Typology as situatedness: the architectural dialectics of modern vernaculars in British Mandate Palestine

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which several key figures in Jewish architectural circles sought to create an appropriate style that would reflect their emerging national identity in British Mandate Palestine. I analyse the 1930s texts by two architects and educators at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technion Polytechnic, Yohanan Ratner and Julius Posener, whose efforts were motivated by a notion of belonging. Belonging or affirming a connection to a specific place, and creating architecture that reflected this connection, was a pressing question for architects in the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine, which was mainly populated by new immigrants. The article argues that Ratner (who immigrated to Palestine in 1923), and even more so Posener (who did so in 1935), addressed the notion of belonging by articulating a ‘local bearing’ for modern Israeli architecture. Stemming from a critical historiography of interwar modernism, ‘local bearing’ refers to the process of situating modern architecture, and claiming its historic and vernacular sources. I show that typological reflections, or the examination of architecture’s cultural and disciplinary history, became the means through which these architects sought to localise modern architecture.