Jaffa's gilded cage - Haaretz

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Tue., November 20, 2007 Kislev 10, 5768

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Jaffa's gilded cage

By Shani Shilo

Tags: Israel, architecture

The Andromeda Hill project has attained the status of legend. Its name has become associated with the hubris of Cassiopeia, who claimed that her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than Neptune's companions the Nereids. That led to unhappy Andromeda being chained to the famous rock off the Jaffa shoreline. Jewish mystics also believe that ultra-Orthodox cursed the project after bones were found at the construction site, leading to financial losses for the entrepreneurs. And in general, many think the Andromeda Hill project symbolizes the gaps dividing rich and poor in Israel, Jew and Arab, even Tel Aviv and Jaffa themselves. For many, the luxury housing development emblemizes the polarization in Israeli society today.

Andromeda Hill has become the most well-known example of a gated community in Israel. Planned by Barlev Architects and architect Alex Cohen, with its high surrounding walls and security cameras, the complex, which is perched above the Jaffa Port, is seen as a symbol of alienation.

A report recently presented to the Knesset by an umbrella organization of Israeli environmental groups stated that some areas in Israel have third-world levels of medical and environmental problems. The report also pointed at the gaps between north Tel Aviv and the city's south, in environmental conditions and open areas. These gaps are epitomized by Andromeda Hill, which had been part of a gentrification trend (the practice of inserting people of higher socio-economic levels into poorer areas) promoted by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality. The wealthy people choosing to live in Jaffa consent to live in the city, but they didn't want to become part of it, and the result is a neighborhood lacking any connection with its surroundings.

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"The Andromeda project is an example of an autistic construct," avers architecture Prof. Zvi Efrat, of the Bezalel Academy. "It is detached from its surroundings and from the urban context. This dissociation is in part a consequence of post-modernist thinking. This is a building that relates only to itself, without engaging in questions of context. Also, at Andromeda, detachment becomes an ideology, one of gated communities that deliberately dissociate themselves, creating sealed bubbles in the middle of the city."

Naturally, the planners of Andromeda Hill didn't invent the wheel. Gated communities can be found everywhere, for example in apartment buildings with doormen who make sure that undesirable elements are kept at bay. Another closed community is now rising by the Ramat Aviv Hotel.

The main argument of Andromeda's planners to justify the stringent security and closed gates is that Jaffa is crime-ridden. Yet another city-village was erected in Hamashtela, a neighborhood of Tel Aviv peopled by the well-to-do, which has never been called a hotbed of crime. Nobody's allowed into that one unless they've been invited.

Architect Naama Malis says that the Andromeda project embodies a philosophical question: "Is the person who chooses to live in a gated community imprisoning himself behind the walls, or is he keeping society out?" She recently attended a conference in Copenhagen that addressed the worldwide trend of voluntary ghettoization, she says. Research has shown that gated communities are not confined to crime-ridden areas, Malis says.

"It is easy enough to mock people who want to step outside the consensus," she says, "but the phenomenon testifies to someone that is apparently lacking, that gray area between the public and the private." The neighborhood created social and urban situations that had more of "intermediate status. But the more polarized our society became, the more dichotomized the distinction between private and public became, and the need became acute."

"The street" isn't our street any more, it's the municipality's, Malis fleshes out the idea. "The neighborhood is only a definition at the level of the municipality. It doesn't convey a feeling of belonging. People need that feeling, so they buy it. To send a child out to play on a public street is more frightening than sending him out to an acquired street in a gated community. Perhaps the choice to live in these ghettoes is vulgar and crass, but it indicates a basic human need."

Planners should begin to consider how that essential quality of neighborhood disappeared and how it might be restored, and not only for the rich, Malis says.

