The environmental semantics of rural and urban architecture standards in British Mandate of Palestine, 1920–1940

Abstract

This paper analyses the 1940 exhibition catalogue, Twenty Years of Building: Workers' Settlements, Housing and Public Institutions, published by the Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. A cross-regional analysis of this publication in the context of Mandatory Palestine and its commonalities with the environmental German notion of ‘rootedness’ [Bodenständigkeit] forms the basis of this paper. It challenges previous scholarship viewing Jewish architecture as progressive, climatically adaptive, and correlating with the 1930s separatist stance of Labour Zionism vis-à-vis the Levant. It argues instead that the Federation's architects reflected a conservative agenda concerning ‘functional’ design. The paper reconstructs how their agenda adapted various rhetoric, from rooted rural buildings, colonial ruralisation, to new urban co-op environments in the 1920s and 30s. The paper also explores the historicist and settler-colonial stance of this agenda as it negotiated progressive building standards relative to the brief tradition of cooperative settlement history and indigenous Palestinian habitats. The paper, thus, identifies the environmental semantics of the Federation’s functional buildings, its structuralist logic, and its role in the legitimation of Zionist settler colonial institutions. In assessing this aesthetic-economic discourse, the paper contributes a missing prelude to the vernacularisation of post-independence development architecture in Israel.