Archinect - News

ALNY chat discusses 'Domicide' and its application to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza

2024-06-11T12:05:00-04:00

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.

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 roots in modern conflict (namely the U.S. bombing of Japan and Germany during World War II). The most recent reporting from human rights groups, including the UNWRA, has said that more than half of all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed since fighting began there on October 7th.

Architects for Gaza launches Gaza Global University for afflicted Palestinian students

2024-03-18T18:07:00-04:00

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 Instagram. The group says: "We know that to rebuild Gaza requires rebuilding its institutions, its culture, its life — and importantly for those of us not situated in Gaza — it requires a rebuilding of all our worlds. We see Gaza Global University as a radical pedagogical project rooted in hope and shared humanity."

According to the group's website, the objectives for developing the initiative include:

Establishing links with academic institutions internationally to offer online tutorials and lectures free of charge Gazan students in any part of the world, who are students of architecture, and related courses, such as design and urbanism.
Offering technological assistance for remote communication at...

A Palestinian architect looks for a future in Gaza’s rubble

2024-02-05T11:47:00-05:00

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.

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 possible. A top-down solution that keeps Palestinians out of any post-war rebuilding process has been a growing concern for activists, who brought the issue to the International Court of Justice as part of South Africa's attempt to use it to stop the violence in December.

To date, the IDF’s military strategy has razed more than 70% of all residential structures, plus another 20 or so hospitals and approximately 350 schools. Its plan to establish a 23-square-mile "buffer zone" within the Gaza Strip's borders has become another recent point of contention (h/t LA Times).

Over 100 Gaza heritage sites damaged or destroyed by Israeli strikes, report says

2023-12-05T13:30:00-05:00

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 since November 7th are not yet available.

The Heritage for Peace report lists 104 pieces of built heritage impacted by the latest war, of which 4 have been completely destroyed, 11 have been partially destroyed by direct shelling, and 89 have been partially destroyed by indirect shelling. The list of sites spans mosques, churches, archaeological sites, historical houses, shrines, cemeteries, and museums.

Among the sites completely destroyed by direct shelling is the Omari Mosque, described by NPR as “one of the most important and ancient mosques in historical Palestine.” Meanwhile, the Church of Saint Porphyrius was partially destroyed, described by NPR as “the third oldest church in the entir...

Architecture can be 'an exercise of violence' warns Forensic Architecture founder

2022-10-25T13:38:00-04:00

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 how the Peabody Award-winning, Turner Prize-nominated organization has used spatial principles to expose human rights abuses.

“Forensic architecture is a way of reading architectural facts, architectural material, architectural situations, in order to see within them evidence for these violations that I'm speaking about,” Weizman said, as reported by The National News. “Perhaps the best way to understand it is, just like a pathologist reads a dead body — looking at the bones — forensic architecture looks for evidence of these crimes in walls, in foundations, in buildings, in plans, in bridges, in roads etc in a way that they're conceived sometimes, in order to survey and control us.”

Related...

Forensic Architecture's latest investigation is a dig at one-sided Israeli archaeological pursuits

2022-04-13T12:14:00-04:00

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 site in question was tentatively added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 2012 but has since been closed off to further archaeological research and beset by damaging new construction. The group examined ten years' worth of data collected by the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem between 1995 and 2005 to produce 3D renderings of an ancient city called Anthedon that existed for two millennia until about the High Middle Ages.

Image: Forensic Architecture

What they discovered was that Israeli bombing and consolidation, combined with climate change-caused coastal erosion, has placed a considerable strain on the site, which counts among its ruins examples of building from the Byzant...

The University of Manchester has forced out Whitworth Gallery director Alistair Hudson over his pro-Palestine Forensic Architecture show

2022-02-24T17:39:00-05:00

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 lobbying effort on the part of several prominent local barristers who form the group U.K. Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).

Hudson has been the director of the university’s Whitworth Art Gallery since 2017 and became the target of the pro-Israel group’s effort after allowing the statement as part of a show called Cloud Studies that focused in part on the activist group’s study of poor air quality and human rights in areas that included the occupied territories as well as Louisiana and Beirut.

In a statement, Forensic Architecture’s founder Eyal Weizman said the saga “makes clear yet again that the anti-colonial struggle in support of Palestine and elsewhere has to be fought within and sometimes against our ...

Forensic Architecture reinstates exhibition at University of Manchester following censorship row

2021-08-19T20:55:00-04:00

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 censorship concerns.

