CARACTERIZACIÓN INGENIO MANUELITA E INCAUCA EN EL VALLE DEL CAUCA

Hashimshoni’s essay construes the gradual crystallization of Israeli style, and with it the transition from functionalism to comprehensive planning and design, through a historical narrative. It opens with the early modern Jewish settlement in Palestine in 1881 and concludes in 1963, at the moment the essay was written. Hashimshoni divides this narrative into five phases: 1881-1920; 1920-30; 1930-40; 1940-50; and 1948-63 (sometimes including secondary sub-divisions within these phases).133 Restaging the nineteenth century argument on the battle of the styles, Hashimshoni noted variants of

Neues Bauen approaches affirming themselves, against 1910s and 1920s eclectic

orientalism, from the 1920s onwards. He discussed these variants through the works of creative individuals—Erich Mendelsohn, Richard Kaufman, Leopold Krakauer, Yohanan

132 _{Hashimshoni, 206, 207, 211. See also when discussing the contradictory nature of a contemporary}

civilization: “It is no wonder, then, that the contemporary architect is principally concerned with finding a modus operandi which will allow him to weed this body of contradictory factors into a single homogeneous fabric” (217).

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Ratner, and the members of Tel Aviv Chug, including Arieh Sharon, Dov Karmi, Zeev Rechter, and Joseph Neufeld. Hashimshoni described occasional alliances between these architects, their experimentation with new forms, techniques, and design tasks and commissions by co-operative settlements or institutions. Judging their work relative to the telos of a local style, he positively reviewed their contributions as leading to rational principles and allowing for higher degrees of uniformity.134

Like Elhanani and Ratner’s views, Hashimshoni’s description of the 1920s and 1930s asserted functionalism and modernism as a design culture organically taking root in Palestine.135 This establishment of a culture of functional building finds its apex in the narrative through the description of Ratner’s 1927 winning entry for the House of the National Institutions in Jerusalem’s competition, the house that holds the administrative seats of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish National Fund (Figure 2.16):

The progress of pre-state architecture from eclecticism and the desire to create a local style based in practice on a full understanding of the underlying principles of architecture is dramatically exemplified in the 1927 competition for the design of the National Institutions Building in Jerusalem. This building, or rather group of buildings, was to represent the headquarters of a state in the making. The judges included the Viennese

134 _{This cursory functionalism in the narrative is primarily attributed to the work of the Technion’s first director,}

architect Alexander Baerwald, and his disciples. Hashimshoni identified an initial affirmation of this value in the designs of institutional and housing programs for the rural settlements, specifically in the works of Richard Kaufman (1887-1958) and Leopold Krakauer (1890-1954), as well as in the works of Erich Mendelsohn (1887- 1953). Furthermore, he saw this value accomplishing a more synthetic and less technical or simplistic result in the work of Yohanan Ratner, specifically as he analyzed his approach through his winning entry for the Jewish Agency Headquarters. In the period succeeding independence, Hashimshoni’s discussion of functionalism as a disciplinary discourse was further an issue of historicizing as he pointed to the various strands of modernism into which interwar culture developed. Hashimshoni, 216-217.

135 _{This was close, as noted above, both to Elhanani’s discussion of Ratner (1996) and to Ratner essays (1992). In}

these essays, Ratner emphasized a programmatic and climatic rationale and efforts to adopt primarily European models to local conditions that will allow for moving beyond the original remit of individual authors and into an anonymously shared and non-fully administered culture of design. This view, that is restated in Hashimshoni’s essay consisted of an historiographical model assigning qualified agency to individual authors, viewing them as cultural mediators and synthesizers of existing threads who establish new common grounds for contemporary practice: “Mendelsohn's architecture was essentially a compromise between the traditional building of his age and the constructivist and planning values of the new school. It is still too early to evaluate the overall importance of Mendelsohn in disseminating modern architectural ideas throughout the world. Limiting our assessment to Palestine, we may point out that here he assumed the role of co-coordinator and unifier, drawing together the efforts of many Jewish architects and setting them upon a single common path”. (211).

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Jewish architect, Josef Frank. The plan chosen was that of an architect almost unknown at that time, Yohanan Ratner. Contrary to views popularly held at the time, Ratner's plan neither included any historical element, nor did it follow the monumental symmetry which characterized nineteenth-century architecture. His plan, which was analytical and functional, envisaged a group of independent structures centered around a single hub, and built with outside walls of Jerusalem stone, the constructional framework and the interior walls to be of reinforced concrete. The plan received special praise for its success in emphasizing clearly the function of architectural space as the inner content of architecture. It must be remembered that, in the period under discussion, the trend had shifted from building stylized structures to local patterns, and the influence of functionalism was gaining ground. The latter aimed at designs evolving from a sort of inner necessity, dictated by the function which any given building was required to fulfill. (208).

