Jerusalem by Design

...Instead of one square, I had a series of squares climbing up...

...But I could tell you a few tales of things in Israel that involved all these bodies, and still got done in no time when there was the determination to do it...

...Historical monuments...

...How do you feel about the quality of planning in Jerusalem compared to the other cities you've worked on...

...Absolutely...

...that's a straight description of my plan...

...That presumes, does it not, a major investment in public transportation...

...The government of Israel is also involved through the Minister of the Interior and the district planning committee which must approve any plans in the Jerusalem area, so it's involved twice...

...Architects and archaeologists working together in Jerusalem...

...Even Porat Yosef, which has been under construction for five years, is not really complete, because while it's lived in and worked in, there's still part of the construction to go on...

...Designing in a city means knowing the story of that city and its culture and establishing continuity between that story and what you're doing...

...Therefore, I start with the assumption that the population of greater Jerusalem lives as a community...

...it's inevitable, and as far as I'm concerned, any solution which the politicians will eventually work out will have to be based on that...

...That's my personal view...

...By "immediate urban region" I mean that which has continuity with the urban fabric of the Old City, that which depends on the downtown for its essential services, that which forms part of one continuous urban fabric, and is defined by an open space and a green or yellow belt...

...the Jewish Quarter is now...

...The Ministry of Defense is involved because security is involved, access to the Temple mount, and so forth...

...It's been tough, quite tough...

...And not just because I'm doing them...

...The most obvious is that you need to preserve and protect the integrity of these neighborhoods...

...And it also troubled me because those buildings that formed the edge of the plaza were overpowering and competitive with the Wall...

...The fact is that the Hilton and the Plaza would never get through today, but in the 60's they got through...

...Some of them will continue to be homogeneous and some of them will be mixed, and within their own mixture they might have sections—and that's a tough design problem...

...Other commissions include a number of sections in the Jewish Quarter, a housing development near Kiryat HaYovel and the recently completed Paley Youth Center next to the Rockefeller Museum...

...It's not unlike what happens in the way of urban renewal and conservation, both in this country and in Israel...

...When you talk about the immediate surroundings of the Old City you're talking about unconventional transportation...

...Are they also to be homogeneous...

...Given all that, I hope the momentum created by the peace treaty is also going to create the will to get things done in Jerusalem, and get things completed...

...Finally, at one point, I asked myself what I would do if I had been Herod's architect...

...The Wall is history...

...If you want to create another entity which is not essentially a municipality, which of course you have to have for all the central issues—transportation and land use and so on—it is because of the diversity of communities and their needs...

...So the few pray at the bottom, and when there are 200,000, they fill up all the squares...

...Plans need the approval of the Ministry of the Interior, and the approval of the City Council...

...That might be an interesting and useful thing...

...It runs the local library and workshops and certain of the welfare services, and it reports to the central government on many issues...

...It was he who had built this Wall, as part of his plan...

...you want to do it so that the people of Mea She'arim and the people of the Moslem Quarter and of the Christian Quarter and Nachlaot and the new neighborhoods have control over certain issues concerning their daily life...

...It's not just a place of history...

...We had to modify, we had to spend millions and millions to raise the structure over the find...

...I don't see it as a planning problem...

...I think we've got to define the boundaries of the immediate urban region...

...I believe that Jerusalem should be made up of bedrooms and living rooms...

...I think Mamilla, for example, is an obvious living room for Jerusalem with Jews and Arabs and the religious and the secular coming together...

...That I can't tell...

...As a planner I think of the population of the Jerusalem region as living together, and that is a sine qua non...

...to the east the Desert of Judea is the boundary—that's easier—and to the west, it's quite easy, the boundary is just beyond Ya'ar Yerushalayim...

...When you really care for something, then it's very important for you to do something which enhances it...

...the street committee is a political unit which has a great deal of control over the area of its jurisdiction...

...In addition to that, planning in Israel is bureaucratically complicated...

...It's raised many fundamental questions, some of which I'm not sure how to answer...

...And if my luck holds like it has elsewhere...

...What have you finished so far...

...It is not possible to build tall buildings in Jerusalem without destroying its fabric...

...The bedrooms are these homogeneous neighborhoods...

...Within six months the plan could be finally approved, and six months later, we j could be building, and six to seven j years later, we could finish—if there'] is the collective will...

