Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification

by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

After seizing Jerusalem’s eastern precincts from Jordan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel unilaterally unified the city and plunged into an ambitious building program, eager to transform the very meaning of one of the world’s most emotionally charged urban spaces. The goal was as simple as it was to both Judaize and modernize Jerusalem.  Seizing Jerusalem chronicles how numerous disciplines, including architecture, landscape design, and urban planning, as well as everyone from municipal politicians to state bureaucrats, from Israeli-born architects to international luminaries such as Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, and Bruno Zevi, competed to create Jerusalem’s new image. This decade-long competition happened with the Palestinian residents still living in the city, even as the new image was inspired by the city’s Arab legacy. The politics of space in the Holy City, still contested today, were shaped in this post-1967 decade not only by the legacy of the war and the politics of dispossession, but curiously also by emerging trends in postwar architectural culture. Drawing on previously unexamined archival documents and in-depth interviews with architects, planners, and politicians, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan analyzes the cultural politics of the Israeli state and, in particular, of Jerusalem’s influential mayor, Teddy Kollek, whose efforts to legitimate Israeli rule over Jerusalem provided architects a unique, real-world laboratory to explore the possibilities and limits of modernist design—as built form as well as political and social action. Seizing Jerusalem reveals architecture as an active agent in the formation of urban and national identity, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about Zionism, and the crisis within the discipline of architecture over postwar modernism, affected Jerusalem’s built environment in ways that continue to resonate today.

376 pages, Hardcover

Published May 30, 2017

Reviews

[Raphael Cohen-Almagor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan’s exemplary and sophisticated book is an interdisciplinary study in the fields of architecture, urban geography, archaeology, history and politics. The book combines careful analytical research and a comprehensive fieldwork. This is a highly informative and insightful book, providing an original perspective on the role of architecture in post-1967 Jerusalem. With this book, we better understand the construction of the unified city through policies, analyses of ideas, planners’ wishes, and the city architecture.

In Seizing Jerusalem: The Architecture of Unilateral Unification, Alona Nitzan-Shifran draws a fascinating portrait of modern Jerusalem. Her research is based on maps, minutes of city planning meetings, architectural designs, descriptions and photos of buildings and neighborhoods. Her analysis is historical and spatial, drawing on Ottoman and British colonial architectural and planning polices, reaching into the present Israeli cityscape. Nitzan-Shaftan, an architectural historian and Chair of the Architecture Program at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, takes her readers through old Jerusalem neighborhoods, tracing the changes they have undergone, and then probing the planning and building of the new neighborhoods. In tracing what she calls the State’s and the city’s “architecture in action,” she describes the various attempts to unify and homogenize Jerusalem: the successes as well as the failures. Nitzan-Shiftan provides a fascinating analysis both of the players and ideologies and the architectural form (such as the “cluster” in Giloh).

Nitzan-Shiftan consciously attempts to situate the architectural choices in Jerusalem within a broader framework of democratic visions. She classifies the different players (state, city) and identifies the different architectural concepts associated with those players. Her analysis is excellent and remarkable, marrying normative, reflective perspectives with a historical tale of architectural developments. The result is a balanced account that looks at competing and sometimes contradictory ideologies, at planning and building successes and failures.

The book’s presentation is beautiful. The graphic design is impressive. The text is very friendly. The book includes many photos, maps and drawings that support the rich and industrious analysis. Nitzan-Shiftan’s amalgamation of an expansive and nuanced tapestry of sources with a sharp theoretical framework results in a brilliant and nuanced book. The Shapiro Committee concluded that Seizing Jerusalem is a top quality book on all accounts. Therefore, it is worthy of the Yonathan Shapiro Prize for Best Book.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in order to review it. Very dense and required constant reading in order to finish it in time, but I learned a lot about the time period in question (a decade starting in 1967 with the unification of Jerusalem). I hadn't realized that an international community of architects, planners and landscape architects were so involved in determining the future shape and look of the city's built environment. An exhaustive study of this time period by an architecture professor at the Technion in Haifa.