2012–13 LECTURES

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer, Technion, Israel

OPEN HOUSE & LECTURE

February 19, 2007

5:30 - 7:30pm

Join us for a very special lecture at the Archeworks Open House and find out how you can use your design skills to help communities in Chicago.  Applications and information about our one year part-time design program will be available. Enjoy complimentary refreshments and meet Archeworks co-founders Stanley Tigerman and Eva Maddox.    

EVENING'S SCHEDULE:
5:30
Studio Tour

6:00
Archeworks Program Information

6:30 – 7:30
Guest Lecture, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Technion, Israel

LECTURE
"Spatializing Histories at the Foot of Jerusalem's Temple Mount/ Haram al Sharif"

Immediately after Israel captured Jerusalem's Old City in 1967, it bulldozed the Mugharbee Quarter off the area adjacent to the Western Wall. National, municipal and military authorities agreed that a vast space was needed for a nation to gather and 'meet its past.'  Once the post-war stream of pilgrims reduced, Israelis were taken by surprise.  Their central assembly space, and the holiest site for Jews worldwide, became an amorphous field of debris and awesome stones laying at the foot of Islam's third most important sanctuary.

Captivated by the site, architects harried to propose designs for the plaza.  Louis Kahn, Isamu Noguchi, Aronson and Kutcher, Fisher and Maestro, Denys Lasdun, and Superstudio contended the much-debated yet authorized design of Moshe Safdie.  Clearly, neither Safdie nor his contenders suggested mere design solutions for such a complicated site. Their proposals were fierce manifestos in two distinct yet closely connected battles.  One was over the balance between Judaism and Statehood in a rapidly transforming Israeli society.  The other was over the course that modern architecture should take after the dissolution of CIAM. The lecture investigates the ways in which the competing designs argued the above positions architecturally.  It maintains that these concrete architectural projects did not only express contending ideologies, but also took, in the forms, compositions and techniques they suggested, distinct positions in fierce political and architectural debates.

Nitzan-Shiftan is an architect and historian; member of DOCOMOMO Israel. Her research focuses on post-World War II architectural culture in the light of recent thought in the fields of nationalism, Orientalism and post-colonialism; modernism in Israeli architecture and planning (Erich Mendelsohn; Jerusalem after 1967); American architectural and urban culture of the 1960s and 1970s (including I.M. Pei); and the politics of architectural historiography and preservation. Her publications have appeared in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism, Harvard Design Magazine, Jama’a, and Thresholds (MIT).