In the middle of April, for three days, I attended a conference assembled to address topics on concrete architecture: The Brutalist Turn.
The conference was organized by the Dr. Eran Neuman, faculty at Tel Aviv University's Azrieli School of Architecture and director of the Architectural Archives hosted currently by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. I was invited informally by my colleague Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler, since she knew of my interest generally in architectural history. The line-up of presenters and active conference participants had already been set a long time ago, and so I could look forward to being a "fly on the wall" while other people pointed and counter-pointed, so to speak, about the legacy of Brutalism in Israel and elsewhere.
The first day took place on the Tel Aviv University campus, in the "Mexico Building" designed by architects Dan Eytan and Yitzhak Yashar...
The next day took took us to Be'er Sheva, a paleo- and neo-Brutalist pilgrimage site...
... and, on the last day, the Tel Aviv Museum, designed also by Eytan and Yashar:
I had been looking forward to this event to provide an overview of the history of buildings that are, alternative, hated and loved by the general public. Despite their only-a-mother-could-love aesthetics, Brutalist buildings are increasingly appreciated as architectural designs and as statements about how architecture can engage the public realm. (Depends on the building, of course.) But, as a social media flame war taking place in Baltimore over the course of these several days reminded me, that a lot more was at stake. Brutalism has long been infamous for its failures. Especially in cities like Baltimore, Brutalist architecture has become a "straw man" for social and economic failure and, accordingly, a target for demolition. Besides the loss of buildings of real historical and aesthetic significance, one has the sense that history itself is being demolished, as though the best time to return lost affluence is to rewrite the historical record embodied by its architecture. An entire period of architectural and urban history has come under erasure, often by social actors who ostensibly value "history" and "preservation." This conference, the Brutalist Turn, seemed to offer a way to promote engagement with that history, including real architectural failures, while celebrating real architectural achievements as well.
The first day's sessions came with the titles "The Brutalist Discourse" & "The Social Ethics of Brutalism," which covered generally theoretical models by which European architects and critics advocated for new concepts in reaction to the Modernism represented by Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM). We were treated by presentations by Dr. Laurent Stalder (ETH Zurich), Vladimir Kulic (University of Iowa), and Oliver Elser (Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt), as well as Dirk van den Heuvel (TU Delft), Roy Kozlovsky (TAU), and Noah Chasin (Columbia GSAPP). The conversation generally hovered around works in English by Reyner Banham and the Smithsons, although the audience quickly sought ways of tying their work to intellectual streams in France, Holland, and "peripheral" countries like Yugoslavia, Israel ... and the United States. In fact, that was the key consensus among both speakers and audience: "Brutalism" had diverse local manifestations, and was hardly a coherent philosophy in its own right. Since its main (British) proponents wrote mostly about New Brutalism, I asked to what "old" Brutalism these writers were referring. The answer? Well, there was never an "old" Brutalism, and that fact points towards New Brutalism's penchant for sloganeering and a priori critical abstractions.
At the end of the evening, conference guests, attendees, and the general public looked forward to a talk by yes-or-no Brutalist bad boy Zvi Hecker, probably the only Israeli architect known widely outside the country. He called his talk "Socialized Brutalism."
At 86 years old, he prefers the role of "righteous prophet" to enfant terrible. (It is not clear to me that he is, or was, either.) But he's still active, and presented his recent project for the Royal Dutch Military Police Complex. Considering his famous intransigence where client needs are concerned, he demonstrated in his talk at least some self-awareness.
So he played it for laughs, which is at least better than the alternative.
* * *
Day two's agenda included site visits to three important works in the Be'er Sheva area. First on the list was Dani Karavan's Monument to the Negev Brigade, which I visited with my family already in March. Third on the list was Ram Carmi's Zlotowski Dormitories, which I toured with Matthew W. in February. But the second site was a building I had only seen from the outside: Be'er Sheva's Central Synagogue, by the architect Zahum Zolotov. (I have describe my visit to Zolotov's Central Synagogue in Nazareth Ilit in a previous blog entry.) This time, thanks, to the conference organizers, we were treated to a tour of its interior and a conversation with one of the original congregants.