...We would do them here, in collaboration with the Israelis, and then make them available to the municipality to use as a kind of reinforcement from the outside...

...At that level I think the mayor and the councillors and many others have demonstrated a really deep concern for the planning of Jerusalem—more so than in most other places...

...Can they be homogeneous...

...It even has some local policing powers...

...There has to be a population limit on the immediate city—not the Jerusalem region, but on the immediate city...

...The Jerusalem Committee plays a wonderful role as a critic...

...Moreover, the present state of the area is a disgrace...

...Well, I think that what may be really unique to Jerusalem—I can't think of any city quite like it—is that it's made up of very homogeneous neighborhoods with quite specific boundaries, and so divergent that as we cross from neighborhood to neighborhood we're dealing with changes in religion, language, income group, lifestyle...

...Much of the development of Jerusalem has been the object of considerable controversy...

...How long will the project take...

...Both in terms of connecting the hinterland to the city, as well as inside Jerusalem itself—public transportation has to take a very important role if we're to preserve the fabric...

...And there we have a number of very difficult problems...

...What does it mean to create a building in the heart of the Old City so that people will feel it has always been there, and not be eclectic...

...The rock climbs gradually...

...It's fascinating, it's enriching—it really is enriching— and it can be very irritating...

...I see it as a catalyst for greater enrichment of the city...

...We've done a lot of that in the Jewish Quarter and we've got two dozen buildings doing all kinds of contortions to complete the projects...

...But when the question concerns the quality of planning, good intentions are not enough...

...The question is also how one goes about improving it...

...The Rabbinate is involved through the Rav Hakotel and also through the Moetzet G'dolei Hatorah, which reports to the Chief Rabbi, whom I've met with many times...

...moment: Is it intimidating to have such extensive responsibility for Jerusalem, for a city that is so special...

...It starts with one's feeling towards Jerusalem, and one's respect and love for it...

...I think in the next few years two or three other such locations will emerge in which you contrast the homogeneity of the neighborhoods by creating a totally heterogeneous, completely mixed, meeting place for everybody...

...The problem of getting good people, for example: A municipality whose mayor makes four hundred dollars a month, whose senior officers make less, which has a bureaucracy that is extremely complex—a really poor municipality with a complex bureaucracy where you can't even fire anybody—how does a municipality like that put together a top-notch professional team...

...The additional problem of Jerusalem is not just the hallowedness of the buildings, but the integrity of its neighborhoods, which must create very serious constraints on your work...

...Is there any other place where architects and archaeologists work so closely together...

...In every one of my projects up to now we've been quite fortunate—or unfortunate...

...The government of Israel is involved...

...And in the 50's, when the Old City was on the other side, there was no sensitivity at all...

...Is it to do something so subtle that no one will know that you've done it...

...The idea that you might be able to allow some isolated buildings to be built as landmarks, like the mosques and the church towers, is nonsense because a contemporary office building or a contemporary hotel is not a slender minaret...

...Now, with all these bodies involved, it could take years...

...And the time will come to start digging, as we've done elsewhere...

...Does our generation have the right and ability and capability to intervene in a marked way...

...It's a place of gathering both at the religious and the national levels...

...And when you start explaining that we in Jerusalem don't live that way, we really live in our own areas, it takes some convincing that we're not doing something that's immoral...

...I think it's a mistake...

...That's a tough question, because there are two issues...

...Now that the Hilton is up certain people in the government Department of Public Works want to put up three forty-story towers in the Kiryah, because they say it's inappropriate that the hotel should be taller than the government center—government should be taller...

...Now, however, there is real dedication to the issue...

...First, it's a place in which a few pray and meditate and want to have a sense of aloneness with God...

...It has a sub-cabinet committee for Jerusalem matters which has jurisdiction over this issue...

...And I was troubled by two things...

...What I can tell is who's involved...

...It therefore wants to have the dignity and appropriateness and all the other attributes we would connect with the holiest active place in Judaism...

...Let the Mea She'arim people worry about keeping the Shabbat in Mea She'arim and let the Christian Quarter people worry about certain aspects of running the Christian Quarter and let the central municipal people worry about what they do best, what is relevant to the overall region...

...When you go down to the markets of the Old City there are Arab merchants, tourists, Jewish and Arab people buying— it's kind of a meeting place...