The description resonated with Elhanani’s notion of a moderate yet civic institutional design. It foregrounded Ratner’s combination of plastic and spatial (artistic) sensibility with clear (analytical) programmatic organization. Hashimshoni described Ratner as representing a balanced approach to functionalism, analytical and holistic, and not wholly technical.

This sequence correlated the design of the major pre-state Zionist institution, (also the central organ of co-op planning), with the consolidation of a local style. Hashimshoni’s review of the clarification of a local style under Jewish modernism— through Ratner and other protagonists working in phases 2, 3, and 4 in the narrative— described such functionalism in terms of attempts by professional agents to define design strategies and knowledge.136 Parallel to this narrative, Hashimshoni pointed to the gradual intervention of land-settlement institutions in the definition of functionalism as design approach.137 He emphasized the roles these institutions played in coordinating and scaling up planning tasks and in promoting practical, economic reasoning characterized by a

136 _{This is also the case as the consolidation of a functional design approach conjures clarity of judgments}

effective compromise between contradictory requirements (primarily artistic and technical) as well as capacity of analysis and synthesis. Ofrat Harel commented that Hashimshoni’s professional pride was particularly based on the idea of professional moderation and budget control. Interview. December, 2015.

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general lack of spontaneity. This description portrayed these institutions as precursory agents of comprehensive planning:

In addition, spontaneous creation [referring back to the works of individual authors. m.h.] is almost entirely absent in the pre-State tradition, which employed rational planning as its basis. The functional approach and the desire for comprehensive planning were adapted to local conditions and adjusted to the modest scale of building of the pre-state period by the Israeli architect. Practical solutions and a lack of pretention typified that era. Together with these features, we find excitement over the very act of building, a sense of public responsibility, and a relentless search for proper solutions to the country’s unique building problems. The pre-state architect was conspicuous for his cooperative attitude toward the material requirements of building work, and sometimes identified his viewpoint with them [the material requirements, m.h.]. (205)138

This description recalls the understanding, communicated in 20 Years of Building, of Israeli functional building as a product of a purely technical or economic approach to shelter provision. This practice and its products—the act of building and the building— are described here as meaningful because of their sheer existence and “practical” (sachlich) approach. More specifically, the role Hashimshoni attributes to settlement agencies’ and co-operative institutions’ practice of settlement and resource management is analogous role to that which 20 Years of Building attributes to the same agencies and institutions. He describes these institutions as parallel historical agents of Israeli modernist functionalism that operated alongside individual authors’ more intentional culture of design, specifically during the transition to statehood.139

The phase following independence is divided into two secondary periods, 1948-

138 _{Another aspect of this characterization of functionalism is found in the following passage: “Most Israeli}

building to this day is still subject to the pressure of urgency and the need for swift planning without adequate preparation. Large-scale projects, public buildings, new towns and regional developments embracing both rural and urban areas are made in haste. Even overall plans for nation-wide building are produced under relentless pressure. It is no wonder then that given these conditions two types of architecture predominate. In one, improvisation plays a large part; the other is based on stereotyped formulas which fulfill only a small part of architectural requirements” 202-203.

139 _{This aspect, resulting in “practicality,” denotes another functional aspect that is less intrinsic to a culture of}

design, which was also in line with 20 Years of Building and a post-independence culture of comprehensive planning. This was the case, as this aspect did not result from self-proclaimed architectural intentions, but from external constraints to which design has to comply.

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1955, in which new towns and large-scale housing projects defined the primary architectural programs (Figure 2.17); and 1955 onwards (to 1963). In this second phase, Hashimshoni identified an effort toward comprehensive synthesis. This notion, as discussed above, was based on Patrick Geddes’s regional planning agenda and was central to post-World War II architecture and planning cultures either through the CIAM meetings or the expert culture of development planning. It undergirded the humanistic, civic, and developmental critiques of interwar functionalist urban visions.