The group shared a social media post on Wednesday showcasing the re-installation of their statement that decried the “ethnic cleansing” of the country as a prominent introduction to their exhibition titled Cloud Studies which opened on July 2nd. The exhibition outlines FA's initial phase of the latest investigation which explores and exposes how “power reshapes the very air we breathe," according to a brief posted on the group's website.

Our statement is back up! pic.twitter.com/uwE5pJM7Am
— Forensic Architecture (@ForensicArchi) August 18, 2021

Read Forensic Architecture's statement standing with Palestine here.

The move came after the announcement earlier in the week that the g...

Michael Sorkin and the politics of architecture

2020-04-13T14:03:00-04:00

[...] 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”.

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 to speak of how we lost an architect, urbanist, activist, author, and teacher with Michael’s passing. To me, we lost a forceful and inspirational presence for social justice, Palestine, and humanity."

Influential architect, educator, and critic, Michael Sorkin, passed away from COVID-19 on March 26, 2020.

Planned cable-car network over Jerusalem divides the public

2019-09-16T19:51:00-04:00

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.

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 Israel's "architecture of occupation."

"Trumpeted by right-wing Israeli leaders as a green solution to the challenges of increased tourism and traffic in and around the Old City," Kimmelman writes, "the plan has provoked howls of protest from horrified Israeli preservationists, environmentalists, planners, architects and others who picture an ancient global heritage site turned into a Jewish-themed Epcot, with thousands of passengers an hour crammed into huge gondolas lofting across the sky."

Israeli-born Canadian architect Moshe Safdie is among the vocal opponents of the cable car.

The new Qattan Foundation arts center rises as “a beacon of culture” in the West Bank

2018-06-29T18:21:00-04:00

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 Palestinian Museum opens its first show: Jerusalem Lives

2017-08-25T18:41:00-04:00

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 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 Quds), on view from August 27, is participatory, consisting of four chapters that examine the cultural, political, economic and ideological aspects of Jerusalem. The exhibit will include works by contemporary artists, a display of 20 large-scale commissions in the museum’s extensive gardens 'based on ideas about land, openness and non-exclusion', featuring artists such as Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Khaled Jarrar, and many more. Additionally, supporting events and programs will be held at other Palestinian institutions.

“What is going on and why are these exclusionary policies being accepted? How are people—artists, organisations and civil society—working against it? And how can we build togethe...

An empty museum for a stateless people

2016-06-02T18:02:00-04:00

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.

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 related news:

Architecture and the index: McKenzie Wark on Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture

2015-11-09T16:38:00-05:00

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.

"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 detective story. A forensic architecture takes as its subject events that happen or don’t happen in build space, including the destruction of built space."

New Heneghan Peng-designed Palestinian Museum to open in May 2016

2015-08-21T16:30:00-04:00

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

Israel okays plan of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem

2015-04-01T15:09:00-04:00

I had doubts about accepting this project. I didn’t want to become a pawn for politicians, but the residents gave me a mandate. The public understood that it could act collectively in order to improve its situation - Architect

Project's architect Senan Abdelkader is well known to NY Times a few years back via Nicolai Ouroussoff.

A distinct aesthetic language from Senan Abdelkader: an apartment building in an Arab neighborhood near Bethlehem.

An apartment building, designed by Senan Abdelkader, in an Arab neighborhood near Bethlehem

Let's just say this is not another maneuver by Netanyahu government to ease off the international pressure on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Do Israelis have any idea how bad it is in Gaza?

2015-02-18T15:30:00-05:00

I’m extremely concerned that if you leave Gaza in the state it’s currently in, you’ll have another eruption, and violence, and then we’re back in a further catastrophe, so we’ve got to stop that,-Tony Blair

Even a hawk like Tony is worried.

"The scope of destruction in Gaza remains enormous. According to the UN, over 96,000 homes were either damaged or destroyed by Israeli air strikes. The donor states that have pledged to transfer money have yet to do so, re-building is going nowhere, many are still seeking refuge in UNRWA schools and the winter storms have only increased the damage to the homes and neighborhoods that survived. "

Rawabi - with no running water

2015-02-09T11:24:00-05:00

His risk-taking real estate is a microcosm of the tumultuous process of Israel-Palestinian peace-making and the web of complex relationships in the occupied territories.

Lyse Doucet and Jane McMullen report in from a totally new city made from scratch in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The Most Relevant News of 2014 (for Architects)

2014-12-30T14:02:00-05:00

Sometimes it's easy to pretend that architecture exists outside of this world, erupting instead in the blank of a 3D space governed only by the laissez-fair laws of software. But sometimes a news headline will penetrate through this fog of imagination, appearing as a blazing light shining forth from an image of some distant row of houses hollowed by mortar fire and colored with the blood of a strangers' body. "This is the real of architecture," the news seems to silently implore.