...To me, as a planner and as an architect, that is one of the most beautiful things about the city...

...It's full of contradictions...

...The question becomes whether the city fathers are able to meet the actual challenge...

...You have intimacy and you have a place for masses...

...And the Jewish Quarter is a living community...

...But it's one thing to talk about continuity when you're doing a project in Montreal or in Dakar, Senegal, or in Baltimore...

...A major intervention of such scope and scale in the Old City, even in the area of the Western Wall, is going to create some problems for us as time goes by, and therefore the sooner we do it the better...

...And that's expensive...

...It's to have arcades and shops and a hotel, and housing and essential services for the whole city...

...What can I say about it...

...It's a very cumbersome machine that leaves much to be desired and really affects the quality of planning...

...And the answer was very simple...

...The big challenges are ahead...

...The archaeologist sees things from a very narrow point of view...

...Out of that concept came many things...

...Then we— faculty, students, consultants, including Israeli guests as well— could develop urban design guidelines and plans and models and prototypes...

...And while there are some people there who are dedicated and work hard—the general problem has been how to get the best people in the world and the best people in the country to come and work in the planning of Jerusalem...

...There should not have been a tall building there...

...The complexity is in part in resolving its contradictions...

...The second issue has to do with whether a city made up of homogeneous neighborhoods is an introvert city, an antisocial city...

...And maybe they should in other cities...

...But it's also a place of tomorrow...

...If you just think—the Armenian Quarter, Mea She'arim, Nachlaot, Rechavia, Talbiyeh, the Katamonim, and then going into the Arab community and the Christian Quarter—there are probably two dozen definable neighborhoods of a very homogenous quality...

...It must be a non-place, an anti-place, because by being a place it immediately becomes a substitute for the real thing, which is the Temple...

...I mean semi-rural, industrial communities which are part of the hinterland but are not part of the city itself, and are divided from it by a very clear green belt...

...The Western Wall and Mamilla I consider to be the pivotal projects for Jerusalem...

...What are you trying to achieve in the Wall area...

...For months and months and years I worked on the plaza concept, a single plaza...

...When you come to Jerusalem you get involved with the mystic side of things, and they're immeasurable...

...But the other side of the question is how to build new neighborhoods...

...And that's where the real challenge arises...

...If you're designing in nature, you have to search out the secrets of what nature has to tell you about the place and the site and so on...

...One is a connection of the old and the new and the Arab and the Jewish and the other one is the single most...

...I was really preoccupied with prefabrication and technology and the quality of the environment, but all in a kind of cool, abstract, qualitative, measurable way...

...Obviously, it's a matter of degree, it's a matter of balance...

...Or should you, and can you, get Arabs and Jews to live together...

...The street committee sounds like a street, but it has responsibility for usually thirty to forty thousand people—it's really a Moment/23 neighborhood committee...

...Second, it's a place which is the holiest active place of Jewish worship...

...In addition, he is Director of the Urban Design Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design...

...And then there were buildings at the end of the plaza, facing the Jewish Quarter—public buildings, like the Rabbinical court...

...I was one of those who joined with others in criticizing the master plan that had proposed some major expressways going through town and would have really damaged some of the neighborhoods...

...So it's few and many, and it's a non-place and it's a place of dignity, and then it's a place of history, so that whatever happened there— which is already partially told by the excavations that have taken place— is part of the story...

...So it's got to be a non-place...

...But it's also a place where hundreds and thousands pray together on holidays and celebrate and demonstrate on national holidays...

...And it was quite fascinating then to find in Flavius— and I didn't find it, Ben Dov the archaeologist found it—a passage that said that on the west side of the Temple the city rose from the level of the street in the form of an amphitheater terracing upwards as it reached the upper city...

...Maybe fifteen, twenty years ago we weren't as sensitive to that...

...In terms of size it doesn't make sense to break up Jerusalem into anything but one centralized municipality...

...At the personal level, I've always believed in architecture having to be a continuity with what's around it, if you don't design out of context...

...And that's a contradiction—a place Moment/25 for few and a place for many...

...In many ways, as an architect, I've discovered an aspect of myself working in Jerusalem which I didn't know before...

...And I'm sure I've forgotten a couple...

...I can deal with that without getting political because I can deal with it as a planner—although there might be some political implications in my approach...

