Fridays are sometimes for relaxing, and indulging in a little bit of flânerie, but sometimes it's fun to get out of town for a change of scenery. The holiday Purim fell on a Thursday, which gave us a free day in town to get our strolling done. Friday, therefore, was wide open for a trip to Haifa, to see the Bahá’í Gardens. During the years we lived in Israel, the Bahá’í grounds seemed always to be undergoing some kind of renovation; in 2018, an impromptu visit to the sect's gardens in Akko turned out to be a day the place was closed. So, after all these years, we had never been.
Finally, the timing was right, and we enjoyed a guided tour from the crest of Mt. Carmel down to about half-way down, stepping through each of the "Terraces of the Bahá’í Faith," designed by Fariborz Sahba. With the shrine of the sect's founder, the Báb, at the focal point of the entire ensemble, the gardens are both impressive to see and to see out from. The guide explained that the gardens are derived from an Iranian prototype in Shiraz, as well as English and Continental prototypes. The graphic delineation of the garden elements create a kind of artificial feeling to the ensemble, but to complain about such a thing feels ungracious. The experience of being in the gardens is transformational, especially when perfect air, sun, and sea pitch in. We were happy to have made the trip.
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The following week started with another trip, this time to Jerusalem, for a follow-up meeting with haGihon's Kobi Shmuelowski. I had wanted to talk more with Shmuelowski about the waste water treatment side of haGihon's business. We talked also about the pros and cons of the Israel's water company privatization that occurred in the early 2000's; the devolution of water supply and waste treatment from the cities to newly-established public-benefit companies was an important part of Israel's water sector "revolution" that continues today. (Among the goals for the privatization to improve transparency of the water tariff structure, so that fees paid for water service would be applied to the costs of water, rather than transferred to other municipal services as before.) Shmuelowski also talked about the biggest challenges that remain ahead of him: new supply lines to connect Jerusalem's main water storage facilities to the new, 100" "fifth line" that Mekorot is currently building. The continued development of Israel's water infrastructure serves continued development of everything else, which promises to proceed at a breakneck pace to keep up with the country's high birth rate, immigration, and its booming economy.
I also had a chance to meet Dr. Eran Feitelson, professor of geography at the Hebrew University. I will use several of his papers as assigned texts for my class. Two papers, in particular, have caught my attention. The first, "Desalination, Space and Power," proposes that increased use of desalination in Israel and elsewhere will cause new political relationships to emerge, reversing the age-old advantage of upstream riparians over downstream riparians. The second paper is titled "What is Water?", and proposes that water management needs to differentiate among "waters" depending on their origin, their use, and their role in the environment. He distinguishes between "needs" and "wants" in the human use of water, and so suggests that water management policy should take note of such distinctions in the planning and operation of water infrastructure.
Feitelson received his PhD at Johns Hopkins and wrote his dissertation titled '‘The Spatial Effects of land Use Controls: The Chesapeake Bay Critical Area Case." We talked a little about Baltimore, about which he remembers more his apartment's vermin than the charms of Charm City. He was in Maryland last fall for an event at University of Maryland titled "Maryland-Israel Water Conference," which one would imagine I'd have heard of before. The fact that I (a professor at a public university working in this field!) didn't is typical of UMD's lack of communications with other institutions in the state. But the good news is that, now that I know, I can reach out to the folks involved to see about common interests in the future.
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Back at my desk in the library at Tel Aviv University, I had finally to submit the revisions to my paper draft for Journal of Architecture. I had also to scramble for image rights permissions, including rights owned by the estates of architect Percival Goodman and artists Amalie Rothschild and György Kepes. Annoying as it is to administrate these reproduction rights, I like communicating with the families of these famous personages.
I had also to reach out the Avery Archives, at Columbia University, who require that they photograph all items from their collection used for reproduction. Annoying as that is, it's not as bad as the rights held by the Baltimore Sun's parent company, the Tribune. They're fast to respond, but outrageously expensive for these purposes.
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As a lark, Isabelle and chose to attend a collection of presentations given in honor of a new book, Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction.
Introductions were given by the book's editors, Yael Maurer and Meyrav Koren-Kuik. Two lectures followed. The first, by architect Johnathan Dortheimer, was a light review of how "future cities" have been and are currently imagined by practicing architects. His talk directed the audience's attention to recent "high tech" cities, including Amazon's failed bid for a new campus in NYC, as well as the other developments in the Middle East. The second talk had a bit more life to it: film critic Erez Dvora spoke about Fritz Lang's Metropolis and its sources in German Romanticism and its relationship to a cinematic genre called "mountain films." . I have to admit that I had always focused on Lang's visual style and that period's amerikanismus, and so I have to admit that Dvora's film covered new ground for me.
As one who has studied and taught this very topic, I was otherwise disappointed with the cursory way in which the editors described their work. To judge by the book's table of contents, each chapter is interesting in itself, but covers "old ground," and themes about which writers (including me!) have already covered (and uncovered) extensively...
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