The project's formal conceit is simple: a concrete plate folded to form a tent-like structure, set on a plan shaped like a six-pointed-star. The symbolism is blatant, what architects in the USA call a "one liner," but the result is (spatially) surprisingly warm and nurturing, akin to Wright's Beth Shalom synagogue near Philadelphia -- a building which is also a much better interior space than it ought to be. On the other hand, Zolotov didn't even try to elaborate the geometry for human consumption. In other words, what came out of the geometry is what was built. The building entrance is neither hidden nor marked; it's just there, around the back, without inflection. (Part of the tour group was sitting opposite, waiting for the others, unable to find the front door.) But the interior light is rich, with geometricized colored glass fit into the gaps left by the concrete roof.
Additional fittings have been added, ad hoc, by the congregants in the years since the building's completion in the early 1980's. But their doing so, and the way they've done so, seems less at odds with the architect's intent than the changes to Zolotov's synagogue in Nazareth Ilit. The community for whom the building was designed is still active, and so their pride in this Brutalist "icon" is real, and evident.
The first session of the second day's was titled "Brutalism Migrates," featuring talks by Dr. Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler (BGU and Sapir College), Dr. Erez Golani Solomon (Keio University and Front Office, Tokyo), and Anna Kats (MoMA). Later that day, during the session "Brutalism Beyond Form," we heard from Dr. Daphna E. Half (Research Fellow, Azrieli Architectural Archive), Dr. Alexis Meier (National Institute of Applied Sciences, Strasbourg), and Dr. Dana Margalith (Tel Aviv University). The emphasis of all these talks on realized projects in Israel and abroad afforded both sessions a helpful grounding in "real" architecture, and allowed the conference participants to deploy in their responses some of the theoretical background from the day before. Several of the presentations focused on Ram Karmi's work, including lesser-known projects like his Negev Center, as well as his design process sketches held in the Azrieli archives. But we learned also of other architects from the broad historical period that included Brutalism, such as Ram Karmi's father, Dov (a giants among the first generation of Israeli architects), and Yugoslav architect Svetlana Kana Radević, whose design for Hotel Podgorica in Montenegro is an excellent example of "localized" Brutalist architecture.
* * *
On the last day, back in Tel Aviv, session topics addressed "Brutalism Identity and Memory" and "The Medium of Brutalism." (In the morning, group had been led on a tour of Ram Karmi's New Central Bus Station, about which I wrote earlier this year, but I chose not to attend.) The final sessions took place in the Tel Aviv Museum's second floor, where the Azrieli Architecture Archives have found a home for the time being. After the previous days' ranging from the "conceptual" to the "concrete" (pun intended), the final day's presentations addressed the social circumstances in which architecture -- including Brutalist buildings -- are commissioned, conceived, planned, and constructed. Speakers included Dr. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan (Technion), Dr. Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat (Technion), Efrat Hildesheim, Dr. Nissim Gal (Haifa University), Aya Peri Bader (Tel Aviv University), and Alessandra Ponte (University of Montreal).
All the talks were stimulating.
Nitzan-Shiftan provide some context for the building in which we were assembled; almost as an aside, she observed that the Tel Aviv Museum illustrates successfully -- at its interior -- a kind of authentic Israeli urbanity that is elsewhere hard to find. Her point was echoed, in Ponte's discussion of Montreal's Place Bonaventure. But how is it possible that such obviously anti-urban buildings can embody "urbanity" at all? Or is it just wishful thinking on architectural critics' part?
By the end of the conference, I was led to consider the possibility that urbanity (and, even, urban design) does like at the core of "The Brutalist Turn." And this is despite Banham's quasi-Positivist definition (of "New Brutalism"), which depends on both materiality and object-ness. For all our fixation on the Brutalist object, perhaps the real story is on the inside. Perhaps architects' impulse to design in the Brutalist mode derives from the desire to evoke urban qualities in interior spaces; to engender more and better human interrelationships under cover; to monumentalize not intricate form but, rather, complex space; to protect urban life from exigencies of nuisance, conflict, pollution... and weather. Considering the historical moment, the thirty years following the World War, this interpretation may not be not far-fetched. Our parents were taught to "duck and cover," and so the architecture of Brutalism may have followed suit.
The conference "The Brutalist Turn" afforded its audience a number of alternative perspectives on a topic that architects like to think they know well. Looking back towards Baltimore, where the city's developers and politicians can't tear down those buildings fast enough, I am increasingly apprehensive about a future replete with empty lots, both physical and metaphorical.
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