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160 pages

English

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This book attempts a comprehensive overview of the "architecture" of the kibbutz: its essence, its history, its constant change, and its physical planning and architectural expression and management, and relates to this unique spatial alternative from a holistic viewpoint: the kibbutz in all stages of its development, from the kvutza as a "micro-utopian" commune to its physical configuration as an autonomous-autarkic complex arising out of its basic social, economic and educational structure, and its later stages as a potential 'macro-utopian' regional entity, envisioning a real alternative lifestyle to the capitalist metropolis. It is about its beginning and also about its end... and what might perhaps be its new future...

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urban planning

Architecture

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Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	20 juin 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781456624712
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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NEITHER VILLAGE NOR CITY

The Architecture of Kibbutz

FREDDY KAHANA

Copyright © 2015 Freddy Kahana,
All rights reserved.

Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2471-2

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Cover design : Freddy Kahana
Cover illustration
Kibbutz Ein Harod in the 1930s as a paradigm of modernism: fields where there were swamps, lawns, open space, the new collective generation and architecture of community, set against the mountains of biblical Gilboa…
Epigraph: From COMMUNITAS: THE ORIGIN AND DESTINY OF COMMUNITY by Roberto Esposito, translated by Timothy C. Campbel. Copyright © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press, sup. org.

Dedicated to our dear, sadly missed friends, Henry and Aliza Near
And to the memory of the late Simona Michaeli whose search for the Loci of Utopia ended with her tragic and untimely death

Nothing seems more appropriate today than thinking community: nothing more necessary, demanded, and heralded by a situation that joins in a unique epochal knot the failure of all communisms with the misery of new individualisms…nevertheless, nothing is further from view; nothing so remote…

