Another busy week that demonstrated how heterogeneous the study of infrastructure history can be. The first few days continued the work of the previous week, finally putting together a talk on "Water and Nation-Building" for the Israeli context. A paper by Alon Tal served as the main source: "Enduring Technological Optimism: Zionism's Environmental Ethic and Its Influence on Israel's Environmental History." Building on Derek Penslar's first book, Zionism and Technocracy, Tal argues that an enchantment with technology lies beneath Israel's diverse attitudes to the environment. Despite the influential "Romantic" view of nature, labor, and Zionist identity exemplified by A. D. Gordon's writings, development, settlement, and (later) stewardship of land in Israel has generally relied on modern technology and innovation -- to a greater extent, even, than already-industrialized societies often seen as models in the Middle East. The result is that, despite their well-known successes among in agriculture, horticulture, and water management, Israeli's engagement with environmental issues tends towards "problem solving." Attitudes among the general public and politicians alike reflect tactical reaction rather than sustainable, holistic planning. Although such attitudes are hardly unique to Israel, the realities of its specific climate and environmental challenges (as well as its political predicament) may eventually overwhelm the capacity of technological ingenuity. Within the context of the class, however, Tal's essay should provide a useful framework by which to understand Israel's past and present development of its scarce water resources.
The next class to prepare has to do with Israel's geography and its water sources. But geography includes so many things besides a country's borders, its topography, and its bodies of water! Learning a bit more about Israel's diverse geology and its wide-ranging climate demonstrated how hard it is to generalize about any place, let alone a country for which elevation ranges from sea level to mountains to the lowest surface on the entire planet.
Work on this presentation was abbreviated by a visit with Isabelle to the new Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, located on the east side of the Tel Aviv University's campus. The new building is very much an "object" and a "destination" building, and within its rather opaque volume is a well-organized presentation of ecological themes that address directly the holism that, historically, has been lacking from Israel's "Technological Optimism." One odd thing is immediately visible: the use of mounted animal samples, way more extensively deployed than one is used to seeing in a contemporary museum. Who bagged-and-tagged all those birds, foxes, and deer?
It turns out that it was this guy: Father Ernst Schmitz, a German-born naturalist *and * Catholic Priest, who collected extensively on the island of Madeira and, after 1908, in Palestine under the Ottoman Empire. The Museum website explains how Father Schmitz's collection came to be displayed:
He witnessed a period in which a large number of large vertebrates went extinct in Israel, no doubt due to population growth and the increasing use of firearms... After Father Schmitz’s death, his collection, which with time became an almost mythological zoological treasure, disappeared without a trace. In 1978, the collection was rediscovered by Prof. Yossi Leshem, in the basement of the Schmitz School in East Jerusalem.
So, despite the bizarre provenance of all Schmitz's specimens, the curators created an effective display that is especially affecting -- especially for those, like me, who like stuffed animals.
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On Tuesday, I walked over the Tel Aviv University's Porter School for the Environment, the home of which is a snazzy "Eco-building" that appears most of all to serve as a luxurious roost for pigeons. But it has something for everyone (including humans) and for everything (including grey-water recycling).
I met with Dr. Shula Goulden, director of the Research Program of the Center for Innovation in Transportation and adjunct professor in the Porter School's International MA program in Environmental Studies. I had reached out to her because of a course she teaches titled "Buildings, Energy, and City," the scope of which dovetails with at least two of the class sessions that I have planned for my class. But, as she herself explained, her post-doc work at the Technion (with Naomi Carmon & Uri Shamir) may be more directly relevant to what I'm working on. In particular, their buzz-phrase "water-sensitive planning" may be a way of helpfully tying together design-side issues relating to water management. Even now that I'm about to dig deeper into the technical side of water infrastructure, I remain uncertain how to relate everything back to architecture. Obvious conservation and recycling practices in design might be valuable, but hardly impactful. Exploring the potential meanings of "water-sensitive planning," a general rubric, might be a useful starting point. Is there anything new here that we didn't know? Probably not, but sometimes a slogan can help: Dr. Goulden told me that Israel today had yet to integrate stormwater effectively into its water management cycle. Considering the increasing sprawl of Israel's hardscape development, this is more than a bit surprising. Perhaps stormwater and "water-sensitive planning" is the next local frontier for water policy...
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On Thursday, in Be'er Sheva, I had another stimulating meeting, this time with Dr. Inbal Ben Asher - Gitler, who teaches at both Sapir College and Ben Gurion University. She and her Texas A&M colleague Anat Geva have co-edited a forthcoming book, Israel as A Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948-1978, to which I contributed a book chapter. Dr. Ben Asher-Gitler has a lot of interesting projects going on, and it was great to hear more about them.
Later that day, I went out in search of another type of specimen, the concrete "Brutalist" kind. The trip to Be'er Sheva with Matthew W. gave me the the opportunity to see a few buildings that have been on my "wish list" for a long time, including the "Quarter Kilometer" building by architects Yaski and Alexandroni. It is LONG!
Despite my colleagues' complaints about its wretched urban context -- and the building's own wretched urban space-making premise -- it's still an awesome architectural object to experience. 250 meters!
Earlier in the day, we snuck past a gate to visit Ram Carmi's Dormitory "Gimmel" for Ben Gurion University. Another failure from a humanist's perspective, it is still an impressive technical feat. Nevertheless, as a colleague complained, it is "architecture for architects," and that's usually a bad thing. In this case, he's probably right, but the complex is still is a lot of fun to visit -- for this architect.
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