Spontaneous Architecture

3/23/2015

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1/09/2015

1/08/2015

Sharon Rotbard / White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa

The history of Tel Aviv, presented for a moment as an architectural history, can be seen as a part of a wider process in which the physical shaping of Tel Aviv and its political and cultural construction are intertwined, and plays a decisive role in the construction of the case, the alibi, and the apologetics of the Jewish settlement across the country.
—White City, Black City

In 2004, the city of Tel Aviv was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site, an exemplar of modernism in architecture and town planning. Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv gleams white against the desert sky, its Bauhaus-inspired architecture betraying few traces of what came before it: the Arab city of Jaffa. In White City, Black City, the Israeli architect and author Sharon Rotbard offers two intertwining narratives, that of colonized and colonizer. It is also a story of a decades-long campaign of architectural and cultural historical revision that cast Tel Aviv as a modernist “white city” emerging fully formed from the dunes while ignoring its real foundation—the obliteration of Jaffa. Rotbard shows that Tel Aviv was not, as a famous poem has it, built “from sea foam and clouds” but born in Jaffa and shaped according to its relation to Jaffa. His account is not only about architecture but also about war, destruction, Zionist agendas, erasure, and the erasure of the erasure.

Rotbard tells how Tel Aviv has seen Jaffa as an inverted reflection of itself—not shining and white but nocturnal, criminal, dirty: a “black city.” Jaffa lost its language, its history, and its architecture; Tel Aviv constructed its creation myth. White City, Black City—hailed upon its publication in Israel as ”path-breaking,” “brilliant,” and “a masterpiece”—promises to become the central text on Tel Aviv.

Editions:
Pluto Press (UK) - January 20, 2015
The MIT Press (US) - February 5, 2015

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/white-city-black-city

12/05/2014

Breaking a Wall at Srirangam Temple

11/26/2014

SABA at "Mobile Home Project", Songwon Art Centre, Seoul

Searching for an alternative moving space, Mobile Home Project is going to be put on display from 21st of November to 19th of December in Song Won Art Center and Corner Gallery. In this exhibition, 20 groups of globally active artists and architects will participate to look for the possibility and present situation of movable spaces. 9 national-based groups are accessing topics under the social context of Korea, while 11 groups of foreign artists from Austria, Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Spain introduce experimental cases and alternative models on their diverse social and physical contexts.
Space was initially formed in need of human and generated distinctive architectural and life styles based on different cultures. The movement in space, thus, arises from the movement of human. Different forms of mobile home appeared in parallel to the activities of human looking for a living space, for example to escape from an uninhabitable area, for the dispossessed to discover a temporary habitat, or to migrate to a better site. Mobile Home Project is a project in relation to space that has been created from the migration and movement, and it aims to study the possibility of moving space under art and life. Basically, the project intends to research about the attempted fluid and hypothetical space project and throws questions regarding periodic phenomena.
The underlying reason of defining the form of space as the movement of space or the movement of one individual in a smaller scale lies on diverse social political background such as the limit of physical habitat or the exile from social system. The movable space- mobile home starts from the movement resulted from the realistic limit and physical incapacity. Focusing on the creative form of space resulted from uninhabitable situations, the exhibition talks about the relationship between movable space and life. The artworks of 20 groups at home and abroad approach in various aspects to discuss about life on the border, body to space, labor mobility, moving house, floating land. The Mobile Home Project will search for creative ways to involve in our lives and share possibility of constantly potential alternative model with the contemporary artists and architects.
Somi Sim (Curator)

(Source: Mobile Home Project exhibition - http://mobilehomeproject.com/; SABA's portfolio at the exhibition's website - http://mobilehomeproject.com/?portfolio=saba)

11/19/2014

SABA at "Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities", Museum of Modern Art, New York

"In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities. Most will be poor. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. Over the next years, city authorities, urban planners, designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to ensure these expanding urban enclaves remain habitable.
Uneven Growth, the latest exhibition in MoMA’s Issues in Contemporary Architecture series (which also includes Foreclosed and Rising Currents), addresses this increasingly inequitable urban development.
In conjunction with the exhibition, this online platform welcomes the public around the world to submit examples of "tactical urbanisms"—temporary, bottom-up interventions that aim to make cities more livable and participatory.
In the scope of the exhibition, six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners were brought together to examine new architectural possibilities for six megacities: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York City, and Rio de Janeiro. Challenging assumed relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up and top-down urban development, the resulting design scenarios, developed over a 14-month initiative, consider how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can respond to alterations in the nature of public space, housing, mobility, the environment, and other major issues of near-future urbanization." (source: http://uneven-growth.moma.org/)

SABA 2011 Halvad project:
http://uneven-growth.moma.org/post/102987238658/spontaneous-architecture-at-the-bezalel-academy

SABA 2013 Hiriya
http://uneven-growth.moma.org/post/103053956283/saba-spring-2013-park-hiriya-20-sqm-of-shade

SABA Summer 2013, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel
http://uneven-growth.moma.org/post/103053786368/saba-summer-2013-mitzpe-ramon-israel

SABA 2014 OccupyTLV projects:
http://uneven-growth.moma.org/post/99675462858/saba-spring-2014-public-showers-and-grey-water

http://uneven-growth.moma.org/post/103053754823/saba-spring-2014-black-water-compost-toilets-at

11/17/2014

SABA's OccupyTLV projects at the show "Mobile Home project", Songwon Art Center, Seoul

"Grey Water, Black Water", SABA's projects at the OccupyTLV tent-city, were selected to the show and archive "Mobile Home Project" curated by Somi Sim at the Songwon Art Center, Seoul.

