The future is not here

The summer pavilion at the Ramat Gan Museum is the fitting Israeli answer to London's Hyde Park Serpentine Gallery, whose seasonal structures inspired architects David Knafo and Tagit Klimor. As a pavilion in a small country, in a city the size of an average London neighborhood, the building is small by any standard, and especially in comparison to its spacious London counterparts. It is many times less expensive than they are; it doesn't pretend to belong to the Serpentine's breathtakingly showy parade of architecture; and it seems it was not intended to become a pilgrimage site for architectural tourists from all over the world.

A light and easy urban spirit surrounds the London enterprise, which specializes in noncommittal social meetings in the cosmopolitan ambience within its walls. In contrast, the Ramat Gan pavilion and the exhibit it houses, "Residential Verses," curated by Knafo and Klimor, take themselves a little more seriously. They have a message for humanity that is ecological, futuristic, and apocalyptic yet optimistic - if only we'll do the right thing.

The theme at hand is the 21st century home in the global city: crowded, urbanized, ecologically threatened, in an age when lifestyles are changing and "the traditional nuclear family has lost its exclusivity." Existing models are irrelevant, wasteful, inefficient and consume the earth's resources.

Contemporary construction technology already allows for new and daring homes prepared to deal with the challenges ahead, Knafo and Klimor believe. Citing Le Corbusier in their fiery manifesto, they write that "A home in the global city is a mobile, technological, personal and compact mechanism. The traditional apartment contains a dining room, living room and a few bedrooms; exchange it for a unique space, surprising in the mix made possible by personal choice." In pluralistic urban expanses, "the individual stands at the center, consuming services according to personal taste, and living life with complete freedom of choice."

In the future, the typical apartment will be a "living cube" whose walls can be dismantled and reassembled with only modest effort, and whose living space can be redesigned not merely once or twice in a lifetime, but several times a day. Partitions will contain furniture, and bedrooms will be large and have multiple uses: Their ceilings lowered at night to create a "desired amount of intimacy." Children's rooms will be outfitted with multifunctional furniture, providing maximum flexibility and allowing for "transitions from one activity to another, naturally and instantly."

The apartment will also contain a answer to the growing need for home exercise, integrated into the living space, used as need arises, and with a number of sports to choose from. The living cubes will also include "outdoor space," a futuristic version of the garden or balcony, suited to the severe crowding of the approaching era. The housing unit will no longer be fixed in place as it has been for ages, but able to "walk" with the tenant to a new address. Tall urban apartment towers will be human "anchoring stations" or home "parking lots" rented as individual residences connected to infrastructure such as water, electricity, sewerage and so on, which may be disconnected at any time in order to move to a different tower.

The housing issue is always relevant. Since at least the second half of the 20th century, infinite amounts of experiments and a proliferation of variations and the technological means to apply them have been piling up on the desk of every architect and architectural student. They range from Le Corbusier's mechanism to Moshe Safdie's habitat, from vertical housing projects to housing hives, capsule homes, and houses that grow and spread out.

But as these solutions accumulate and become even more sophisticated - whether they are built or remain on paper, and whether they succeed or fail - it becomes progressively clearer that the housing issue is primarily political, and not architectural or technological. There is no lack of innovations or inventions in the housing field. But with the current injustice and inequality in the distribution of resources, they will never reach those who really need them. And if they arrive with western colonialism, they don't meet the needs of the target population.

Even today, half the world's population does not have suitable shelter. So the vision of a brave and good new world, with anchorage towers and flexible children's rooms, is not only a deluxe neoliberal futuristic fantasy, but rubs salt into a wound. The system strikes again, each time, and that's what needs to be changed. But futurism is always more fashionable.

The pavilion itself (which will remain standing for three months and then be recycled) is small, and the most pleasant exhibition space in the area. This is so even though it is not exactly a pavilion or a space, but rather an installation containing a series of closed and open segments exemplifying the exhibit's main ideas. And viewing conditions in the blinding spring sun are not exactly ideal. But the idea is exciting the design dialogues, as they say, with modernism and Bauhaus architecture, and the subject at hand has potential: relevant, controversial, naive and lacking cynicism.

The pavilion is located near Beit Kahana, a branch of Ramat Gan Museum on the other side of Abba Hillel Street. The museum is an enchanting building designed by Yaakov Rechter in the 1960s, surrounded by a garden in a state of neglect, which looks like it belongs to a primeval, pre-ecological world. It is an agreeable local place, almost like a real neighborhood, far from the trendy, contemporary Tel Aviv exhibit spaces, which needs only a little more marketing and public relations effort to bring it to the awareness of a larger audience of architecture and culture consumers.

Jerusalem's Valley of Cedars features a monumental blight on the landscape. A walk through Jewish National Fund forests somehow always includes cactus shrubs and almond trees, ancient terraces, the remains of destroyed Palestinian villages and pine trees that fail to completely conceal them, and always passes by monuments erected by Jewish donors from around the world in memory of great people, family members, tragic disasters and any person or event you can think of.

We are not talking about modest remembrance plaques or hidden ones that only with great difficulty could become the center of attention, but tasteless and exaggerated statues and memorial sites that overlook the most beautiful places and spoil the landscape and the sense of leisure and holiday. The forests are collapsing under memorialization.

A holiday eve walk in the Valley of Cedars at the western entrance to Jerusalem provides a visual encounter with remnants of Palestinian life which have not been awarded memorials, and on the other hand, with the obsessive memorial syndrome (and desire to occupy land and raze it): This time it's the "Twin Monument" - in memory of the victims of the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York, a recent addition to the infinite line of memorials at nature sites in Israel.

The eyes refuse to believe. A building project in all but name rises up out of a high hill in the middle of the forest overlooking the valley: an enormous paved plaza, a stage with stone steps, an abundance of stone walls with the names of the dead spelled out in protruding aluminum letters against gray metal plaques, paved asphalt paths, fences and railings. An eight-meter high bronze statue towers in the middle: an American flag and a metal flame, and at the base, a real remnant of the towers, a gift from the City of New York, Jerusalem's official twin city. But the lingering suspicion is that Al-Qaida's long arm is behind this piece of aesthetic and environmental terrorism.

The monument, a mad project of artist and designer Eliezer Weishoff, was inaugurated in November, after eight years of a failed public struggle against it. Originally it was supposed to be a simple medallion. But Weishoff was not satisfied with a medallion, the kind which can be squirreled away in a drawer, but wanted to make a stamp on the real world.

The idea to turn a medallion into a monument spoke to the secret cravings and bad taste of the then-mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, and the Jewish National Fund, and was iced with more metal and stone. In one hand it holds a supposedly ecologically green fig leaf, and with the other it funds and executes damage to the environment, including the digging of roads so that cement mixers could travel to the building site, along with other heavy machinery. Since it was erected, it has been guarded day and night, 24 hours around the clock.

The Valley of Cedars is an easy target for environmental abuse. After it was saved by the skin of its teeth from architect Moshe Safdie's plans for western Jerusalem, it was fatally wounded by the network of tunnels, fast roads and overpasses notched into it (and which blend in naturally with the graves on the Har Hamenuhot cemetery to create a breathtakingly destructive landscape).

In the future it is to become a metropolitan park which will be stormed by landscape architects and designers of such attractions. The Twin Monument is a sign of things to come. The terror attack on the World Trade Center had already received a fitting and honorable memorial in one of the Jewish National Fund forests near Jerusalem, by planting trees in memory of the victims, and that was more than enough. Even New York is managing with just one memorial at the site of the disaster, which has also aroused strong controversy and has not yet been built.