The environmental semantics of rural and urban architecture standards in British Mandate of Palestine, 1920–1940

AbstractThis paper analyses the 1940 exhibition catalogue, Twenty Years of Building: Workers' Settlements, Housing and Public Institutions, published by the Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. A cross-regional analysis of this publication in the context of Mandatory Palestine and its commonalities with the environmental German notion of ‘rootedness’ [Bodenständigkeit] forms the basis of this paper. It challenges previous scholarship viewing Jewish architecture as progressive, climatically adaptive, and correlating with the 1930s separatist stance of Labour Zionism vis-à-vis the Levant. It argues instead that the Federation's architects reflected a conservative agenda concerning ‘functional’ design. The paper reconstructs how their agenda adapted various rhetoric, from rooted rural buildings, colonial ruralisation, to new urban co-op environments in the 1920s and 30s. The paper also explores the historicist and settler-colonial stance of this agenda as it negotiated progressive building standards relative to the brief tradition of cooperative settlement history and indigenous Palestinian habitats. The paper, thus, identifies the environmental semantics of the Federation’s functional buildings, its structuralist logic, and its role in the legitimation of Zionist settler colonial institutions. In assessing this aesthetic-economic discourse, the paper contributes a missing prelude to the vernacularisation of post-independence development architecture in Israel. AcknowledgementsSeveral mentors and friends have contributed to the development of this essay. I wish to thank in particular David Leatherbarrow, Joan Ockman, Daniel Barber, John Tresch, Daniel Hershenzon, Ayala Levin, Nimrod Ben-Ze’ev, Keren Gorodeisky, Lior Barshack, Duffy Half, and Shani Sladowsky for their contributions in shaping its arguments. I wish also to thank the journal editor Doreen Bernath and the reviewers for their helpful critique.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Folder: IV-250-31-240, the Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research Archive. The exhibition displayed building activities by members of the collective agricultural labour settlements [Ha’hytyashvot Ha’aovedet], which from the 1910s stood primarily for the agricultural settlements as a geographical sector. This notion was roughly distinguished from the administrative and cultural arms of a Jewish workers’ society, which was identified with the urban settlement.2 See [Anon.], ‘בתערוכה של הבנייה ההסתדרותית’ [‘At the Exhibition of the Federation Construction’], Davar, 21 November 1940, p. 4; and עשרים שנות בניה – התיישבות, שיכון ומוסדות ציבור פועלים [Twenty Years of Building: Workers’ Settlements, Housing and Public Institutions], ed. by E. Polsky, Asher Allweil, Israel Dicker, Shmuel Mestechkin, A. Freudental, and Benyamin Chlenov (Tel Aviv: Engineers’ Architects’ and Surveyors’ Union of Palestine, 1940).3 The 1958 exhibition celebrating the first decade of Israel’s independence was most likely of a similar scope; see Zvi Efrat, The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture, 1948–1973, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2004), p. 20.4 See Zvi Elhyani, ‘Multi-Contextual Approaches to Architectural Archiving: Knowledge Restoration for the Historiography of Israeli Architecture’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, The Technion, 2014), pp. 18–23; and Duffy Half, ‘A New Materiality in Praise of the Ordinary, in Palestine-Israel, c. 1940–66’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 23.1 (2019), 47–62 .5 Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).6 See Richard Ingersoll, מוניו גיתאי-וינרויב – ארכיטקט באוהאוס בארץ-ישראל [Munio Gitai Weinraub: Bauhaus Architect in Erez Israel] (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2009), pp. 61–2; Tzafrir Fainholtz, ‘The Jewish Farmer, the Village and the World Fair: Politics, Propaganda, and the “Israel in Palestine” Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937’, retrieved from SHS Web of Conferences 