Mobile Home Project (Songwon Art Center, Seoul, KR) | 21.11-19.12.2014

‘Mobile Home Project’ is a research and exhibition project on various cases of mobile spaces that are created and caused by people’s migration and about the life within them through perspectives of arts, architecture and design.

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cover photo: SABA 2013, Spring in Hiriya: Guy Ehrlich, Michelle Hites, Shamir Zalkin / Humanesting

In spring 2013 SABA arrived at Park Ariel Sharon in Hiriya. Initiated by Dr. Martin Weyl and planned by Latz+Partner, this project strives to rehabilitate the garbage mountain that has been sprawling in this place since the end of the Independence War, to develop 8000 Dunums of open areas, fields, streams and ponds and to re-use them for various cultural, natural and leisure activities. During the semester, the students studied the park and its environmental challenges; they had to plan and to build 4 structures that cast shadows of 25 sqm each. The budget was fixed to zero. The structures will stand in the park from June 24th for 10 days.

Toward a non-violent architecture: Summer 2014 in India

‪In summer 2014, between September 11th and October 23rd, Spontaneous Architecture returned to India for an International studio held in collaboration with CARE school of Architecture in Trichy.

‪The program combined a 3-week intensive traveling seminar in 3 very different Indian Cities (New Delhi, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad) with a 3-week spontaneous architecture workshop at the KVK research agricultural farm in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.‬

‪During this workshop, Israeli and Indian students worked together and designed and built 6 small structures that would serve for farmers' markets and exhibitions.‬

Black Water, Grey Water: Spring 2014 at OCCUPYTLV Tent City

In summer 2011 Tel Aviv experienced a huge wave of protest, mainly due to the housing prices. The protest occupied the city's center during all the summer, From July 14th, when young Dafni Leaf spontaneously erected a tent in Rothschild Boulevard to the September 3rd "One Million Demonstration" in Kikar Hanedina [State Piazza). Soon later, most of the protesters packed their tents and went back to their too expensive homes, leaving behind only those who insisted to stay and many others, who did not have anywhere else to go.

On November 27th 2012, in accordance to an agreement originally made between the activist Tamir Hajaj and the Tel Aviv Municipality, the remains of the summer 2011 Tel Aviv protest Tent City were removed from Rothschild Boulevard and exiled to the Volovelsky-Karney park. Situated in the Tel Aviv's north eastern margins, the park was a green island surrounded by one of Israel's heaviest traffic, Tel Aviv's Central railway Station, Namir Road, Petach Tikva Road, Ayalon Freeway (hence its most common name, "Tsomet Parachat Drahim" - Crossroads Junction). The location was chosen because it was one of the only parks in Tel Aviv with public toilettes.

In 2013, a large portion of the park, about a third, was fenced to become the construction site of the "Loop", a new, gigantic infrastructural project which is to add a new connection to the Ayalon freeway and maybe one day would become a new station of Tel Aviv's mysterious Metropolitan train system. Tent-dwellers residing in the fenced area where asked to move to the unfenced area. The public toilettes was demolished; chemical toilettes offered and maintained by a private subcontractor of the project 's contractor were placed instead.

Today, OCCUPYTLV Tent City oscillates between a protest sit-in, a homeless shelter and a favela, and is occupied by few dozens of individuals . Each one of the occupiers has his own reasons to be there, they all protest either by protesting or by their mere survival in this place. However, apart sharing the shrinking space and infrastructures, the only thing they have in common is that none of them wishes to form a community with the others, and they do not form any organized community.

During spring 2014 SABA worked at OCCUPYTLV Tent City.

Summer 2013, Mitzpe Ramon

Located almost in the middle of route 40 from Beer-Sheva to Eilat and situated on the edge of the Ramon Makhtesh - the world's largest makhtesh (erosion cirque in the form of crater), Mitzpe Ramon was first settled in 1951 for a brief period of time by the asphalt workers of the route.

Few years later, in 1956, it was founded as a cooperative settlement for the mineral mining workers. A year later the cooperative was dismantled and the state took over: the small settlement soon became a tiny "development town" designed according the state planning apparatus of the late fifties, stacking new immigrants from Morocco in public housing projects.

In the following decades few more populations moved in:

During the Eighties, with IDF's redeployment in the Negev after the retreat from Sinai, Mitzpe Ramon absorbed a new population of Military professionals' families; in the Nineties new immigrants from former USSR; from the end of the 20th century few religious communities as well as a massive wave of young population of professionals and artists attracted to the spectacular landscapes of the desert.

Mitzpe Ramon is toady a local Council surrounded by the Har Hanegev Regional Council. Mitzpe's population counts some 5000 inhabitants. In the last decade Mitzpe Ramon tries shifting from the industrial and mining uses originally planned to eco-tourism: The hangars industrial zone has been transformed into an arts and crafts quarter, the stone quarries have been closed down and are about to be restored, a new luxury hotel, "Bereshit", was built near the Makhtesh's cliffs.

SABA will be working in Mitzpe Ramon from August 25th 2013 to October 2nd.

Spring 2013: Spring in Hirya

During the semester, the students studied the park and its environmental challenges; they had to plan and to build 4 structures that cast shadows of 25 sqm each. The budget was fixed to zero. The structures will stand in the park from June 24th for 10 days.