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How might this destruction be stopped? International law remains one of the only paths to seek accountability. And it is not only lawyers who make its systems function. Through their stewardship of the built environment (including long-standing engagement with the right to housing and the politics of climate change), architects, planners, and preservationists can shed light on the techniques, procedures, and consequences of modern urban warfare. They also have the potential to change them. — The Architectural League of New York
Berlin-based Palestinian urbanist and scholar Natasha Aruri, formerly of the TU Berlin, breaks down the concept of ‘domicide’ with MIT's Balakrishnan Rajagopal and SITU founding partner Brad Samuels. The term can be traced to the 2001 title Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, but has... View full entry
The UK-based group Architects for Gaza, appealing to the educational needs of displaced Palestinian architecture students in the occupied territory, has just announced the creation of a new learning platform called Gaza Global University. The announcement was made earlier this month via... View full entry
Over 60% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. But it's also the heritage, the culture, the collective memory. So it's important for us to rethink how to rebuild, how to accommodate one of the highest densely populated spots on Earth. Do we go vertical? Do we go horizontal? You've got an urban fabric. You've got a coastal fabric. You've got a rural fabric. Each one requires a different way of looking at it. — NPR
Yara Sharif is the London-based co-founder of the group Architects for Gaza. The Palestinian architect tells NPR the task now is to assemble a society literally of the rubble using the remnants of some 200,000 buildings that have been destroyed and in the most environmentally sensitive ways... View full entry
The Spanish NGO Heritage for Peace has published a report on the impact of recent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza’s cultural heritage. The report, released on November 7th, claims that over 100 cultural heritage landmarks have been damaged or destroyed as of publishing. Reports of subsequent damage... View full entry
Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman has used a speech at the Culture Summit Abu Dhabi to set out the group’s position on the relationship between architecture and human rights. Weizman, who is also a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, offered the summit a series of examples of... View full entry
Fresh off its recent Peabody Award win, London-based Forensic Architecture (FA) has returned to one of its most popular research sites with a new project, called “Living Archaeology in Gaza,” examining the fate of an important archaeological site under assault in the Gaza Strip. The... View full entry
A legal smear campaign has ousted a museum director over the inclusion of a pro-Palestinian statement in an exhibition examining the work of Forensic Architecture at the University of Manchester. Artnet News is reporting the forced resignation of Alistair Hudson following a concerted... View full entry
A statement in support of Palestinian rights put up by Forensic Architecture as part of an exhibition at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery is back in its rightful place tonight after backlash against the message caused the group to temporarily withdraw the exhibition over... View full entry
[...] Michael advocated for collective, neighbourly, and walkable cities, while also practising architecture and urban design in ways that embraced these same principles. Even so, his shrewd wit always recognized the fallacy that architecture can change society by itself. “Architecture is never non-political,” he told Aleksandra Wagner in a 2006 interview “it always reinforces a set of social relations, whether within the family or between the ruler and the ruled”. — Failed Architecture
Architect and educator Fadi Shayya pens a heartfelt, personal tribute to the late Michael Sorkin, pointing out his involvement in Palestine and initiatives like the Open Gaza project. "So many others were closer to Michael," Shayya writes in Failed Architecture. "So many others are more qualified... View full entry
Israeli authorities have approved a plan to build a cable car to the Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world, by 2021.
It’s the first phase of what proponents envision as a fleet of cable cars crisscrossing the locus of sacred sites known as the Holy Basin.
— The New York Times
NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman explains the controversial plan for a cable-car network, envisioned to connect significant Jewish religious sites in Jerusalem while bypassing Palestinian neighborhoods, and how the concept contributes to a "Disneyfication" of the Holy City as much as... View full entry
This metallic box is the new $21m home for the AM Qattan Foundation, an arts centre that its founders hope will stand as a “beacon of culture” in the occupied West Bank.
“It has been years of fighting to achieve anything close to the standards we wanted. There are defects, but it is the best we could do while building under (Israeli) occupation,” [says achitect Juan Pedro Donaire, whose firm designed the new building]
— The Guardian
The Palestinian Museum opens its inaugural exhibition this weekend focusing on the holy city of Jerusalem, a city that both Israel and Palestine claim as their capital. The wide-ranging, overtly political show focuses on the realities of living in Jerusalem as well as the idea that despite being seen as the original global city, it also serves an example of how globalization has failed worldwide. — The Arts Newspaper
The Palestinian Museum, located in Birzeit, Palestine’s West Bank, opened last May. Back then, however, the $24 million structure designed by Heneghan Peng Architects had no exhibits to show due to a sudden resignation of the museum's former director. Its first show, Jerusalem Lives (Tahya Al... View full entry
THE Palestinians’ new national museum is a striking monument to the state they don’t yet have. Designed by a firm in Dublin, the museum itself is angular and modern, with glass curtain walls topped by smooth white limestone. From afar it looks almost like a low-slung bunker perched on a hill north of Ramallah; inside, though, it is light and airy. A terraced garden stretches out below, filled with dozens of local species...
Only one thing is missing—the exhibits.
— the Economist
A series of curatorial disputes, as well as cost overruns and delays in part attributable to the occupation of the West Bank by Israel, mean the new Palestinian National Museum will open this month without its inaugural exhibitions. The museum was designed by the Irish firm Heneghan Peng.In... View full entry
Besides the thing itself, architecture concerns itself with two kinds of sign about it: iconic signs and symbols. Iconic signs resemble the thing itself. They are the plans and elevations and isometrics. The more symbolic architecture is that of language, the word, the logo and so forth. The postmodern turn shifted the emphasis from the iconic to the symbolic.
I think [Eyal] Weizman has created an architecture about a whole other kind of sign – the index.
— Public Seminar
"Indexical signs are traces of events: where there is smoke there is fire. The smoke does not resemble the fire. It is not an icon. Nor does it have a code like a symbolic sign system. Forensics is a matter of working backwards from the index to the event of which it is the sign, like in a... View full entry
A new museum dedicated to the history and culture of Palestine over the last two centuries is due to open in May next year in Birzeit...In a controversial move, the planned launch date coincides with the 68th anniversary of the Nakba, when the Israeli state was established in 1948 and more than 750,000 Palestinians went into exile. 'The decision to open the museum on May 15 is designed to underline the enduring importance of the Nakba to the museum’s work,' says [museum director] Jack Persekian — The Art Newspaper
More on Archinect:Israel-Palestine: Hope through architectureGaza attacks: Lethal warningsAfter Banksy: the parkour guide to Gaza View full entry