63: 10004 (2019) ; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Performing the State: The Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, 1939/1940’, in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 98–115; and Sigal Davidi, ‘״האדריכלות החדשה״ ביריד המזרח ,1934 הבניית זהות ליישוב היהודי’ [‘The “New Architecture” of the 1934 Levant Fair: The Creation of an Identity for the Jewish Society’], Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, History, Society, Culture, 24 (2016), 163–90.7 IV 208-1-1771A, the Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research Archive.8 See the Union meeting minutes: IV-250-31-240, IV 250-36-1-237, IV 250-36-1-236, and IV-250-36-1-238, the Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research Archive; ‘The Council of the Union of and Engineer’, Habinyan Bamizrach Hakarov, 2 (1935), p. 9; ‘From the Activities of the Union of Engineers and Architects in Eretz Israel’, Habinyan Bamizrach Hakarov, 4 (1935), 15; and H. Promkin, ‘ארבע שנות מאבק, 1936-1940’ [‘Four Years of Struggle, 1936–1940’], Davar, 29 March 1940, p. 2.9 See also Ines Sonders, ‘Julius Posener und das Neue Bauen in Palästina’, in The Transfer of Modernity: Architectural Modernism in Palestine (1923–1948), ed. by Ronny Schüler and Jörg Stabenow (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag. 2019), pp. 53–68 (pp. 57–8).10 IV 250-36-1-237, the Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research Archive. These matters corresponded with interwar discussions in Europe on social housing and welfare; see Iris Graicer, מהשכונה אל השיכון: ההתיישבות העירונית של הפועלים בארץ-ישראל ושורשיה הרעיוניים, 1950-1920 [From Neighborhood to Housing Estate: The Urban Settlement of the Labor Movement in the Land of Israel and its Ideological Sources, 1920–1950] (Haifa: Pardes, 2017), pp. 16–7.11 Or Aleksandrowicz, Daring the Shutter: The Tel Aviv Idiom of Solar Protections (Holon: Public School Editions, 2015).12 Hannes Meyer, ‘Building’, in Programs and Manifestos, ed. by Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 117–20.13 See Aleksandrowicz, Daring the Shutter; and Aleksandrowicz, ‘Facing the Sun: German-Speaking Émigrés and the Roots of Israeli Climatic Building Design’, in Designing Transformation Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism, ed. by Elana Shapira (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), pp. 253–66.14 Th. F. M., ‘Twenty Years of Building: A Proud Palestinian Record’, The Palestine Post, 12 December 1940, p. 4.15 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Tracing Settler Colonialism: A Genealogy of a Paradigm in the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel’, Politics & Society, 50.1 (2022), 44–83 (pp. 46–7).16 For British Imperial perspectives, see Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (London: Routledge, 2018); and Alex Bremner, ‘Introduction’, in Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, ed. by Alex Bremner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1–15 (p. 7).17 By employing the term Palestinian in this context, I refer specifically to constructions of indigenous Palestinian Arabs.18 Ingersoll, Munio Gitai Weinraub, pp. 15–20, 28, 81, 84–5. Ingersoll acknowledges also alternative assumptions; see ibid., pp. 20, 153.19 The Chug, a group of architects that gathered in the city in 1932 and promoted ‘new architecture’ through competitions and a journal, emulating the German 1920s Ring group.20 Eran Neuman, אריה שרון: אדריכל המדינה [Arieh Sharon: The State Architect], ed. by Eran Neuman (Tel Aviv: Museum of Modern Art, 2017), pp. 15, 45, 67.21 Efrat, The Israeli Project, pp. 64, 65–6, 69.22 Ibid., p. 59.23 See Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Contested Zionism – Alternative Modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv “Chug” in Mandate Palestine’, in Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, ed. by Haim Yacobi (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 147–80 (p. 153, 156); and Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925–1933 (Boston, MA, and Leiden: Brill, 2002).24 Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 