compositional challenge of bare economic facts. His expertise grew out of pre-state knowledge as it was mobilized by a new state-based and international developmental culture of design and planning. This expertise was, ultimately, predicated upon the figure of an author/artist claiming a non-technocratic vision of comprehensive design. With regard to his career and its general practical approach, Yalan stressed the lack of tension between a political ideological background and its “nonpartisan” result:
One may assume that the secret of success lies in the cooperation between the settlers and the settlement planning teams. While the motivation for the effort was ideological in character, the approach was practical, suited to the capabilities of the settlers.
Yalan lays out two inter-related political rationales for cooperative settlement that this formulation of practicality and, by extension, of modernist design expertise, supported. The first was the substitution of pre-state cooperative villages (kibbutzim and moshavim) with a new model predicated upon moderate or horizontal cooperation, as Weitz depicted this model. This project concurred with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s emphasis after 1951 on nonpartisan and anti-sectorial cooperative politics.286 The state’s objective
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Henry Near, The Kibbutz Movement: a History, Crisis and Achievement, 1939-1995, Vol. II (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992). The Jewish Agency’s statism had to do with the framing of cooperation in regional
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was to substitute its own authority for pre-state Labor Zionist alignments (primarily identified with Ashkenazi “first Israel” in the kibbutzim). While supporting this objective, Yalan also crafted his book to position himself as a potential advisor to governments of other countries seeking to develop rural habitat. In the context of the Cold War, development planners such as Yalan saw an opportunity in their potential neutrality as experts outside of the east-west power system.287
Yalan’s understanding of expertise rests on two other emphases. The first was central settlement authority, in this case the Jewish Agency, running parallel to the state mechanism and serving as a guide to and representative of the farmer. The second was the architect-planner as an expert who worked among settlers in the field and could serve as mediator in the name of the authority.288 In keeping with this, Yalan portrays architect
experts as learners, recognizing the at times superior expertise of settlers. He opens his book with a comment on his initial lack of knowledge in the field of rural planning and
terms. While paralleling European and North American agendas on development, this “hotizontal” framing had to do with overcoming the identification of pre-state cooperative institutions with Ashkenazi ruling elites (on this point see also Shafir and Peled, ibid. 37-74). In the Israeli context, Weitz’s references to “Horizontal Planning” and regionalism as an horizontal model of cooperation sought the establishment of an inclusive structure of cooperation run through a non-party-based state mechanism, albeit the fact that this was a project originally promoted from within the Mapai party.
287 Based on Trumann’s talk (1949), Hayter writes that the development era was based on a claim for a shift from
imperialist models towards technical aid practices, which the World Bank viewed as based on apolitical expertise. In Theresa Hayter, Aid as Imperialism (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1971). On a critique of the politics of an anti-partisan development approach see Fredrick Cooper and Randall, M. Packard. “Introduction.” International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Fredrick Cooper and Randall, M. Packard. Eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 19. Yalan’s book subtitle, “Technological Aspects of Community Development” and the technological vocabulary he uses throughout resonate with this non-politically aligned rational, as they make it potentially applicable to other political and economic systems outside of Israeli post-independence cooperative regionalism.
288 “This settlement authority is not intended to replace government institutions, each of which operates within its
own sphere. Rather, it represents the farmer and by its direct connection with government bodies assists him in establishing himself on his farm and becoming a member of his community independent of the settlement agencies” (20); “It was not without tremendous effort through all these years that success was achieved. This success is reflected in the fact that the settlements exist, produce and continue to develop. The work was accompanied by many failures and disappointments. What is remarkable is that despite the limited financial resources and lack of knowledge among the settlers, as well as among the experts of the settlement agencies, development is now self-generating” (Yalan, ibid).
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design and how it led to his initiative to organize a team of technical experts— hydrologists, agronomists, soil experts, engineers—in order to secure rural planning decisions. This modeling of work soon included field experimentation as well, to allow an integration of know-how gained by farmers from pre-state cooperative settlements.289 His modernist credo of optimal layout was thus the result of a long-term acculturation into the mechanism of planning, implementation, and trial and error through rural production.
