The “model neighborhood” in Be’er Sheva, Israel, was built in 1959 and consists partly of a modernist patio house grid, which is referred to as “The Carpet (Hashatia) Settlement.” The “model neighborhood” was the first attempt to create an alternative to the standard public housing projects in Israel. A group of young architects (A. Yaski, A. Alexandrni, N. Zolotov, D. Havkin and R. Carmi) were commissioned to find new local solutions for a settlement with 3000 residential units. The architect Avraham Yaski (1968) specified the following objectives for building this settlement: “Finding an appropriate solution for a neighborhood in a desert climate; developing structural solutions that would facilitate maintenance by the immigrant population’ and materializing the concept of cluster as a clear-cut physical and social element in the urban pattern.” Architects Nahum Zolotov and Daniel Havkin as part of the planning team designed the modernist patio house grid, the “Carpet Settlement,” which was integrated into this master plan. At the time, Be’er Sheva became a laboratory for modern settlement and city planning. The “new town” emerged within the context of the comprehensive urbanizing program of establishing “development towns” in the Negev desert during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The layout of “The Carpet Settlement” resembles the settlement structure developed by Michel Ecochard in Casablanca in 1951. How were architectural or urban building concepts from North Africa, which had been planned for Berbers and Arabs in Morocco, able to make their way to Israel? On the one hand, this might be explained by the fact that European architects traveled between America, Asia, Africa and Europe and were agents of a global transfer of knowledge, who propagated modernist ideas that then became internationalized. On the other hand, many architects from the Middle East, Latin America and Asia participated in the international CIAM congresses and were in intellectual and personal contact. In addition, architectural and urban planning experiments in Africa, Asia and South America didn’t go unnoticed. Numerous international architecture journals kept up with the projects that had developed under colonial and post-colonial conditions. The French magazine L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui was an important player in the dissemination of this knowledge.
Moreover, architects like Artur Glikson, who was head of the planning department of the Ministry of Labor’s Housing Division, had a significant influence on the planning discourses during the 1950s and 1960s in Israel. Glikson had designed a prototype of a modern patio house, laid out as a habitat adapté in a “carpet form” and did intense research on vernacular architecture. He was also an influential teacher at the Technion in Haifa where he passed on his knowledge to a younger generation of architects. As he was closely connected to Team 10, he also knew about the urban experiments in Morocco, as members of the Team 10, namely George Candilis and Shadrach Woods were central protagonists in this endeavor. Glikson was also in strong contact with the Clarence Perry, LewisMumford and connected to the ideas of Patrick Geddes. As central protagonists of the discourse of regional planning and vernacular architecture he had a major impact on his younger colleagues when they were asked to develop their idea on experimental housing proposals.
Architectural historian Zvi Efrat calls attention the fact that architects in Israel definitely had the Kasbah in mind during the debates surrounding the neighborhood unit. But in current discourses surrounding the “Carpet Settlement" of Be’er Sheva, the influence of vernacular Palestinian or Arabian architecture on the development of the patio house’s specific design vocabulary has been relativized. Instead, the influence of Interbau Berlin (1956) has been more readily cited as having had an impact on the general planning discourse of the development towns in Israel, though the roots of the modernist patio house or the “Carpet Settlement” cannot be traced back to the Hansaviertel in Berlin. The Israeli patio house grid—the carpet settlement—is for sure a product of transnational knowledge transfer, carried out by journals, the CIAM congresses from 1928 onwards, and personal encounters. But the modernist patio house is, above all, an expression of a Eurocentric discourse on Arabic secular buildings, situated within the binary construction of tradition and modernity, occident and orient. The “old” city center of Be’er Sheva, popularly referred to as the “dark Kasbah,” is an almost paradigmatic site of transcultural and colonial modernity: before Be’er Sheva became a laboratory of modern, Israeli city planning, its “historical” center was planned and constructed as a grid structure by civil engineers from the German imperial crown at the beginning of the 20th century, by order of the Ottoman Empire. The German architects translated the spatial order of a medina to a grid, which is popularly known today as the “Arabic Kasbah.” (MvO)
Sources:
Ackley, Brian (2005): “Blocking the Casbah: Le Corbusier's Algerian fantasy.” In: Bidoun,Issue 06/2005. 13-39, http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/06-envy/blocking-the-casbah-le-corbusiers-algerian-fantasy-by-brian-ackley (18 July 2011).
Dvir, Noam: Magic carpet. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1082108.html (18 July 2011).
Mayo, James M (2004): “The ideologies of Artur Glikson.” In: Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Issue 21/2004, 99-101.
Minta, Anna (2004): Israel Bauen. Architektur, Städtebau und Denkmalpolitik nach der Staatsgründung 1948. Frankfurt/Main: 248-253.
Oxman, Robert/Hadas Shadar/Ehud Belferman, Casbah (2002): “A brief history of a design concept.” In: Architectural Research Quarterly, Issue 6/2002. 321-336.
Shadar, Hadas (2004): “Vernacular values in public housing.” In: Architectural Research Quarterly, Issue 8/2004: 171-18.
Yaski, Avraham (1968): “Foreword.” In: Hirsch, A., Sharshevski, R.: Occupants’ reactions on the planning of apartment and neighbourhood in the Experimental Housing Project in Be’er Sheva. Ministry of Housing, Unit of Social and Economic Research. 1-5.
Yifachtel, Oren (2006): Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Press.
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L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui is the oldest French architecture magazine. It was created during the economic crisis, in November 1930, by the architect, sculptor, painter and publisher André BLOC (1896 to 1966).From its very first issue, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui promoted the avant-garde and different movements and personalities of the architectural thinking behind "modernity", among whom Le Corbusier, who contributed to several issues. L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui also offers a cross disciplinary vision of period architecture mixing featured subjects, architectural creation, interviews with architects, urbanism and technical resources. At this time, it was the only French architecture magazine known all over the world, thanks to its uncompromisingly international character.