157–61.25 See, among others, Shira Pinhas, ‘Road, Map: Partition in Palestine from the Local to the Transnational’, Journal of Levantine Studies, 10.1 (Summer 2020), 111–21; Fredrik Meiton, Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019); and Dafna Hirsch,באנו הנה להביא את המערב – הנחלת היגיינה ובניית תרבות בחברה היהודית בתקופת המנדט [‘We Are Here to Bring the West': Hygiene Education and Culture Building in the Jewish Society of Palestine during the British Mandate Period] (Sde Boker: The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2014).26 See Yael Allweil, Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime, 1860–2011 (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 12–4, 230–1; Gabriel Schwake, Dwelling on the Green Line: Privatize and Rule in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 21, 31–2, 63; Gabriel Schwake, ‘From Homes to Assets and from Pioneers to Shareholders: An Evolving Frontier Terminology’, Urban Planning, 7.1 (2022), 1–13 (pp. 2–3); Ayala Levin, ‘Exporting Architectural National Expertise: Arieh Sharon’s Ile-Ife University Campus in West-Nigeria (1962–1976)’, in Nationalism and Architecture, ed. by Darren Deane, Sarah Butler, and Raymond Quek (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2017), pp. 53–66 (p. 55); and Ayala Levin, Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), pp. 27, 37–9.27 For alternative arguments on this progressive architecture, see Sonders ‘Julius Posener’; Yossi Klein, ‘The Architects Leo Adler and Jacob Pinkerfeld: Modern Architectural Regionalism as an Act of Political Resistance’, in The Transfer of Modernity, ed. by Schüler and Stabenow, pp. 225–40; Fainholtz ‘The Jewish Farmer’; Half, ‘A New Materiality’; and Martin Hershenzon, ‘The Architect as Civil Servant: Aviah Hashimshoni’s Architecture Education and Historiography in 1960s Israel’, The Journal of Architecture, 26.2 (2021), 116–46 (pp. 118–9).28 See Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009), pp. 226–9; and Kenny Cupers, ‘Bodenständigkeit: The Environmental Epistemology of Modernism’, The Journal of Architecture, 21.8 (2016), 1226–52.29 In this article, my use of the notion ‘environmental’ is primarily used, following Kenny Cupers, James Nisbet, and Oliver Botar, to designate that which falls under the premises of ecology, that is, a holistic understanding of the system of bodies and (living) organisms that together form the environment, and a pursuit to develop an analytical discourse that comes to terms with inter-relations between single organisms and their environments. See Cupers, ‘Bodenständigkeit’, p.1244; James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments and Energy Systems in the Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), pp. 5–6; and Oliver A. I. Botar, ‘Defining Biocentrism’, in Biocentrism and Modernism, ed. by Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabelle Wünsche (Essex: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 15–45 (pp. 18, 25–6).30 In particular, in the works of institutions such as the German Colonial Society and the Homeland Protection League and through figures such as Paul Fischer, Theodor Fischer and Paul Schultze-Naumburg among others; see Cupers, ‘Bodenständigkeit’, pp. 1227–34.31 See Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory; and Harry Francis Mallgrave, ‘From Realism to Sachlichkeit: The Polemics of Architectural Modernity in the 1890s’, in Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity, ed. by Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993).32 See Mary McLeod, ‘Piacé: Ferme Radieuse and Village Radieux’, in Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern, ed. by Jean Louis Cohen (New York: MOMA, 2013), pp. 185–91; Sibel Bozdoğdan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001), p. 21 and chapter 5; Michelangelo Sabatino, Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 147–8, 157; Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2010); and Alan Colquhoun, ‘Regionalism 1’, in Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism (London: Black Dog Pub, 2009), pp. 287–8.33 Bernd Hüppauf and Maiken Umbach, ‘Introduction: