Although this blog is ostensibly a journal of my professional activities during my sabbatical, I've obviously allowed "life" to creep in my story-telling. Our stay in Tel Aviv has been rewarding personally as well as academically, and so I want to make sure that I keep up with accounts of at least some of the everyday events that contribute so much to our experience here.
Velodrome Tel Aviv 4/7/19
At the start of the month, Isabelle and I were invited to tour Tel Aviv's latest sports facility, a world-class velodrome that is wrapping up construction near the Yarkon River, set among other buildings that serve athletics and fitness. Isabelle's cousin Nimrod is co-owner and coach of the Tel Aviv Cycling Club, which will be among the organizations that will use extensively the new velodrome. Nimrod knew that I'd be curious to see the building "as architecture," and so he invited us to see the building from close-up. Still a lot of work to do on the exterior site development, but the rest of the building is substantially complete. Like other "open" structures of this scale, it's an impressive architectural space!
It has certainly been interested to observe the boom in cycling culture, which was hardly in evidence when we left Israel in 2004. Nimrod has been at the center of Israel's cycling "sports" world since the early 2000's, and one can see that his efforts have contributed also to the popularity of cycling's proliferation among Israel's general public.
Weizmann Institute 4/7/19
Later that day, Matthew and I jumped on a train to Rehovot, originally an agricultural community on the southern fringes of the center of 19th century Zionist settlement, and since the 1930's home to an agricultural and scientific institute named after its founder, Chaim Weizmann. Since 1948, the Weizmann Institute of Science has developed into Israel's Cal Tech. (Does that make the Technion Israel's MIT?) The analogy to Cal Tech, in my own mind, has something also to do with the campus, which is verdant and modernistic, like its SoCal counterpart. I wasn't prepared for how verdant -- the campus is especially well landscaped, apparently for the benefit of past and future donors as much as for the researchers themselves.
Weizmann built himself a house on the campus, designed by the famous Erich Mendelsohn. The house is an attraction in its own right, even if it is not its architect most nurturing residential design.
Mendelsohn's architecture in British Mandate Palestine is often spare and abstract, a reflection of his interpretation of the surrounding landscape. But it is not so often "rhetorical," in the sense that it stands for seemingly self-important concepts and relationships. The Weizmann House, however, does tends towards the rhetorical, despite Mendelsohn's intent was to open its domestic activity to the distant horizon. It's not his best house, but it's certainly an exciting monument to its inhabitant, whose contributions to Israel's institutional development was as important as his scientific work.
A fun display to the side of the house is Weizmann's office vehicle, a custom-built Lincoln Cosmopolitan made to match Harry Truman's own fleet of limousines. The car was donated to Israel by Henry Ford II, perhaps partly in tacit acknowledgement of his grandfather Henry Ford's role in fomenting antisemitism in the US and in Germany.
Naturally, I paid most of my attention to the pavilion in which the car is situate. My former boss, Hillel Schocken, was responsible for the late-1990's renovation to the Weizmann House and so was asked, subsequently, to design the glass "jewel-box" for display of the vehicle. I remember clearly how the design was developed on the desk of my colleague Taher Abu-Hamed. But I had never before now seen the happy result!
Erich Mendelsohn designed also another building on the campus, a concrete structure for the study of magnetic resonance. His use of a parabolic shape for the cross section makes this tiny building especially interesting, even if roofed (uncharacteristically for Mendelsohn!) with terra-cotta roof tiles.
There are a score of other fascinating buildings on the Weizmann Institute campus. We had to take a break after so much Architecture, and so we were glad to locate (at last) the student snack shack -- not designed by Mendelsohn, unfortunately, but a comfortable place to relax, nevertheless.
Student Presentations at TichoNet 4/8/19
One day later, the students at the urbanism track at Tichonet-Alterman high school in Tel Aviv presented their final projects to invited jurors, including myself. The work was not entirely technically proficient, but demonstrated instead familiarity with the principles of urban design and concepts underlying many geographers' analyses of the built environment.
As I've written in earlier blog posts, I'm intrigued with the course instructors' explicit goals of using urbanist theory to build among students a template for students to engage diverse issues in the public realm. I think there's a lot of potential for similar pedagogical initiatives in other schools, and of course especially in Baltimore where this approach would be especially valuable for students of high-school age. Among the invited guests was Meirav Moran, an "urban affairs" journalist for haAretz and Globes. The students appreciated having the input of a local media celebrity, such as print/web journalism represents. But her involvement also reminded me of what we lack in Baltimore: a media discourse concerning the ongoing evolution of our design and development and infrastructure cultures. A recent Facebook flamewar concerning the proposed demolition of a building on North Avenue proved to me that we've replaced constructive discourse, such as it ever existed, with merely the online equivalent of a shouting match.
Elections! (Jerusalem) 4/9/19
Early in April was a general election in Israel, an event covered by reportage around the world. This election held some excitement for the possibility that a challenger could succeed in replacing the incumbent and in forming a government which would promise more than continuing the status quo. Well, as I wrote on my Facebook page at the time, "Here goes nothing!"
And, as we all found out soon enough, there went nothing -- no real change to the political (or, obviously, near-term international) situation in a country whose leadership remains polarizing, but sufficiently popular to deflect attempts to hold it accountable for serious ethical lapses. Sound familiar?
We took the edge of our anticipated disappointment by regular tourism in Jerusalem.
A visit to Jerusalem's First Train Station for lunch, then a stroll around the Hebrew University. The weather cooperated, even if the election results didn't.
Chillin' with Family and Friends 4/10-11/19
The week of the election took place ahead of a major religious holiday, and so students had off from school. Tel Aviv entered "vacation mode" ahead of time, so to speak, and so we followed suit with visits with family and friends whom we hadn't seen in a long time. A trip to the religious neighborhood of Bnei Brak brought us to the home of Isabelle's first cousin and her family, all of them embedded in the life and institutions of the ultra-Orthodox. Returning to Tel Aviv, I received a visit from a former Jerusalem colleague, and together we enjoyed the scale and vitality of the Florentin neighborhood...
Walking on Water 4/12/19
I had pretty much given up on working this week. As you'll read in my next installment, I had planned to attend an academic conference starting Sunday, and so I had little interest in going back to the library for just one more writing session before the holiday. Isabelle has been much more diligent than I this month, but with such a nice environment for work, who can blame her?
At the end of the week, however, we wrapped things up "not by working hard, but hardly working." Another stroll along the river, another walk to the beach, was a great way to start what would prove to be a quiet weekend.
We've been joking about life in Tel Aviv's "Bubble," a way of acknowledging that life in the city can be attractive and stimulating and rewarding even while all sorts of crap is flying outside the immediate radius of one's attention. That week's election results was just one reminder; reports continued violence, then an agreement for calm, then more violence, then more calm... those were others. But this kind of balance between awareness and "coping" is not unique to Tel Aviv, of course, except for the local hot-house cultural perspective that tends to make it so. If anything, we've been keeping out of mind mostly the ongoing wretched events back home in the US, and particularly in Baltimore. We are very much grateful for the opportunity to do so, at least, in a physical environment that at least demonstrates the kind of urban life that would better serve so many of us.
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