Are Politics Built Into Architecture?
The catalyst for the debate came last month when the Israel Association of United Architects vetoed a catalog and canceled an exhibition that it had commissioned to represent Israel at the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin from July 22 to 26. It decided that the catalog, titled "A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture," would damage Israel's image abroad by presenting a uniformly hostile view of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Uri Zerubavel, president of the association, blamed Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, the two young Israeli architects who edited the catalog.

"They used our resources, they used our public name to make one-sided political propaganda," he said in a telephone interview from Tel Aviv. "If you are a political party, you can do what they have done. But the association is apolitical. It has members on the left and on the right. Imagine if we did an exhibition praising the settlements."

Mr. Segal and Mr. Weizman, in turn, said they were surprised by what they called the association's "extreme reaction."

"We were picked in a competition of 10 firms of architects," Mr. Segal said by telephone from Tel Aviv. "We suggested the theme and even mentioned some of the writers who would contribute to the catalog, so they knew ahead. But when they saw the whole work, they suddenly got cold feet and didn't want it."

The architects have won strong support from Esther Zandberg, the architecture critic of Haaretz, an independent daily, who accused the association of exercising "harsh political censorship."

"The catalog is a rare work in its power and importance for the community of architects and town planners in Israel, who usually separate `pure' professionalism and `dirty' politics," she said. "The catalog shows clearly that this option no longer exists."

In truth, architecture has always been inseparable from politics in a broad sense. No less than, say, the Egyptian pyramids, Europe's great Gothic cathedrals were conceived as expressions of power. Similarly, both Albert Speer's grandiose design for Hitler's Berlin and 1960's efforts to bring social improvement through public housing were politically inspired. But in Israel, Ms. Zandberg said, architects "seem never to have examined their actions critically."

In the English-language catalog for "A Civilian Occupation," half a dozen architects do just that, although its fiercest criticism of the settlements in the occupied territories comes from a journalist, Gideon Levy, a columnist in Haaretz. "They are almost always up there, the settlements, dominating the plateau, challenging, provoking, picking a fight," he writes. From everywhere, he continues, "you can spot the settlement on the hilltop, looming, threatening, dreadfully colonial."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/design/10ARCH.html?pagewanted=all&position=top