Yalan’s expertise was thus based on a process of professionalization parallel to Sharon’s claim for a comprehensive expertise after independence. It was defined by the actual implementation and development of settlements. In Kibbutz + Bauhaus Sharon claims an elemental and mythical connection with the field of settlement. On the basis of this connection he displays experiments as a final product, codified through the visual emblems of “first buildings.” These serve both to support the acculturation of his Bauhaus modernism, to imbue the new scales of state production with the traits of optimal simplicity, and to claim a non-scientific leading authority in matters of large scale planning. It also posits that by creating the optimum economic construction of a naturalized co-op environment, Sharon achieved a situation in which truthfulness overcomes rational judgments. It legitimizes the suggestive, spatial, and material nature of his developmental institutional designs.
Similarly, Yalan makes recurrent references to the field to stress his service in
289 These farmers, who belonged primarily to the settlement movement (responsible for the cooperative workers’
villages), commissioned research from the Rural Building Research Center and opened their farmyards for experiments on specific rural production facilities. The models the bureau codified thereafter were the product of the Jewish Agency’s experts and farmers (Interview with Gdalyaho Gal. Cowshed Archive, Kibbutz Yael, folder II).
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terms of the Jewish Agency in-situ–based instruction for new settlers.290 The book’s
displays of the survey and actual experimentation with settlers further substantiate this emphasis.291 While modestly claiming a lack of knowledge, The Design of Agricultural Settlements conjures a scientific, objective credo that was central to the two research institutions from which he operated. In this, Yalan suggests, on the one hand, the existence of a practical truth able to overcome site contingencies through optimal layout and experimentation pictures. On the other hand, the book represents such optimal surveys and standards as embedded precisely in a contingent historical territory. In this distinct manner, functionalism served to vernacularize a culture of cooperation through design. In Yalan’s book, such culture codified possible modes of the implementation of and settlers’ enrollment into the system of cooperative habitat.
This chapter has explored two variants of the mutual acculturation of land development institutions and modernist architectural thinking that affected Israel’s design culture between independence and the mid 1970s. It traced the various manners by which the co-op habitat and the challenges of post independence development expertise inflected the credos of Arieh Sharon and Emanuel Yalan pertaining to New Building and optimal spaces (Existezminimum). As the chapter has shown, both of these leading architects identify the agricultural cooperative as a field of primary experience in
290 Stressing the non-partisan position, he omitted the fact of a historical inflection of the roles carried by the
Rural Building Research Center, as through the 1960s it was primarily concerned with production improvement in pre-state cooperative settlements. See discussion in chapter 4.
291 In Thomas Gieryn’s terms, this represents a mode of knowledge production, in which knowledge, credibility
and authority are being validated through the display of the sites of knowledge production (central to Gieryn’s analysis of agricultural research stations). Whereas Sharon’s display operates via the finalized built emblems through which the field is being fetishized, Yalan’s representations of the field display the applied research of post-World War development expertise. These representations assume a scientific etiquette of a disinterested research operating “in the field.” See Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science, ibid. 245-253.
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territorial development under conditions of resource scarcity. Through their two variants of functionalism, the cooperative environment marked both a model under construction and a field through which professional knowledge was shaped.
The opening and closing statements in 20 Years of Building posit a dialogue between modernism and the land-development institutions that implemented the modernist project in Palestine. This dialogue has shaped both Kibbutz + Bauhaus and The Design of Agricultural Settlements. They portray the modernist architect as an agent capable of addressing and mastering scarce economic resources and rushed development and doing so towards the collective missions of leading co-op and national institutions. While Sharon’s book does so via text-image expression and an aesthetic judgment as to the potency of economic optimum, Yalan’s book does so via calculated outlines, between precise measures, contingent social and technological conditions, and future possibilities of cooperative regional growth.
By examining the architectural formulations of optimum comprehensive design, this chapter reviewed the ways in which agricultural cooperative institutions shaped Israeli architectural knwoledge. The two architects’ writings demonstrate their use of design tools and vocabulary to define physical and symbolic emblems by which a cooperative habitat could be translated and re-invoked after independence. While the writings of the 1960s subsumed the rural territory within a more centrist, metropolitan vision of the state, Sharon and Yalan’s functional credos and professional knowledge relied once again on a more heterogeneous vision of the national geography, affected by their engagements in state planning. As this chapter has suggested, the institutions Sharon
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and Yalan represented polarized and hybridized the semantics of the local professional knowledge. Sharon’s book made them discursively visible and civic; through Yalan’s book they became marginal and rural. Yet both developed a semantics of a comprehensive functionality and economy that bifurcated along the lines of the polity’s metropolitan and rural environments.
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Chapter 4: The Jewish Agency Cowsheds — Rural Building Functionalisms