Review: Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification, by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

Abstract

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 376 pp., 8 color and 129 b/w illus. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 9780816694280 Seizing Jerusalem elegantly entwines the history of modern architecture with nation building and state policy. In particular, it weaves the history of architecture together with the history of Zionism after the 1967 Six-Day War and the unification of Jerusalem, when the city's population tripled in size. This book is not the first to examine the development of modern architecture in Israel and its connection to sociopolitical issues. The controversial 2003 publication A Civilian Occupation is perhaps the most familiar to architectural historians, yet a number of important books have tackled this subject.1 What makes Alona Nitzan-Shiftan's study unique, however, is her thorough exploration of “the agency of architecture” (3). She underscores the impact of architecture on sociopolitical formations, as opposed to the reverse, and explains that she views architecture “neither as a mere reflection of the agenda of individual architects, nor as a spatial technique representing meaning beyond its confines” (3). Echoing observations by many architectural historians of the modern Middle East, in chapter 1 Nitzan-Shiftan considers the evident tensions between modernist architecture's investments in history and its orientation toward the future.2 After World War II, while the Israeli nation aspired to be modern, it was at the same time deeply invested in its ancient roots. In chapter 2, Nitzan-Shiftan traces works by a generation of architects who were mostly born and raised in Israel, commonly known as the sabra (Israeli-born) architects. Through analysis of select examples, such as housing in Giloh by Ram Karmi and Ma'alot Dafna by the Sho”p Team, she shows how sabra architects appropriated Palestinian vernacular and religious sites understood to have links to a Jewish past. She argues that this approach was rooted in Israeli nationalism, but it also owed much to the contemporaneous global embrace of phenomenological approaches to architecture, widely known …