This Tuesday will mark the end of our three months in Tel Aviv. With our bags packed, we'll head to the airport to return to Baltimore. The calendar of my sabbatical sill has another three months marked on it (!), but we have the feeling that the most substantial part of it will soon be behind us.
So this blog entry will be my last from Israel.
It's been a productive time, I think, even up to the end. I had the chance last week to spend some time in the Azrieli Architectural Archives, currently located the Tel Aviv Museum. The head of the Archives, Eran Neuman, organized the "Brutalist Turn" symposium last month, and so I had the opportunity to meet some of the Archive staff. One of them invited me to apply for a fellowship, and so I decided in turn to invite myself to the Archives itself to get an overview of their holdings.
As their website explains, their goal is to become the primary repository for architectural archives -- papers, drawings, models, ephemera -- so that historians and others will have a single access point to historically critical material of that kind. Their collection includes currently the personal archives of archives Bauhaus-trained Arieh Sharon, AA-trained Ram Karmi, Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur (Landscape Architects), enfant terrible David Yannay, Sam Barkai (who briefly worked for Le Corbusier), and Nahum Zolotov, whose synagogue in Nazareth Ilit I Illustrated in a previous blog post. Considering the chronological range of these designers' careers, their inclusion is a good start to the Archives' goal of covering the history of Israeli architecture with their collection.
And the Archives have also a large collection of historical papers from the Engineers and Architects Association, a professional body similar-but-different from the AIA in the US. Of great interest to me is their role, for many years, of administering and coordinating Israeli architectural competitions, the subject of my next "big project" push. So I had the chance to review the collection's index, and I had the pleasant surprise of seeing so much useful material in place for future examination. I started diligently listing everything in their database, for future reference...
So I've applied for a fellowship that will allow me to spend Summer 2020 elbows-deep in boxes and boxes of competition material: announcements, judge's protocols, and submission drawings. If I'm lucky enough to get it, I'll be able to start making plans for an encore visit to Israel as soon as next year...!
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So, what have I accomplished during my time here? The main goal was to focus on class prep for the Water Management course. With that, I certainly made progress, although the "lift" was considerable. I have the lecture text for most of the semester's lectures; I created a Blackboard site for student resources, including class reading material; and I prepared a provisional syllabus, pending future schedule changes due to program requirements. I have still to create lecture slides, but doing so is a way of re-familiarizing myself with class material in advance of the class itself, and so I plan to get into that only this fall, close to the January 2020 start of the class.
I interviewed a number of academics and water management professionals about their work: Dr. Shula Goulden, Dr. Eran Feitelson, Dr. Yaron Zinger, and Kobi Shmolowski. I came up to speed through reading a range of technical documentation. And I had a chance to "live," self-consciously, as a consumer/participant in Israel's mater-management regimen. For all the country's accomplishment in so many regards, much of the system is provisional, jury-rigged, and sometimes cheaply done. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising, where resources are consistently diverted towards security (primarily) and development. But the long-term sustainability of Israel's water infrastructure may not be as physically robust as it is institutionally robust. So, if the institutions weaken -- if government oversight weakens, or if privatization creeps tends exploitation as so often happens around the world -- Israel's physical water infrastructure might quickly deteriorate.
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What else did I do?
I continued final editorial "touches" on a book chapter (“Israeli Architecture at a Turning Point" in Israel as A Modern Architectural Experimental Lab), expected to be published this fall;
I completed editorial work on a journal article ("Alternative Spaces of Discourse," for the Review of Middle East Studies), due out any minute now;
I successfully revised another paper for an academic journal, leading to its final acceptance ("Art in Modernist Architecture," in Journal of Architecture);
I successfully placed an abstract for an upcoming special journal issue ("Sectarian Ecumenicalism," for Arts);
I participated in several student reviews at Tichonet high school;
I filled out a sketchbook with drawings of local Tel Aviv buildings, and sent it to the Brooklyn Sketchbook Project for digitization...
I embarked on a series of digital images culled from street photographs that I collected every day...
The images are intended to be funny, but they reflect also my affection for Tel Aviv's ongoing engagement with "the Modern" -- aesthetic or social -- something that I continue to love. With so many excellent modernist designs under attack in Charm City, Modernism's ongoing importance for Tel Aviv's cultural narrative is personally inspiring.
And... I had the pleasure of living in a truly "urban" city, where walking, biking, and other forms of personal transportation coexist -- mostly for better, comparatively speaking. We were able to discover old and new neighborhoods, old and new architecture, and old and new examples of infrastructure while mostly on foot. All the while, we were never more than a few minutes from the beach. It's been a great three months.
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There's still plenty more to do. Before we left for Israel, I placed an abstract with an upcoming "special edition" of Arts journal that will focus on synagogue art and architecture. I pitched an essay about the design of on-campus Jewish centers, a building type both similar and different from traditional synagogues. And so that's my next project, which I'll jump into immediately after we return to Baltimore next week. I have trips planned to San Diego, New Haven, and Durham to interview architects and document buildings there. What a change of scenery that will be for us!
With all that said, this image (Masaryk Square, at the start of King George Street in TLV) is an excellent happy-chance visual metaphor of what lies ahead of us, professionally and personally, after our reentry.
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