces.
The resulting entry facade is potentially both sensitive and monumental. The decorative inscriptions on the concrete wall depict a highly stylized menorah, akin to ancient pictographs rather than sentimental religious art.
Use of the synagogue by a liberal, flexible congregation must have afforded an exciting combination of ritual and space. But for the traditionalists who now occupy the building, these kinds of innovations have little relevance.
Their disregard is obvious on the interior, which has been festooned with kitchy yiddishkeit. I wasn't able to enter the main sanctuary, but a picture taken through a window suggests the incompatibility of the architectural design and today's congregational use.
We see similar challenges in modernist religious buildings in Baltimore, where a significant architectural legacy is more often seen as a hardship than a blessing.
With the increasing awareness of the significance of these concrete structures in Israel, there is some hope that their preservation will be sustained even in the face of real estate pressure and some groups' "philosophical" antipathy to this kind of architectural design.
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A very different kind of religious experience awaits visitors to the historical core of Nazareth, identified by most Christians as the place of Jesus's youth. Traditional Nazareth is like many other older towns in the Galilee and elsewhere: crowded, surrounding a water source in the valley between surrounding hills, and architecturally "layered" over the course of centuries, if not millennia. (Nazareth's archeological remains extend back to the middle bronze age, but after a gap of a thousand year, its historical record picks up after the third century of the common era.) One result is a crowded circulation pattern, resisting movement rather than facilitating it. And despite the city's visual charm when seen from afar, the result from within the town is less charming than haphazard. "Public space" is really more like "residual space," at least for a visitor. (Israeli architects have for generations romanticized the visual qualities of Arab hill towns and have applied them not to Israeli towns but to architectural projects. I am not sure, however, that the spatial experience of these towns warrants that enthusiasm; furthermore, I'm not sure that the spatial morphology of these towns serve today their inhabitants...) Nevertheless, coming upon a Christian or a Muslim holy place can bolster one's appreciation for how the built environment can inspire people and their engagement with a place.
The Basilica of the Annunciation is Nazareth's primary Christian cultic site, identified as early as the 4th century as the location where Mary received word of her impending conception. There is practically nothing remaining from those early days. Designed by the Italian architect Giovanni Muzio, Basilica itself dates only to 1960-1969 and was designed as a syncretic combination of local vernacular architecture and Modernist concrete Brutalism.
The entrance facade is a lot of fun...
... but the character of the building changes entirely at the interior, which if not "fun" is certainly moving:
The exposed concrete frame is itself a decorative element within the basilica. Like other churches, there is a lower level akin to a crypt, but there is unusually also an upper level, which serves most typical Basilica functions.
Looking up towards the cupola demonstrates the architect's facility with balancing the traditional Catholic church architecture with some novel, "modernistic" architectural elements. Of course, some other churches in Europe and the US had been designed to be even more aesthetically "revolutionary," but this example does a good job at negotiating among the alternative architectural trends current at the time.
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After lunch, with more than a few hours of daylight left, I hopped on a bus to Akko ("Acre"). I hoped to visit the 12th century crusader structures "rediscovered" in the 1970s.
The crusader-era complex is huge, and the curatorial set-up is extensive. But the entrance is elusive; rather than enter from the public space opposite the bazaar, one has to "know" that the gate for tourists is usually hidden by all the tourist buses. I found it, finally, on a second pass around.
Otherwise, Akko is as intriguing as any other walled city, perhaps more so due to its unique situation on the coast. Even Yafo, which shares its seaside location and boasts a much older urban history, nevertheless can't provide the combined feeling of antiquity sea-side exuberance that Akko does.
What would be the closest comparison? Maybe Malta...?
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