Hashimshoni’s description of the period beginning in 1955 emphasizes a move towards a large-scale public complex that brings together multiple programs: “From 1955 onwards there was a marked tendency to look for new forms of comprehensive planning for all the components of a city — public buildings, housing, traffic regulation, and a proper blending of working and residential areas.”140 Using the above-mentioned regionalist vocabulary, Hashimshoni argues that Israeli land development and planning authorities, both municipal and state based, turned at this time towards a more holistic planning approach (Figure 2.18).141

Hashimshoni underscored the heuristic need to shift from the category of the individual author to that of building programs (housing [shikun] and public institutions, primarily university campuses and hospitals, Figure 2.18).142 This claim asserted a shift

140 _{This period was preceded, according to Hashimshoni, by a more mono-functional approach focused on}

housing provision: “Between 1948 and 1955 particular attention was paid to apartment housing and to the problems of national planning; architectural ideas were those of the preceding phase, particularly in the influence of English satellite-town planning”. ibid, 204. Hashimshoni’s periodization scheme presupposed four relatively distinct decades preceding statehood: prior to 1920; 1920-30; 1930-39; 1939-48; and two sub-periods afterwards, 1948-1955 and 1955-1963. Ibid. 203-5.

141 _{Hashimshoni develops an argument similar to the one Sharon will develop a decade later through Kibbutz +}

Bauhaus (see chapter 3). However, none of the images Hashimshoni provides for this phase effectively depict this more holistic approach, as they are still focused on a building, i.e., a relatively isolated architectural object.

142

As we have noted, the activity of Israeli architects since independence has been energetic, extensive and continually pressed for time. The fruits of this activity may be viewed rather as a collective than an individual

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from the characteristics he noted in the pre-state period, in which individual authors still served as primary historical agents and towards the culture of comprehensive planning and design after independence. He characterized pre-state architecture as a dual culture operating between author-based, bottom-top intervention and institutional influence. The discussion of building programs emphasized instead the perspective of comprehensive planning that municipal and state organizations primarily directed as major clients. It portrayed these organizations and their resulting metropolitan programs as the primary historical agents after independence.

The essay concluded that if there is a uniformity of style, it is not one based on complex or decorative formal features, but on the comprehensive practicality, relative formal simplicity, and vitality characterizing the designs of the period after independence. Here, Hashimshoni translated one notion of modernist anonymity, or cultural fabric resulting in style, into another. The first notion denoted a mitigated process of exchange between generations of architects acting as mediators of Western modernist trends and the further dissemination and simplification of their contribution through land development institutions.143 _{The second notion was more univocally directed top-to-}                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

effort. We prefer, therefore, to survey this most recent Israeli architecture in terms of function (houses, public buildings, communal projects) rather than in terms of its individual creators” (220-221). Among the housing projects he discusses or includes in the visual portfolio are social housing in the southern city of Beer Sheva, in Haifa, and in the north of Tel Aviv (Ramat Aviv); the visual portfolio also includes several images from the Givat Ram university campus (Jerusalem), the Technion University Campus (Haifa), and the Jerusalem Hadasa hospital. Such a heuristic shift resonated with Henry-Russell Hitchcock in his 1947 essay, “The Architecture of Genius and the Architecture of Bureaucracy.” Republished in In Hunch, The Berlage Institute Report on Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape. No. 12. Salomon Fausto. Ed. 147-150. The essay was originally published in Architectural Review (January, 1947). 3-6.

143 _{See Hashimshoni’s discussion of the period succeeding the works of Krakauer and Kaufman as that of}

synthesis, unification, and the role of Mendelsohn as a precursor offering a new, more purged model of practice to be further followed thereupon (211). As Hashimshoni’s narrative suggested, it was a dialectical exchange between a multiplicity of individual strands and their crystallization into unity (style): “It is no wonder, then, that the contemporary architect is principally concerned with finding a modus operandi which will allow him to weed this body of contradictory factors into a single homogeneous fabric.”

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bottom, by township and state commissions. It further emphasized a lack of spontaneity. However, as noted earlier, it was not fully in conflict to what the essay sought—the establishment of a homogeneous cultural fabric and expression.

Recalling Elhanani’s praise for mediocrity, we bring to mind the metaphor of the ants’ labor—representing professional agents, architects, and artists alike—to describe the acculturation of Israeli institutional design as a culture of the place. This metaphor naturalized what his description also acknowledged and acclaimed: design characterized by simplicity, grayness, and mediocrity. In Hashimshoni’s survey, the transition from pre-state functional building to post-independence comprehensive practicality denoted a similar acculturation of Israeli institutional design. It imbued the latter culture of large- scale institutions for municipal and state anonymous publics with the organic characteristics of the preceding moment. By extension, Hashimshoni described post- independence restraints on creativity, defined by the economies of client and construction industrialization, as favorable for the emergence of a national culture. While not marked by “greatness” these restraints, and in turn the economies of state land development, effectively shaped a culture of practical directness, freshness, and vitality.