Vernacular Modernism’, in Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment, ed. by Bernd Hüppauf and Maiken Umbach (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 12.34 Mark Crinson, ‘Dynamic Vernacular: An Introduction’, Architecture Beyond Europe, 9/10 (2016), 1–8 (p. 1).35 See Hollyamber Kennedy, ‘Infrastructures of “Legitimate Violence”: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder’, in Grey Room, 76 (2019), 58–97 (p. 84); Cupers, ‘Bodenständigkeit’, p. 1244; and on the influences these models had on Jewish farm planning, rather than architecture, see Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism: Architecture of Israel (Leipzig: Spector Book, 2018), pp. 28–9.36 Cupers, ‘Bodenständigkeit’, pp. 1226, 1247–8.37 See ibid., p. 1247; and Detlef Mertins, ‘Hannes Meyer, German Trade Unions School, Bernau, 1928–30’, in Workshops for Modernity: Bauhaus, 1919–1933, ed. by Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: MOMA, 2010), pp. 256–65 (pp. 259–60).38 The reconstruction of this worldview merits further investigation regarding the influences of interwar Italian architecture education, German expressionism, and French regionalism. See Myra Warhaftig, They Laid the Foundation: Lives and Works of German-Speaking Jewish Architects in Palestine 1918–1948 (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag Tübingen, 2007), pp. 88–9, 288, 300, 354; and Fainholtz, ‘The Jewish Farmer’.39 See Anat Helman, Or ṿe-yam hiḳifuha: tarbut Tel Avivit bi-teḳufat ha-Mandaṭ [Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv] (Haifa: Haifa University Press, 2007), pp. 104–20, 186–209; Shmuel Duke, The Stratifying Trade Union: The Case of Ethnic and Gender Inequality in Palestine, 1920–1948 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), chapters 4 and 5; and Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, ‘“Europeans in the Levant” Revisited: German Jewish Immigrants in 1930s Palestine and the Question of Culture Retention’, in Deutsche(s) in Palästina und Israel: Alltag, Kultur, Politik, ed. by José Brunner (Goettingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013), pp. 40–59 (p. 44).40 Roza El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929–1948 (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 74–6, 82, 95, 153. Twenty Years of Building also corresponds with visual perspectives on Palestine that were devoid of Indigenous Palestinian voices; see Nadi Abusaada, ‘Urban Encounters: Imaging the City in Mandate Palestine’, in Imaging and Imagining Palestine Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918–1948, ed. by Karene Sanchez-Summerer and Sary Zananiri (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 359–89.41 See Boaz Neumann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2009), pp. 31–2, 103–4; and Efrat, The Object of Zionism, p. 37.42 See Graicer, From Neighborhood; and Tal Alon-Mozes, ‘Food for the Body and the Soul, Hebrew-Israeli Urban Foodscapes’, in Food and the City: Histories of Culture and Cultivation, ed. by Dorothée Imbert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 55–82.43 See Gilbert Herbert and Ita Heinze-Greenberg, ‘The Anatomy of a Profession: Architects in Palestine During the British Mandate’, in The Search for Synthesis: Selected Writings on Architecture and Planning (Haifa: Architectural Heritage Research Centre, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion, 1997), pp. 149–62; Helman, Urban Culture, p. 26; also key here is Crinson’s notion of vernacularism as ‘demotic modernity’, in ‘Dynamic Vernacular’, p. 4.44 Itamar Even Zohar, ‘Polysystem Studies’, Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication, 11.1 (1990), 175–94.45 A comparison with the work of British Mandate expert Otto Königsberger is awaiting; see Rachel Lee, ‘Engaging the Archival Habitat: Architectural Knowledge and Otto Königsberger's Effects’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 40.3 (December 2020), 526–40.46 See Neumann, Land and Desire; and Henry Near, תנועה במלכוד: איחוד הקבוצות והקיבוצים בפוליטיקה: העשור הראשון [Movement in Abeyance: The Political Activity of Ichud Hakvutzuot