performing a ‘public’ service could occupy a thin sliver of public space.
There were other grounds for resistance to the requirement for stone cladding. For Israeli architects raised on modernist traditions, stone cladding countered their belief in the ‘honesty of materials’, and the received wisdom that the function and structure should dictate a building’s organizational logic and visual appearance. These architects saw stone cladding as decadent veneer. Debates between municipal planners and architects regarding the use of stone cladding also engaged with other formal and technical questions, centring at different periods on the relation of stone cladding to raw concrete, on the logic of applying stone cladding to the upper floors of high-rise buildings, and on the correct relation between stone and glass in office buildings. Various cladding details and construction methods were developed in response to these debates. Some cladding elements sought to emulate the appearance of solid stone construction. Cladding exposes its thickness, and thus its nature, at the corners of buildings, and it is usually enough for an architect to study the corner to verify whether a building is clad or built of solid construction. The architecture of the corner has thus quickly become an obsession in Jerusalem and a particular architectural detail – the ‘Dastor Stone,’ a hollowed-out stone with a 90-degree ‘L’ section – can now be placed on the corners of buildings thereby rendering cladding indistinguishable from solid construction. While some cladding details were designed to simulate authentic stone construction, others were developed in order to make sure the observer understood that the stone is anything but structural.20 The 1968 Jerusalem masterplan referred to these architectural details and alluded to the debates regarding the use of stone cladding, siding firmly with those seeking to preserve its rigid application. ‘The function and value of the masonry construction must be measured not only according to an architectural value that seeks to reveal a building’s construction method in its appearance, but according to a cultural value that sees buildings as conveyors of emotional messages referring to the image of the city. It is against this cultural value that we must weigh the [extra] price of construction … this justifies, even today, the requirement to maintain the continuity of stone facing as the material which embodies the appearance of the city.’21 That a simple limestone cladding could be imbued with this quasi-religious mysticism is hardly surprising in a climate in which ‘Jerusalem Stone’ is presented in the sales brochure of one of its local manufacturers as ‘a precious stone, carved from the holy mountains of Jerusalem … a wonderful masterpiece of nature’, or by an Israeli architectural critic as an element ‘in whose texture, the signature of the twentieth century is not yet engraved, sensually reminding us that man is but a small detail in a large and timeless life-cycle’.22
Indeed, for a succession of the city’s builders, from Ronald Storrs to the Israeli planners of post-1967 Jerusalem, the stone has embodied not only the earthly nature of place, but also a sense of spirituality and even holiness. Indeed, by the various religious traditions that inhabit it, Jerusalem is perceived to be much more than a city that contains a number of holy places, or the location of historical holy events; instead, it is perceived to be a holy-city in its entirety.23 When the city itself is perceived to be holy, and when its boundaries are flexibly redrawn to suit ever-changing political aims, holiness inevitably becomes a planning issue. Since the extent of the municipal area is also the border of a zone that is understood to be holy, wherever the stone façades were applied, so the holiness of Jerusalem sprawled. And holiness, as Meron Benvenisti explained, is an extremely potent political definition, for ‘all of the territory within its municipal boundaries is regarded as the “Holy City” by the religious establishment [that forms part of the Israeli state]. And this is no trivial matter, since from the moment a particular area is designated as part of the Holy City, it comes under Jerusalem’s religious laws, whose sole objective is to strengthen the spiritual ties between Jews and their sacred city.’24 Like the stare of Medusa, Storrs’ bylaw has been used by Jerusalem’s planners to petrify all construction in the new neighbourhoods – shopping malls and kindergartens, community centres and synagogues, office buildings, electrical relay stations and sports halls and, above all, housing – into stone. Suburban neighbourhoods placed on remote sites outside the historical boundaries of the city were thus imbued with the city’s overall sacred identity.
But these architectural/optical manipulations were not always convincing. Azmi Bishara, the notable Palestinian member of Israeli parliament, sarcastically observed: ‘only in Jerusalem the natural stone that was quarried from these very rocks could look as a foreign element within these same mountains …’25 Furthermore, the stone itself is often foreign to Jerusalem. Contrary to perceptions, before the 1967 war, ‘Jerusalem Stone’ also came from outside the city, from quarries adjacent to Palestinian villages and towns in Galilee in the north of Israel. When the environmental hazard of stone dust restricted the quarrying industry in Israel ‘proper’, the stone quarries mushroomed in the West Bank to cater for Jerusalem’s endless appetite for stone. It is a paradox that the very material used for cladding the expanding Jewish Jerusalem has become one of the most important branches of the Palestinian economy, quarried mainly from the bedrock around Hebron and Ramallah. The largest of these quarries, located just outside the northern limit of the Jerusalem municipality, leaving a layer of dust on the clothes and skin of anyone travelling past it, is referred to by Palestinians as ‘Tora-Bora’ because the monochromatic tone of its artificial topography is reminiscent of images of the landscape of Afghanistan.
The Jewish neighbourhood of French Hill.
East Talpiyot neighbourhood, early 1970s. Images courtesy of IP.
Housing Cluster in Gilo, 1972 (Architect: Salo Hershman), IP.
Architectural transformations
Throughout its ninety-year history, the Jerusalem stone bylaw has been applied within the context of different architectural periods, styles and fashions. Not being an exclusive feature of any of these, it has been applied and understood differently within these various contexts. Stone has been demanded and applied in the ‘traditional’ context of colonial regionalism, it has clad buildings of the modern movement’s ‘international style’, it was used to clad hotels and tall office buildings, government buildings, theatres, shopping malls and community centres. It has been also a central element in the production of the historicist context of post-modern architecture that fully emerged in the city to coincide with the housing boom of the post-1967 war period.
Two Israeli critical architectural historians of the new generation – Zvi Efrat26 and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan27 – have each showed that 1967 marked the culmination of a process of stylistic transition within Israeli architecture. It was primarily the state housing projects in and around Jerusalem that helped redefine Israeli architectural practice. Although the emergent style has been a continuation of previous attempts by Israeli architects to ‘orientalize’ architecture, the post-1967 war period coincided with a time of uncertainty and turmoil in the development of architecture worldwide. As the 1960s were drawing to an end, the tenets of the modern movement were being challenged. The vanguard of planning and architecture attempted to escape the ‘simple’ utilitarian logic of the modern movement, reinvigorate design with a reawakened obsession with urban history and charge the language of architecture with symbolic, communicative and semiotic content. The architecture of the period started to be infatuated with ‘place’, ‘region’ and the ‘historic city’, with a passion that pitched the idea of ‘dwelling’ against that of ‘housing’, and ‘home’ as a remedy for an increasingly alienating modern world.28 These emergent sensibilities went worldwide under the general terms of ‘post-modernism’. Within this context it is not surprising that Jerusalem became an international cause
