With all due respect for the damage inflicted on Lake Kinneret over the Passover holiday, what is ultimately important is the ordinary daily landscape we encounter near home. The landscape of construction, infrastructure, gardens, backyards, streets, sidewalks, apartment buildings and office towers. Nearly all sectors of the Israeli public are hostile to and abuse the country's constructed landscape, which returns the favor. Lake Kinneret's condition, which netted headlines during Passover, proves that natural landscapes receive no special treatment from the public. There are no nuances in the general attitude toward the public domain. In the city or in nature - I will not disturb this holiday's tranquility by discussing the security wall that is mercilessly tearing apart the land - ugliness starts inside each of us.

After Passover and the quarrels between northern Israel's regional councils regarding who is responsible for protecting nature, we are left with the beautiful/charmless, fascinating/exceptionally banal human-made landscapes. We must rack our brains on how to upgrade them - which is what poet Haim Nahman Bialik wanted to do with Tel Aviv many years ago, when it was still a small town. We must try to upgrade them, not ruin them.

High-tension wires, train tracks, expressways, interchanges, bridges are today the dominant landscape in many regions throughout Israel, which only yesterday, only last year, appeared untouched by human hands but now have the feel of having been created by humans. It is not easy to deal with the dramatic changes that have taken place: They generate not only incisive criticism from environmentalists, but also a deep sigh.

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The startling appearance of transportation infrastructures, commonly encountered only on overseas trips, compensates somewhat for the loss of pristine landscapes. This is breathtaking, nerve-tingling futuristic decoration the futurists could only have dreamed about.

Nonetheless, advanced technology's prophets would wring their hands in sorrow if they saw the lack of imagination and dynamism displayed by most bridges, tunnels, supporting walls and interchanges in many Israeli highways, which often give the impression of having been designed and constructed by the Flintstones. The new Shoresh interchange looks more like a memorial - with its support walls vainly covered with stone, its olive trees and the remains of armored vehicles from the War of Independence at its foot - than a first-rank civil-engineering project and a dynamic traffic juncture.

Surrendering to Calatrava

The bridges of "Natbag 2000," the Hebrew acronym for Ben-Gurion International Airport's major upgrading project, unfortunately look like grounded mammoths, while the new bridge above the Yarkon River in Bnei Brak has the appearance of used junk, as does the Glilot interchange, the focus of massive media buzz, despite the neon lighting that tries to give it a bright look. We are told that the only resort is to surrender to the genius creator of Jerusalem's "bridge of strings," Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. However, it would be mere provincialism to deny our homemade achievements, such as the bridge over Parashat Drakhim Street and the Bar-Yehuda bridge (which was planned by futurist Haifa architect Michael Burt) - two bridges that would meet the criteria of every international competition without a needless, expensive fireworks display.

Acoustic barriers are the inevitable accessories to transportation infrastructures, especially where highways brush too close to residential areas. Granted, sometimes an acoustic barrier is merely a euphemism for a dividing wall. However, its original innocent function is to serve as a legitimate means for reducing the intensity of noise generated by thoroughfares, and to create a minimal barrier between the decibels outside and the attempt to lead a reasonable existence inside.

Acoustic barriers constitute a massive project that has spread throughout the country and that has immense, but rarely exploited, architectural potential. Perhaps because people tend to turn up their noses at the very existence of these barriers and as a result do not even consider the possibility of incorporating them into our physical culture, no winning model has been found among Israel's acoustic barriers that could be included in the local landscape- design pantheon, and attempts to camouflage them behind a veil of protective foliage have failed.

In recent years nearly every Israeli highway and street has become the proud owner of its own traffic circle, and already it's difficult to recall how our world looked without them. The traffic circle is the ideal democratic answer to the dictatorship of traffic lights, ensures acceptable driving behavior and reduces traffic jams and road accidents. Furthermore, it can serve as a sedative for turbulent intersections. The rotary is an area bereft of buildings that has been granted as a gift to the public domain, which is sagging under the traffic burden. However, circles, which require only minimal traffic signs and markers that are practically at the level of mere hints, have generated a major revolution in design and gardening. The artificial hills, outdoor sculptures, commemorative plaques (a worrisome story in itself), planters, waterfalls, range of finishing materials, and in general the dizzying proliferation of the circles - all are an extravagant expression of the ego of frustrated mayors and landscape planners and mute evidence of the unquenchable urge for "more and then more."

In an environment where change is the only constant element, we see the persistent appearance of the unholy tradition of painting the curbstones of sidewalks throughout Israel blue-and-white/red-and-white/yellow-and-red. Nowhere else in the world do you see such a phenomenon, except perhaps around army barracks or in summer camps. The fact that no grassroots movement has arisen to work for the removal of this blight testifies to the public's scorn of and indifference toward the public domain. What possible benefit can we derive from the latest, most promising gray sidewalk tile fresh from the production line of Ackerstein (because that is the best we have), if it must ultimately, inevitably crash into the raucous curbstones, which thwart any effort to provide the sidewalk with even a trace of urban elegance?

Islands of in-tranquility

Even in its most difficult hours, the sidewalk is still the most democratic, egalitarian area in our daily lives. Its crowning achievement is undoubtedly the sidewalk bench, which proclaims that, despite the shopping mall's temptations and despite the noise, soot, dirt, accumulation of odds and ends, garbage cans, "cages" for used plastic bottles, telephone/electric power distribution boxes, transformer boxes, traffic lights and signs advertising this or that service or product, the street still has much to offer. In recent years, the number of benches added to city streets has been more than adequate and they offer, free of charge, an imagined island of tranquility in the middle of the hustle and bustle of life, and the option of taking a time-out, relaxing, enjoying a brief nap or even having an impromptu friendly conversation with someone who has become your neighbor for a few minutes.

The bad news is that the days of the bench as we know it are numbered. It is being replaced by an unfamiliar mutation: a chair suitable for only one bottom that threatens to destruct an entire urban culture. The mutation first appeared in Tel Aviv - initially in renovated Magen David Square and then in Herzl Street and several public parks. Now the chairs have been installed on Ibn Gvirol Street, which is currently cleaning itself up. The chairs are heavy, clumsy, ugly, anti-social and lacking all charm. What can you expect from a device designed deliberately to discourage the homeless from making an impromptu bed there?

As Israel approaches its 60th birthday, the time has perhaps come to upgrade the "sporadic" balcony, which, in the course of a decade or two, has produced a convulsion in an entire country's constructed landscape. It is also time we developed a suitable alternative to the stone envelopes on buildings throughout Israel; they have transformed entire neighborhoods and structures into Western Walls and monuments. Does anyone recall that the regulation requiring all buildings to have a stone overlay dates from 1918? It was issued by Sir Ronald Storrs, the British military, and later civilian, governor of Jerusalem, but it applied only to Jerusalem's Old City basin.

There is still time to rally to the defense of our existing city streets and protect them from disintegrating into compounds and complexes of buildings, as well as from neglect, deterioration and zero-maintenance. Now is the time to reconcile ourselves to the modest housing projects built in central Israel and in its periphery. Despite all the criticism leveled against them, we should reconsider their advantages; we should upgrade them and recycle them for additional use. We should also extend a second chance to the banal but sane "contractor apartment buildings," with their courtyards and ground-floor shops. We should fill in the vacuum created between the disaster of the housing activity in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s and the nouveau-riche decadence that became dominant in the period of occupation following the 1967 Six-Day War. Furthermore, we should make peace with modern Israeli architecture in all its various periods, because it belongs to Israel, just as Victorian architecture belongs to London and art deco to New York, and because it has not yet said its last word.