This is not a photomontage. The accompanying photo shows Jerusalem's Ramot Polin neighborhood as depicted by Yanai Toister's camera recently, more than 30 years after the housing complex was built. The beehive-shaped neighborhood was planned by architect Zvi Hecker in the 1970s, at the height of the euphoria after the Six-Day War. It was built on land expropriated from the village of Nebi Samuel and was considered both the epitome of avant-garde design and an irresponsible experiment in human housing.
Either way, today, those spacious, famous photogenic pentagons are drowning in a sea of improvised building additions that disrupt the "pure" spatial geometry. The additions may not be avant garde, and were built by unfaithful hands, but they were inspired by authentic human needs.
"When I arrived there I noticed that everyone was trying to wriggle out of that strange shape and square all the corners," says Toister, a photography artist.
"The local residents told me that all in all, living there was comfortable and apartments were in high demand, partly due to the low prices. Paradoxically, additions there are actually easy to build. I feel sorry for this miscarriage of architecture. Without it this place could not exist. People apparently cannot live there without redesigning their homes. Life is stronger than the foundation material."
The pictures of Ramot Polin are part of Toister's "Sum of Forms" photography, to be displayed in the "Additions: Architecture along a Continuum" exhibit in the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale 11th International Architecture Exhibition. The exhibition will open on Friday, September 12, in the Giardini di Castello and features the work of some 20 architects, urban planners and artists who will offer their interpretations on building additions.
They will do so with the "acknowledged understanding that cities must grow inward, becoming denser and higher," as the amount of available land decreases. They recognize such additions as a phenomenon that has "become a significant part of contemporary architectural activity," in the words of the exhibition's curators, architect Nitzan Kalush-Chechick and artist Michal Cederbaum (in collaboration with architect Liran Chechick).
Additions everywhere
Although building additions have become a universal phenomenon, in Israel they are particularly extensive and intriguing. Kalush-Chechick notes that there are various types of additions: improvised and illegal, planned or spontaneous, initiated by the establishment or influenced by market forces.
Building additions can also have political, social, economic and architectural ramifications, and no building form in Israel is immune. No matter what the architectural source or principles behind it, writes Kalush-Chechick, "a city becomes overtaken by building additions, to the point where the volume and identities of the original architectural structures are obscured."
Ramot Polin is undoubtedly a prime, albeit extreme, illustration of the exhibition's theme and the discourse it seeks to arouse. And who knows, perhaps one day a section of the pentagonal apartments will be slated for preservation, as befits an architectural creation of historic value. Even though building additions have pervaded the built-up Israeli landscape, the public and architects usually have a selective view of the space around them.
"The additions are everywhere, but are seemingly invisible. People simply don't notice them. It's a kind of blind spot," says Kalush-Chechick.
"When people talk about Ramot, they will be speaking about the original neighborhood that actually exists only in an imagined reality or in archive photos, and when they talk about Tel Aviv, they speak about the White City. What actually dominates the space, however, are the additions, the closed-in balconies, the added floors. Perhaps this blind spot, however, is what makes it possible for us to live here."
The idea of relating to the building additions as "part of an architectural-cultural chain stretched over a continuum," was first proposed by the curators a year ago at a competition for planning the new campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in downtown Jerusalem. At the end of the competition, which they did not win, they concluded that the approach to planning the campus required a different sort of thinking: Rather than new construction on empty land and starting from scratch, the existing historic buildings should be refurbished and augmented.
Kalush-Chechick believes that this type of thinking is better from a cultural and economic perspective, and is more practical "in an era of rapid changes like today. When the campus is built, which will take at least 10 years, it will already be obsolete. Building additions, on the other hand, are a rapid and effective response to swift processes of change."
Kalush-Chechick feels that the approach in Israel of rebuilding on an empty lot, like the parallel approach of demolition and obliteration, "is arrogant and unacceptable, particularly in Israel. The Israeli space works so well with building additions, which are so typical of us, and really should be absorbed into the planning processes."
The exhibition's curators wish not only to present the Israeli aspect of the phenomenon of building additions, but also use the exhibition to position this phenomenon at the center of the local architectural discourse. This is a chance to "examine the significance of planning in the dynamic contemporary reality, and to update the role of architects and planners who increasingly find themselves facing unforeseen needs and conditions.
A link in a long chain
In their essay at the beginning of the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, the curators want planning to "relate to pressing issues of environment, social responsibility and awareness of historical context. Implementing these ideas in practice could open up the possibility for an architecture along a continuum; an architecture that allows for a cultural and historical continuum of a place."
Planners should "view their work as one link in a chain" of architectural planning, writes Kalush-Chechick, and should bear in mind that "something will happen after their work is done. This idea should be regarded not only as a practical framework but also as a suggestion for a planner's state of mind."
The Israeli pavilion is one of dozens of permanent national pavilions at the Biennale site in Venice, where exhibits on various themes are displayed at the discretion of on-site curators from each country. The main event is the international exhibition. This year's exhibition, "Out There: Architecture Beyond Building," is being curated by Dutch architect and theoretician Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
The Israeli pavilion is under the auspices of the foreign and culture ministries, which provided about NIS 500,000 in funding for the exhibition. Additional funding was raised after considerable effort, from private and public sources. Details of the exhibition and the full catalog are available at http://www.labiennale-israeli-pavilion.org/biannial.
The Venice Biennale, which is still considered the most prestigious international architectural event, despite criticism of its ostentatiousness, conservatism and almost exclusively Western character, will close on November 23.