Roberto Esposito- Communitas

Acknowledgments
The Kibbutz Planning Archive project was made possible, above all, through funding by the Jewish National Fund, initiated by Dr. Gavriel Alexander whose interest in the project and encouragement throughout the ten years of its preparation were a major factor in its realization. Additional funding came from Yad Tabenkin and Yad Ya’ari under whose auspices the project was carried out; the A.B. Planning Office as the natural successor of the Kibbutz Planning Offices; the United Kibbutz Movement; the Council of Building Preservation and the Haifa Technion Ne’eman Institute. My thanks go to all of them.
The project came to its fruition in the Hebrew book Neither City nor Village – The Architecture of the Kibbutz 1910–1990 . The English version presented here is an abridged and more concise edition, adapted to a wider readership.
In the late 1990s I was interviewed by Architect Simona Michaeli who had just embarked on her thesis in English on the architecture of the kibbutz. We held many interesting and fruitful discussions and I was happy that I was able to help in her endeavors. Simona completed her thesis, “The Loci of Utopia,” and received her doctorate and then tragically died. Her work was passed on to me by her family, and her research, especially her unique case study of Kibbutz Hazorea (which I have included as a case study here), has become an important addition to the Kibbutz Planning and Architecture Archive, and I have used material from it in narrating the following story, which is her story too.
My personal involvement in my kibbutz, Bet Haemek, and for some 50 years as an architect planner in the Kibbutz Planning Departments, justifies a more individual note in the narrative which follows: from time to time I interject – thus - my own experiences and reflections and for the same reason I have also used my personal sketches and illustrations rather than professionally drawn diagrams.
My personal thanks go to my wife Hannah, who first urged me to tell this unique story in English even if it meant prolonging the hours I spent at the computer or in my office, and less of that precious time together in our old age; perhaps there will be more of that now…
I am particularly grateful to my late friend, fellow kibbutz member and historian Prof. Henry Near, who contributed the Overview chapter, read and reread the manuscript, suggested textual changes, and made sure as to the correctness of the historical narrative. I am no less indebted to Anthony Berris and Margalit Rodgers, also fellow members , who edited the final text professionally with sensitivity and understanding. Finally, my gratitude to Kibbutz Bet Haemek and through it to “The Kibbutz,” which enabled me and my family, to live and experience a full, meaningful and good life, while allowing me to fully participate in the building of a unique community, its planning and architecture.
Preface
Until quite recently, little has been written and published in English on the subject of kibbutz planning and architecture; however, since 2010, the 100 th anniversary of Degania, the first kibbutz, we have been presented with three new publications dealing with the subject from various angles:
In their wonderfully detailed The Changing Landscape of a Utopia, Ruth Enis and Shmuel Burmil trace the planning of the kibbutz through its landscape and gardens, in itself a unique example of total integration of function, complement, and beauty. On the other hand, in their Architecture and Utopia –The Israeli Experiment , Michael and Bracha Chyutin present a comparative study of the kibbutz and the moshav, including a didactic comparison between urban and kibbutz structures. All four authors describe the dissolution of the kibbutz with regret, yet none of them relates to the kibbutz movement as a unique spatial phenomenon, a communal alternative to the capitalist city. It is precisely this aspect that guides the narrative that follows, which also describes the acquisition of kibbutz planning by the kibbutzim themselves, and the creation of a specific discipline resulting in an architecture which was presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale as “without precedent.”
What they do have in common, however, is their preoccupation with imbuing the early kibbutz with Utopian intentions and then tracing the origin of its configuration to idealistic diagrams of past Utopian fantasies or abstract expressions of perfect order.
I have always been more than wary about this correlation between the origins of the kibbutz and Utopian thought and practice. It is somewhat tempting to wallow through those fascinating architectural simulations of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Kropotkin, of Oneida, of Amana, and even the very practical efforts of Owen, the elegant frugality of Hancock and other religious and secular communes in America, and try to relate their historic precedent to the pragmatic reality of the kibbutz; it is far more realistic to assess the result as a hard-headed attempt to face the needs of the time, revolt against bourgeois convention, and create a new and alternate reality.
Nevertheless, present-day communes, including the kibbutz, are at times referred to as “Utopian” 1 in the sense that they represent the endeavor to create this very alternative to the existing and flawed “world order.” As such they have become the subject of extensive study, and the overall concept has even created a number of world organizations through which they are researched and debated at international conferences.
A review of the many subjects and aspects of communes and their various connections to “Utopia” indeed reveals the wide range of interests the subject engenders: political, economic, social, cultural, educational, even artistic and poetic. Little, however, has been mentioned of another possible focus of Utopia: as the potential replacement of the ubiquitous dystopia “Metropolis” as the flawed “world order.”
Of all the many and varied physical accounts of utopian scenarios, very few, if any, envisage an “Urban-Megalopolitan” reality as the ultimate solution; the preferred venue is Arcadian, ex-urban, relatively small, close to nature, and as such can be regarded as the paradigm of Man’s ideal state in some distant future. The commune is thus a harbinger of “The Urban Alternative” whether as a discrete rural community or an in-urban association: both basically reject the alienation of the amorphous city conglomerate in favor of togetherness, solidarity and participatory management of their immediate environment. In their rejection of the “world order,” they tend toward isolation and insularity, preferring local social action and avoiding converting others through political involvement on a wider scale. As the only propagators of a future Utopia in today’s global reality, the commune clearly redefines the new Utopia as a future alternative to the present ubiquitous capitalist, neo-liberal city-state, and according to this definition demands the revolutionary drafting of its social and physical content.
The kibbutz movement still sees itself as deeply involved in the world’s commune phenomenon which, in turn, still sees the kibbutz as one of its most developed branches; this relationship, however, needs closer investigation; there is a clear distinction between the “commune” and the “kibbutz” which, through its size and development, has, by definition as “neither village nor city,” created itself as an “urban alternative.” It was this “spatial” aspect, made potentially relevant through its size, solidarity, political involvement, and geographic dispersal, which gave the Israeli ex-urban space its uniqueness before the basic kibbutz structure changed and diluted itself into a pseudo-suburb.
National goals have changed, agriculture has lost its mythical value, and the introduction of industry and its concomitant adaptation to the global market economy has totally changed social and economic priorities, affecting the very basis of equality of labor, allowing for differences between individual contribution and recompense. The previously accepted definitions of cooperation and togetherness are no longer valid in this changing situation. The postmodern kibbutz of today no longer conforms to a uniform, monolithic image; the heroic paradigm has changed into a var