...So my plan is to resolve these contradictions...

...It's a place of anticipation for Y'mot Hamashiach and the reconstruction of the Temple...

...For twenty years we demolished indiscriminately...

...When I visited China I was fascinated by the structure that they evolved which is called "the street committee...

...Why do I say unfortunate...

...It's a fat slob even when it's twenty-five stories high...

...It's to be the new meeting place for the city...

...But the living rooms of Jerusalem should be those places where everybody meets and everybody does business together and everybody enjoys the cultural and recreational facilities together, regardless of what religion, what group, what income level they happen to be...

...One is the desire, the dedication, the commitment of the city fathers and of the city government—their awe before their task...

...It's got to be a place of anticipation and at the same time the holiest active place in our religion...

...By making a link to history, which told me to dig down to where the Wall once was, I had a height difference which I resolved in what seemed to be the most natural way in terms of the history of the place...

...It simply is a disgrace that the holiest place for Judaism looks like a backyard of something, and it's functionally a disgrace as well—it doesn't work...

...That becomes clear when you see what's being done in Paris and in London and in many other cities...

...We tore them down...

...The Foreign Ministry is involved because anything that affects Israel's foreign posture comes before it...

...Because we had to redesign the projects...

...Nobody worried about taking a highway that might bisect Mea She'arim or Nachlaot and destroy them...

...Peter's and so on where there is a balcony as the place of focus, something which is totally foreign to us...

...After the Wall, what do you do for an encore...

...When is it appropriate to modify the new to preserve the old, and when does it get to be an exaggeration...

...The same is true of Wolfson, and of several other projects...

...There you are, say, in Mamilla— we haven't started digging there yet, so I can talk in the abstract...

...Beyond that I think any pressure for increased population should be met by developments in the region which might be fifteen or twenty kilometers out of the city itself...

...And I was pleased when the municipal planning committee recommended that...

...Or if you've got to raise the whole building—150,000 square feet of it—two stories and it costs two million dollars, well, he's not paying...

...Safdie: Well, it's definitely a most complex, demanding, humbling experience...

...There must be a positive relationship between the lower city, where the Wall is, and the upper city, which is where the Jewish Quarter is...

...I would connect in the most natural way the street level, which is where the Wall used to be, way down thirty feet below its present level, and the upper city, where the Jewish Quarter is...

...it's another thing when you come to Jerusalem...

...Is it not enough sometimes to document, to record, to photograph and to go on with our building...

...I don't want to use the term "satellite towns" because that term has negative connotations...

...Now we're making up for our sins in an extreme way...

...After that, outside the context of the Jerusalem Committee, I fought quite enerMoment/17 getically in support of the height limit for the city as a whole...

...One idea might be to try and channel some energy from the academic world, and one of the things I'm in fact trying to do is to establish, at Harvard, an institute for the study of Jerusalem within the Graduate School of Design, and fund that independently...

...So, the new neighborhoods are difficult questions...

...So he demands it...

...Many people have attempted it by being eclectic, not only in Jerusalem, but in Rome and in many of the historical cities...

...One is that there is such diversity of population that some mechanism which gives neighborhoods control over certain things has to be developed...

...Within them you have mini-living rooms like the shopping street of Mea She'arim or the corner grocers in Nachlaot, so that they are to a certain extent self-sufficient...

...The Wall is too) sensitive to happen without collective will...

...We've started digging, and we've found important buried sites...

...But in contradiction to that, it's a remnant of the Temple...

...But there are many things that arise from that phenomenon...

...Maybe that's the way to enhance it...

...It's their automatic reaction...

...I can't think of any city in the world that has the range of talents the Jerusalem Committee brings together to review what's begin done...

...I supported an eight story height limit as an absolute maximum, with no exceptions—including the Government Center...

...And it's a vicious circle...

...So it has to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people...

...Or is that too political a question...

...We couldn't get to the Old City, so we didn't know what the effects of our work on our side would be...

...And within those boundaries, from a planning point of view, a number of things can be served...

...It's a fat slob even when it's twenty-five stories high...

...And in fact, while it is not absolutely ratified law, because the district committee has never quite approved it, it is now a recommendation on the zoning books...

...So when we start digging in Mamilla maybe we'll find a couple of houses, and then the question will be, when does the old take precedence over the new...