The shortage of affordable housing for Jaffa's indigenous population exacerbated bad feeling for Andromeda. The project occupies 16 dunams that had belonged to the Greek Orthodox church, which sold the property to the Canadian developer Murray Goldman in exchange for 34 percent of the revenues. The Greek Orthodox community in Jaffa had hoped that the project would contain housing solutions suitable for them, and the choice of a Jewish developer building for the rich spurred a flood of objections to the local planning council.

After hearing the various objections, the city of Tel Aviv forced the entrepreneurs to leave four passages to give the public access to the sea and to the observation deck. The developers were also forced to build a public square with a commercial front on the project's north-east side, on Yefet Street, a 300-square-meter public building on a 700-square-meter lot, to serve as a community center or school - that would be leased to the city of Tel Aviv for 99 years. They also had to build 50 parking places on 5,000 square meters for the public.

The Andromeda Hill project comprises 270 apartments with 28,000 square meters in space. To date, more than half the complex's buildings have been erected. The swimming pool, the garden and the other tenant services are in place, but the developers have yet to make good on their promises to the city. The entrepreneurs claim that after the riots that shook Jaffa in October 2000 and because of the rising rate of crime in the city, they cannot allow non-residents right of way through the complex.

But last August, following a motion by several social organizations, the Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court ruled that the builders had to construct the passages for the public. Notwithstanding that, to this day a guard is stationed at the entrance to the community, and passage is anything but free. For instance, when this author tried to enter the neighborhood last week, she was blocked.

Andromeda Hill's isolation stands out not only because of the guard, but because of the road that encompasses it, and because it's situated on a hill to begin with, 15 meters above sea level. Andromeda's eastern front faces Yefet Street and in the north it faces the Old City of Jaffa. The south faces the impoverished Ajami neighborhood.

Andromeda's design is reminiscent of the set for an Oriental movie - arches, pillars, tiles and colorful plasterwork. Zvi Efrat summed up the look as suffering from over-design. The Web site used by the project for marketing purposes is in English, and this only serves to underscore its dissociation from the surrounding space, and defines it as a city within a city.

On the west, Andromeda Hill faces Jaffa Port. Despite the prevailing opinion that it's right on the water, it isn't. It does face the sea, but if residents want to take a dip, they have to take more than a few steps to get there. The western facade towers about 30 meters above the street. Passage is possible only through a narrow bolted gate. The gate leaves the residents of Jaffa outside Andromeda, but judging by its look, the inhabitants hardly use it either.

Architect Sharon Rotbard claims that Andromeda Hill meets the city only in its parking lot. "The use of the ground floor is purely symbolic, because the people move from the underground parking lot to the apartments. The ground floor is empty scenery and the area above the underground floor is outside the city. These areas have been severed from the city."

Andromeda Hill has trouble because it's not part of Jaffa, Rotbard sums up. "Tycoons could drive in from Ben-Gurion Airport straight to the parking lot. There's something mendacious about that kind of architecture, which tries to connect to space through colonnades, stone, tiled roofs, 'human perspective' and all that post-modern architectural gibberish," he says.

To be fair, Rotbard also believes that it's almost impossible to build in Jaffa without making a mistake. "Just building in the city is a problem because of the political and historical subtext, the connection between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and the manner in which the feud between the two originated in a fistfight in Jaffa, which didn't end in 1936 but continues on to this day, in various forms," he says.

"It's easy to criticize Andromeda Hill because it is closed off, and its orientalism, but even if you wanted to build smaller projects in Ajami like housing in the flea market, you can't get rid of the political difficulty, and the result will be problematic buildings," Rotbard elaborates.

It is impossible to do good architecture in Jaffa without considering the political dimension, which is impenetrable, Rotbard says. "There is a genuine problem with a weak population for whom there are no proper housing solutions. This is a city whose status is a neighborhood inside a bigger city. Building in Jaffa requires a different attitude and for the time being I see no way for a Jewish architect to do anything there without flopping."

Jaffa and Tel Aviv have to rethink their relationship, Rotbard believes. Perhaps Jaffa should be left to manage itself: "As things stand, neither city benefits from their relationship."

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