ve’Hakibutzim in the First Decade, 1951–1961] (Ramat Efal: Yad Tabenkin, 2013).47 David Remez, ‘And We Learned to Build’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, p. 4.48 Otto Schiller, ‘Education Through Building’, in ibid., p. 124.49 Arieh Sharon, ‘Public Buildings’, in ibid., p. 116.50 See David Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah le-Halutse Ha-Yishuv U-vonav [Encyclopaedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel], vol. 4, pp. 1593–4 [accessed 10 September 2023]; and Graicer, From Neighborhood, pp. 33–4.51 Martin Hershenzon, ‘The Jewish Agency Open Cowshed, Israeli Third Way Rural Design, 1956–68’, in Architecture and Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South, ed. by Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 323–42 (pp. 325–9).52 See also Leo Kaufman ‘Workers’ Housing’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 86–94 (p. 87); and J. Körner, ‘Workers’ Co-op, Flats and Individual Detached Houses’, in ibid., p. 95.53 Anita Shapira, ‘גדוד העבודה על שם יוסף טרומפלדור’ [‘The Work Brigade in the Name of Joseph Trumpeldor’], in ההליכה על קו האופק [Visions in Conflict] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989), pp. 157–208.54 In fact, 1920s houses with tiled roofs in cities such as Tel Aviv were equally viewed as being out of place relative to an emerging design approach that was based on eclecticism; see Helman, Urban Culture, pp. 21–8.55 Otto Schiller, ‘Education Through Building’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 124–5 (p. 125). His willingness to acknowledge a scope of settings and tasks was, thus, also distinct from the more conservative stances in German Heimat style discourse; see Cupers, ‘Bodenständigkeit’, p. 1227.56 On Schiller, see Warhaftig, They Laid the Foundation, pp. 354–5.57 See also I. Shlaien,’Planning the Individual Dwelling in a Housing Scheme’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 96–7.58 Schiller, ‘Education Through Building’, p. 124.59 The curators included engineers E. Polsky, Asher Allweil, and the architects Israel Dicker, Shmuel Mestechkin, A. Freudental, and Benyamin Chlenov.60 In the group Israel Dicker was experienced in editing and writing through his work for Habinjan Bamisrah Hakarov magazine; see Ronny Schüler, ‘The Transfer of Media Strategies: Habinjan Bamisrah Hakarov’, in The Transfer of Modernity, ed. by Schüler and Stabenow, pp. 181–203. On Mestechkin, a Bauhaus disciple who returned to Palestine in 1934 and joined in 1943 the National Kibbutz movement, becoming the movement’s head architect, see Yuval Daniyeli and Muki Tsur, לבנות ולהיבנות בה – ספר שמואל מסטצ׳קין אדריכלות הקיבוץ בישראל [To Build and to be Built – Shmuel Mestechkin’s Book: The Architecture of the Kibbutz ] (Tel Aviv: Ha-Ḳibuts Ha-me'uḥad, 2008). On Chelenov, who was trained at the École de Beaux Arts in Paris and worked for two short periods in Le Corbusier’s studio in Paris before settling in Palestine, see Tzafrir Fainholtz, ‘לה קורבוזיה והתנועה הציונית’ [‘Le Corbusier and the Zionist movement’] (unpublished doctoral thesis, The Technion, 2013), pp. 288–9. Asher Alweill became a leading engineer in the pre- and post-independence period; see Or Aleksandrowicz, ‘The Other Side of Climate: The Unscientific Nature of Climatic Architectural Design in Israel’, in Israel as a Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948–1978, ed. by Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and Anat Geva (Bristol: Intellect, 2020), pp. 277–303. I did not trace information on A. Freudental nor on the division of the editorial work among these figures.61 The notion of type served extensively in essays in the Habinyan magazine during the second half of the 1930s; see Frederick J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 124–46; and Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 67–8.62 E. Polsky, Asher Allweil, Israel Dicker, Shmuel Mestechkin, A. Freudental, and Benyamin Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 21, 24.63 Ibid., p. 55. See also Josef Neufeld, ‘Twenty Years of the Construction of Educational Institutions in Eretz Israel’, in ibid., pp. 108–9; Shmuel