As gravity serves as the counterweight to the feverish, technofuturism fashionable to today's students, news events seem to ground architecture just at the moment it seems like it may finally escape into the vapors of idealism. While it may seem that architecture is increasingly consigned to the building of institutions or expensive residences, the demand for buildings and dwellings simultaneously grows louder and more desperate with every unfolding disaster.

A year-end round-up is as fraught as a ranking. If...

Eyal Weizman on understanding politics through architecture, settlements and refuseniks

2014-12-02T16:56:00-05:00

They would never discuss issues of repression or land grab directly. There is a certain pact of silence around the political dimension of architecture there. Schools of architecture depoliticise the profession, they put it very much within the domain of aesthetic experimentation

Eyal Weizman - architect, writer, activist and professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London - is explaining how architecture and power are inextricably linked, even within structures that appear largely to serve an aesthetic purpose. Buildings or cityscapes that a tourist crosses the world to see were often conceived with the intent to oversee their populations.

Weizman has just returned from a trip to the US. Like Israel, highways in Los Angeles serve more affluent communities and bypass the poorer areas. In the Gulf, he says, the labour force is contained, separated and supervised. Such capitalist tools of separation, seen across the world, "are all part of the growing toolbox of architecture and planning in the West Bank – it's composed, I mean it has a sort of colonial history, but it's contemporary vocabulary exists overall, everywhere you look, everywhere you go you have the politics of surveillance, separation, supervision and sometimes even oppression. Pal...

Refugees Reshape Their Camp, at the Risk of Feeling at Home

2014-09-10T14:38:00-04:00

Public space like the plaza in Al Fawwar is mostly unheard-of in Palestinian camps across the West Bank. Architectural upgrades raise fundamental questions about the Palestinian identity, implying permanence, which refugees here have opposed for generations. [...] Camps were conceived as temporary quarters. The absence of public space was then preserved over the years to fortify residents’ self-identification as refugees, displaced and stateless.

What can ‘forensic architecture’ reveal about the conflict in Gaza?

2014-09-02T13:25:00-04:00

Weizman has also made a name for himself as the chief proponent of “forensic architecture”, by which he analyses the impacts of urban warfare for clues about the crimes that were perpetrated there. To Weizman, buildings are weapons. When he looks out across the landscape of the occupied Palestinian West Bank [...] he sees a battlefield. “The weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers.”

See For Yourself

2014-09-01T12:29:00-04:00

it is clear that the scale of damage is unprecedented, with approximately 13 percent of the housing stock affected, five percent of the housing stock is uninhabitable – an estimated 18,000 housing units have been either destroyed or severely damaged. This on top of a shortage of 71,000 housing units before the Israeli attack.

This is a real challenge for architecture. I urge Architecture for Humanity to directly involve and bring this crisis into their working platform, producing ideas of reconstruction.

Thousands of Palestinians Flee Northern Gaza as Israel Continues its Bombardment

2014-07-14T20:49:00-04:00

Several thousand Palestinians, defying the urging of Hamas to remain in their homes, fled areas in northern Gaza early Sunday after Israel warned them through fliers and phone calls of major attacks to come.

Thousands of Palestinians, heeding the warning pamphlets dropped by Israeli jets, are fleeing from Northern Gaza. Many are crowding inside United Nations-run schools. As the death toll rises – entirely on the Palestinian side – a potential cease-fire agreement developed by Egypt will be debated in the Israeli Parliament.

During prior Israeli invasions of Gaza, the toll on the infrastructure of the small region was significant. Israel intentionally targets infrastructure that it understands to support Hamas. Unfortunately, it is often civilians who are both the main casualties and who must suffer in a devastated, overpopulated urban ar ea. And according to the Washington Post, in the recent attacks,"most of the Gazans killed so far have died in their homes."

The frequency and totality of Israeli attacks on Gaza – coupled with the ongoing economic blockade – leave little hope that their will be stability or normalcy for Gazans in the near future. Fundamentally, the devastated infrastruc...

East Jerusalem Light Rail Attacked

2014-07-11T17:01:00-04:00

Riots caused tens of millions of shekels in damage and destroyed the Shoafat and Es-Sahl station [...] Residents of Jerusalem’s Shoafat neighborhood are unlikely to enjoy service on the city’s light rail network for several months as CityPass, the company that operates the system, works first to repair the rails and signaling mechanisms destroyed during last week’s rioting, and only later the stations serving the area.