...And I believe it will, so I'm optimistic...

...It's one thing to talk about continuity when you're doing a project in Montreal or in Dakar, Senegal, or in Baltimore...

...But Jerusalem requires more, and better, of us...

...The plaza troubled me because it made me think of the European piazzas like St...

...The Hilton, for example, without even going into the quality of its design—which is certainly above average for any high-rise hotel—I think is conceptually wrong...

...And I'm against that...

...And out of the effort to resolve the contradictions come some of the most exciting things...

...hence what it wants is to be terraced upwards...

...MOSHE SAFDIE INTERVIEW What may be really unique to Jerusalem is its homogeneous neighborhoods with specific boundaries, and yet so divergent that as we cross from neighborhood to neighborhood, we're dealing with changes in religion, language, income group and life style...

...What does it mean to enhance Jerusalem...

...Jerusalem logically extends to the north up to but not inclusive of Ramalla, which is a separate city, and to the south up to but not including Bethlehem and Beit Jella, which are separate communities...

...Out of that grew the solution...

...The municipality is involved for obvious reasons...

...That needs to be increased...

...It's just unbelievable how the Mayor is able to get all these people to come free, and give days and days of their time to evaluate what's happening...

...In a way you already have some of that in the Old City...

...it's another thing when you come to Jerusalem...

...And sometimes I wonder whether anyone is ever going to want to look at these finds...

...And so it must have a sense of intimacy...

...But they've had to learn the hard way...

...The Damascus Gate area is another opportunity for a living room of that kind...

...Should our generation really leave its mark...

...All buildings—we just tore them down...

...Instead of having a wall of buildings defining the edge of the plaza, you have terraced buildings defining it, so you can't really say where the squares end and the buildings start, the public spaces and the buildings become integrated into one visual order...

...Are we letting things get out of hand...

...Well, I suppose they did in Rome...

...The Ministry of Religious Affairs is involved because it is responsible for the area directly...

...The major things are not complete yet...

...What are the outer boundaries of Jerusalem...

...Does there have to be a limit to the size of Jerusalem's population...

...The automatic reaction of my Harvard students when I give them an assignment to design a community in Jerusalem is to come up immediately with the most wonderful, integrated projects—"that's Arab housing and that's Jewish housing Moment/21 and that's Orthodox housing and that's secular housing...

...The Corporation for the Redevelopment of the Jewish Quarter is involved because they developed the Jewish Quarter...

...Or is it to intervene in a real way, so that your generation leaves its own distinctive mark on the city...

...And they simply haven't had the means to do that...

...How do you feel about what's happened so far...

...Architect Moshe Safdie is responsible for several major building and renewal projects in Jerusalem, most notably in the area of the Western Wall and the public buildings around it, and Mamilla, the area that connects the Old City to the new, outside Jaffa Gate...

...That is something that Teddy Kollek has been pointing out for several years now...

...I think that the model of the street committee which you find in the Chinese city might fit very well in Jerusalem and accommodate the kind of diversity that exists there...

...And that's only the public level of complexity...

...How far does it stretch...

...Well, today we can take restraint for granted...

...Keep it, preserve it...

...Now we preserve everything, regardless of what it is...

...An outhouse a hundred years old...

...If you find a little Second Temple house and you're to put a major institution above it that might accommodate five hundred students, he wants the find preserved, fixed up, open to the public—and if you don't build the institution, you don't build the institution...

...The only things that have been completed are minor, smaller projects like the Paley Youth Center and some residential blocks in the Old City...

...My hope and belief is that it will become exceedingly clear that time is not on our side...

...Because I am a member of the Jerusalem Committee, I have been part of the debate and dialogue...

...Up to now the plan has been somewhat affected by a variety of infighting between various factions over issues like who controls the area, and should men and women pray together or not pray together, things which have nothing to do with the plan...

...It's a completely different experience...

...It's by far the most complex commission I've ever had, and it's also a contradictory commission...

...I would think an architect working in Jerusalem would have to be more sensitive than in most other places to the sociology of the enterprise...

...And the idea that you might be able to allow some isolated buildings to be built as landmarks, like the mosques and the church towers, is nonsense because a contemporary office building or a contemporary hotel is not a slender minaret...

...Let's go back to the design of the city...