Bickels, ‘Buildings for Cultural Purposes’, in ibid., pp. 118–9; A. Polatchek, ‘Some Aesthetic Problems’, in ibid., pp. 120–1. For the history of the buildings represented in figures 8, 9, and 10, see Michael Jacobson, ‘Tour in the Cultural House of Kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov Ichud’, in חלון אחורי, ארכיטקטורה ואידיאולוגיה בדיסנילנד מקומי [‘Rear Window, Architecture and Ideology in the Local Disneyland’], 29 December 2021 [accessed 1 October 2022]; Eli Alon, ‘The historical “Cultural House” in Merchavia has Turned into a laundry’, News1 First Class, 13 July 2017 [accessed 1 October 2022]; and Michael Jacobson, ‘Tour in the Gordon House, Kvutzat Dgania A’, in ‘Rear Window’, 22 February 2022 [accessed 8 May 2022].64 See John Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Sacrifice’, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: George Allen, 1903); and Adolf Loos, ‘Architecture’, in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays by Adolf Loos, 1897–1900 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).65 Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 29. Other authors also chastised urban ostentation, see Asher Alweill, ‘Structural Problems of kibbutz Dinning Halls’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 106–7; and Arieh Sharon, ‘Public Buildings in Palestine’, in ibid., pp. 115–7 (p. 115). For Loos’ influence on architecture in Mandatory Palestine, see Ines Weizman, ‘Adolf Loos in Palestine’, in The Transfer of Modernity, ed. by Schüler and Stabenow, pp. 83–100.66 See Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 7; and [Anon.], ‘מחנות פועלים – המחלקה הטכנית של הסוכנות היהודית לארץ-ישראל’ [‘Workers’ Camps: The Technical Department of the Jewish Agency’], in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 71–2.67 Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 9.68 Ibid.69 Jacob Pinkerfeld. ‘Problems of Buildings for Cultural Purposes in the Kibbutz’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 119–20 (p. 119).70 Raanan Weitz, הכפר הישראלי בעידן הטכנולוגיה [The Israeli Village in the Age of Technology] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1967), pp. 65–6.71 See David Remez, ‘Preface’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, p. 4; Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 7; and Körner, ‘Workers Co-ops’, p. 95. For an alternative argument on the cowshed, see Moshe Kesselman, ‘Farm Buildings’, in ibid., pp. 121–2.72 See Pinkerfeld, ‘Problems of Buildings’; and Bickels, ‘Buildings for Cultural Purposes’, p. 117.73 See Körner, ‘Workers’ Co-ops’\, p. 95; Ingersoll, Munio Gitai Weinraub, p. 56; and Allweil, Homeland, p. 157.74 Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 11.75 Körner, ‘Workers’ Co-ops’, p. 95.76 See Kaufman, ‘Workers’ Housing’, p. 89; and Kesselman, ‘Farm Buildings’, p. 121.77 See בעיות השיכון בארץ-ישראל [Housing Problems in Eretz Israel], ed. by Ina Britschgi-Schimmer, Ernst Kahn, Ernst Lehmann, and Fritz Naphtali (Jerusalem: Economic Research Institute of the Jewish Agency, 1938), pp. 69–73; and Roza El-Eini, Mandated Landscape, p. 95.78 See F. Naftali, ‘The Financial Aspect of Cheap Workers’ Housing’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, p. 85; and Kaufman, ‘Workers’ Housing’.79 See also Pinkerfeld, ‘The Primitive Arab Apartment’, in Engineering Review (Tel-Aviv: Engineers’ Architects’ and Surveyors’ Union of Palestine, 1942), pp. 33–6; and J. Körner, ‘The Arab Construction in the City’, in ibid., pp. 36–8.80 This paradigm has been unproblematically accepted in Alon Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 37–8. Also see Neumann, Land and Desire, pp. 99–104; and Tamar Novick, ‘Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, 1880–1960’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2014), pp. 12–8.81 See Israel Dicker, ‘20 Years of Building’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, p. 120; Josef Eidelman, ‘The Building of Dinning Halls in Kibbutzim’, in ibid., pp. 104–5; Josef Neufeld, ‘Twenty Years of Planning Buildings for Educational Purposes’, in ibid., p. 108; Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p .11; Sharon, ‘Public Buildings’, p. 115; and Bickels, ‘Buildings for Cultural Purposes’, pp. 117–9.82 Dicker, ‘20 Years of Building’, p. 120.83 Ibid.84 Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 11. Such positions relative to the Palestinian vernacular are typical of Homi Bhabha’s analysis of the colonial encounter; see Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (1984), 125–33; and Daniel Bertrand Monk, ‘Book Review – Bauhaus on the Carmel and the Crossroads of Empire: Architecture and Planning in Haifa During the British Mandate by Gilbert Herbert and Silvina Sosnovsky’, AA Files, 28 (Autumn 1994), 94–9.85 [Anon.], ‘Palestine Architecture from a Social Point of View’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, pp. 126–7.86 See Helman, Urban Culture, pp. 105, 117–12; and Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 95–101.87 Bickels, ‘Buildings for Cultural Purposes’, p. 119.88 Eidelman, ‘The Building of Dining Hall’, p. 104.89 See also Neufeld, ‘Twenty Years of Planning Buildings’, p. 109.90 The catalogue used the notions of standards, types, and models interchangeably; see also Graicer, From Neighborhood, pp. 16–7.91 Shlaien, ‘Problems of Workers Housing’, p. 104.92 See Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, pp. 7–11, 18–21; Neufeld, ‘Twenty Years of Planning Buildings’; Kaufman, ‘Workers’ Housing’; Shlaien, ‘Planning the Individual’; Meiton, Electrical Palestine, p. 5–6; Markus Reiner, ‘Palestine Architecture’, in Twenty Years of Building, ed. by Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov; and Eugene Ratner, ‘Remarks on the Planning of Public Institutions’, in ibid., pp. 125–6.93 E. Polsky, ‘20 Years of Histadrut Building’, in ibid., p. 5.94 Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 21.95 See also Eugene Ratner, ‘לקראת הסגנון המקורי‘ [‘Towards an Original Style’], in Palestine Building Annual 1934–1935, ed. by Ya’acov Ben Sira (Tel Aviv: Mischar Ve’ta-asia, 1935), pp. 34–36. For analogous discussions in the German Werkbund, see Frederic Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 120.96 Schiller, ‘Education Through’, p. 125; Bickels, Eidelman, and Reiner voiced similar concerns in the catalogue.97 See Shlaien, ‘Planning the Individual’, p. 103; and Reiner, ‘Palestine Architecture’, p. 124.98 Schwartz, The Werkbund, p. 20.99 Polsky, Allweil, Dicker, Mestechkin, Freudental, and Chlenov, ‘Through the Exhibition’, p. 9. Dicker and Schiller advanced similar arguments in the catalogue.100 See also Yael Allweil, ‘Tent: Uncanny Architecture of Agonism for Israel/Palestine, 1910–2011’, Urban Studies, 55. 2 (December 2016), 316–31.101 William Jordy, ‘The Symbolic Essence of Modern European Architecture of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 22 (October 1963), 177–87.102 Neumann, Land and Desire, pp. 93–5, 97.103 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 48.104 See Fuller, Moderns Abroad; and Kennedy, ‘Infrastructures of “Legitimate Violence”’.105 See also Julius Posener, ‘Villages in Palestine’, Habynian, 3.1/2 (August 1938), 1.106 Among others, key architects who contributed to this discourse were Arieh Sharon, Artur Glikson, and Emmanuel Yalan. The related scholarship is extensive; see Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Modernisms in Conflict: Architecture and Cultural Politics in Post-1967 Jerusalem’, in Modernism in the Middle East, ed. by Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi (Ann Arbor, MI: Seattle University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 161–85; and Hershenzon, ‘The Architect as Civil Servant’.107 See Allweil, Homeland, pp. 183–4; Allweil, ‘Tent: Uncanny Architecture’; and Nadi Abusaada, ‘Consolidating the Rule of Experts: A Model Village for Refugees in the Jordan Valley, 1945–55’, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 10.2 (2021), 361–85.108 See Efrat, The Israeli Project, vol. II, p. 731; and Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2006).109 Arieh Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus: An Architect’s Way in a New Land (Stuttgart: Karl Krämer, 1976).110 Levin, Architecture and Development, p. 61.