The Shoafat and Es-Sahl light rail stations in East Jerusalem were attacked last week after news broke that an Arab young man – Mohamed Abu Khdeir – had been kidnapped, burned alive, and abandoned in a forest. Many commentators view the killing as vengeance for the recent deaths of three Israeli teenage settlers in Hebron, in the Occupied West Bank, which the Israeli government has blamed on Hamas. The situation is tragic – and rapidly escalating. At least 27 Palestinians have been killed and 130 wounded in the intense bombardment the Israeli army has unleashed on Gaza in the past few days.

The attack on the light rail stations were committed by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians who live in the areas around the stations. For many, the destruction is highly symbolic. When first constructed, the light rail was considered by some to be a symbol of the possibility of peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews. However, for others, it was viewed similarly to the massive border wall demarcat...

With Dirt And A Vision, Palestinian Architects Break The Mold

2014-07-03T12:36:00-04:00

The city of Jericho sits in the hot, flat Jordan Valley down the hill from Jerusalem. Jericho has bragging rights as one of the oldest towns on Earth. But one of its newest homes looks like it might have arrived from outer space. Ahmad Daoud hired a firm of young Palestinian architects to build this house. Like Jericho's original homes, it is built of dirt. This one has a contemporary twist, though: It's constructed with earth compacted in bags that are then stacked and plastered over.

AIA New York fires back at RIBA over proposed boycott of Israeli Association of United Architects

2014-05-09T14:17:00-04:00

Earlier this spring, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) passed a motion that demanded the suspension of the Israeli Association of United Architects from the International Union of Architects "until it acts to resist projects on illegally-occupied land and observes international law and accords."

This morning, the AIA New York Chapter published a statement denouncing the RIBA resolution, declaring "AIANY does not condone RIBA’s decision to request action based solely on disagreements over local Israeli policies."

Here's AIANY's full statement:

"The AIA New York Chapter (AIANY) has denounced the proposal submitted by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to suspend the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) from the International Union of Architects (UIA).

On May 1, 2014, AIANY wrote to Harry Rich, Chief Executive of RIBA. In the letter, AIANY asks the RIBA Board to overrule its advisory council’s recent proposal to UIA that would seek to exclude IAUA’s ...

Israel-Palestine: Hope through architecture

2014-03-26T13:27:00-04:00

NOT only in 2013 did the building of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the core of a would-be Palestinian state, grow at twice the rate of 2012; its uniform architecture is increasingly attracting Palestinians. In place of their distinctive rough-hewn stone houses, Palestinian builders now tend to prefer the uniform style of red-roofed houses that mark out Israeli settlements. “People always look up to the colonial power, even if they resent it [...]”

RIBA proposes boycott of Israeli Association of United Architects' over Palestinian settlements

2014-03-20T13:37:00-04:00

The Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) has demanded the suspension of the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) from the international body, saying it is complicit in the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and other violations of international law.

UPDATE: AIA New York fires back at RIBA over proposed boycott of Israeli Association of United Architects

The full RIBA motion, proposed by RIBA Immediate Past President, Angela Brady, and passed by the RIBA council on March 19 was:

Since the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) has paid no regard to the UIA resolution 13* of 2005 and 2009, the RIBA calls on the UIA, as the international guardian of professional and ethical standards in our profession, to suspend the membership of the Israeli Association of United Architects, until it acts to resist these illegal projects, and observes international law, and the UIA Accords and Resolution 13.

*UIA's Resolution 13 (2005 and 2009) states that “The UIA Council condemns development projects and the construction of buildings on land that has been ethnically purified or illegally appropriated, and projects based on regulations that are ethnically or culturally discriminatory, and similarly it condemns all action contravening the f...

Eyal Weizman on legacy of Ariel 'the bulldozer' Sharon

2014-01-12T22:53:00-05:00

"Sharon's architecture involved not only destruction but also construction. The other major projects he undertook, besides the destruction of the camps, was an attempt to "pacify" the refugees by constructing and forcefully relocating a few thousand of them into Israeli-style social housing blocks next to major Palestinian cities".

With the recent news of Ariel Sharon's passing, Eyal Weizman (architect, professor and director of the Forensic Architecture) reviews the legacy of construction and destruction he left behind. As "Daddy of the Settlement movement" his legacy has decisively shaped the built environment of today's Israel and Palestine. For more on his political legacy you can also read Jonathan Cook here.

h/t @Brendan Cormier