Forking path: De-scripting interchange architecture at the Ayalon Crosstown Expressway

Abstract

This study explores freeway interchange design as an example of traffic architecture. It reconstructs the design history of one bifurcating interchange along the Ayalon Crosstown Expressway in Tel Aviv, a project that initiated the transfer of American and European freeway technology to Israel. The different geometric configurations developed for the interchange were generated by the unstable, evolving relation among the expressway, city, and national economy and by a fundamental ambiguity within traffic engineering rationality. The realized interchange reveals the disparity among the semiotic, hierarchical concept of route continuity, the optimizing process of cost–benefit analysis, and memory-based spatial orientation. This interchange advances the interpretation of highway technology as a cultural technique that organizes driving activity into a series of switching operations within an informational grid, one that is at odds with the humanist construction of concentric, directional spatiality.