Last update - 00:00 17/05/2007
Surroundings / The utopian illusion of justice
By Esther Zandberg
Last Sunday at the Rechter Award ceremony for architecture, artist Larry Abramson spoke of the Mini Israel theme park in Latrun as a small-scale allegory for a utopian Israeli city, a Zionist version of a theme park, where "the illusion is a perfect substitute for the real." Architects Bracha and Michael Hayutin won the award for their design of a courthouse that is a utopia in and of itself, a kind of architectural theme park.
The courthouse is located in the heart of the old Arab quarter of Haifa, or what is left of it, bordering on the ruins of the Wadi Salib neighborhood, where justice was never served. The courthouse is enormous and magnificent and looks like it descended from a better world into a distressed urban area, loaded with social and political tensions.
The design of the courthouse is tasteful and sleek. Light and luminous, monochromatic, minimalist, homogenous and hegemonic, covered in stone, glass, exposed concrete, wood and aluminum, it oxymoronically "stands out in its modesty" - it is full of itself and photogenic to its last spiral staircase.
The plan was chosen in a design competition in 1994, and the building was inaugurated in 2001. The cost of construction totalled about NIS 500 million. It is home to five courts, 73 auditoriums and 100 justice chambers. It covers 90,000 square meters, and is a relatively low-rise structure.
Approximately one half of the area is an underground parking lot. It also has a monument hall and administrative and judicial wings. The entrance to the building is twisted and steep, and, perhaps symbolically - above ground.
In terms of architectural reference, the hall is a direct genetic offspring of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, designed by Ada Carmi-Melamed and Ram Carmi, Israel Prize winners for architecture, and inaugurated in 1992. Since then the Supreme Court has become a source of inspiration and emulation for public construction in Israel. The trend it started, often pervading commercial structural design, led to a conservative, temple-like, fortified genre of architecture, an architectural allegory for other values of Israeli society.
Thanks in part to the Supreme Court, it seems that an entire generation of young architects has forgotten the option of secular, everyday, high-quality Israeli architecture. A kind of pattern has formed in the architectural arena, one which feeds itself and does not stray from its path: The architects win competitions and later judge them. And then the chain reaction carries on. The award ceremony for the Haifa courthouse was held at the Cameri theater cafe, an architectural theme park in itself.
Bracha Hayutin's presentation on the courthouse during the ceremony reflected a few of the tricks and codes inherent in architectural lingo. Thus, in encoded architectural language, the courthouse is a "construction integrated into the street and urban terrain, whose judicial authority does not intimidate or exhilarate a passerby," as Hayutin described it. And yet, behind the words stands a building enclosed in itself, haughty and arrogant, hovering over a damaged urban surrounding and remnants of a historic area, destroyed partly for the purpose of erecting the structure.
Contrary to what Hayutin says, the average person cannot help but feel exhilarated upon passing this colossal architectural achievement, and at the same time hasten his footsteps and lower his head in awe. "One in need of the courts' services should feel like someone who has come to receive aid and not like someone who has come to get punished for his sins," wrote its planners. But in front of the "clusters of courtrooms that are steeply mounted and present the severity of the judicial process," they wrote; even those who aren't in need of the court services begin to contemplate their actions. The impervious stone walls are the judges.
In Hayutin's architectural speak, "the cultural metaphor we wished to bestow on the structure is that of the common, the everyday." In the gap between words and deeds, stands a structure of rites, a rite in itself. At least it contains a bench for those coming to receive help. At the end of the structure is a staircase enveloped by an enormous diagonal wall, bringing the architectural rite to new heights (and closing in a narrow corridor for the handicapped).
These days, a grandiose entrance is a staple in office and public buildings. The entrance halls have expanded in terms of height, space, design and flashy finishings. They are primarily meant to impress for marketing purposes. However, much smaller and inferior spaces, sometimes dark and narrow corridors and offices, which do not serve the public well and are sparingly designed, too often lay behind the grand entrance halls.
The courthouse is part of Haifa's government office compound, known for its sail-like building which has been ridiculed since being erected. The compound is a centralized area of government and commercial buildings that have caused irreparable damage to the surroundings and an entire urban existence. In its place is the utopian illusion, giving a fabricated alternative: The entrance to the courthouse is in the words of its planners a "covered street," and the hallways are "side-streets" and "alleys." Such are the code words that architects use to convince themselves.
"The ends of the alleys are made of glass, exposing the view outside. The openness of the structure looking outward expresses the transparency of the judicial activity in a democratic country," wrote the planners. Transparency, transparency and even more transparency. Democracy is the mother of all architectural cliches. For quite some time, the most transparent things in public structures around the world, even the most transparent ones, were the surveillance and security cameras and x-ray machines.
From the windows of the judicial wing you can "see the romantic houses of Wadi Salib," said Hayutin. In the Israeli utopia, Larry Abramson said in his lecture, "there is one single national Jewish identity, and all the 'rest' are only exotic folklore." And so, the painful history of the Wadi Salib neighborhood, the tragedy of the Palestinians and the distress of the Sephardi Jews, all these are reduced to a romantic Oriental view from this courthouse. The destroyed neighborhood will be rehabilitated and soon transformed, inevitably, into an artists' colony.