Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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the stone regulation was extended to apply to the entire municipal area and, significantly, to the new neighbourhoods that were rapidly sprawling beyond the Old City walls. By requiring the same architectural rigour outside the walls, this amendment allowed the outer neighbourhoods to share in the city’s particular visual character.15 The spread of Jerusalem had been accelerated by the relative prosperity of the 1920s and by improvements in building technology. As concrete technology developed and concrete structures became cheaper, more available and more efficient, the Arts and Crafts tradition promoted by Ashbee and Storrs through the Pro-Jerusalem Society, with its emphasis on traditional stone construction, came under attack from developers and builders. Towards the end of World War II and the period of the British Mandate, the pressure to develop led to a compromise that was represented by a seemingly minor textual modification of the stone regulation. While the previous Ordinance of 1936 demanded that ‘the external walls of all buildings shall be constructed of stone’, the masterplan of 1944 confirmed practices that were already in effect when it demanded only that ‘the external walls and columns of houses and the face of any wall abutting on a road shall be faced with natural, square dressed stone’16 [my emphasis]. This amendment reduced the role of stone from a construction material to a cladding material. Stone became a stick-on signifying element for creating visual unity between new construction and the Old City, thus visually confirming the municipal boundaries – as whatever building appeared to be built in stone was perceived part of the city of Jerusalem.
With the years, the layer of stone has thinned. At the beginning of the Mandate period, and following the principles of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, stone was primarily used as a construction material, and walls were made of large blocks of solid stone. Since the 1930s a mixed concrete and stone construction technique became more common and a thinner layer of stone – 20cm thick – became part of the structural logic of the building, and together with reinforced concrete, took some of the building load. As mere cladding, the stone has become thinner still and no longer formed a structural part of the building. Today, Israeli building standards allow layers of sawn stone just 6cm thick.
In the 1948 war, Jerusalem was divided between the Kingdom of Jordan and the state of Israel, with the former securing total control over the Old City and its eastern neighbourhoods. In the Jordanian city, whose size under Jordanian administration was deliberately restricted to prevent it competing with the Jordanian capital, Amman, the 1944 masterplan still remained in full effect. The plan was updated in 1964 by its original architect, Henry Kendall, a Briton who continued to enforce the stone cladding bylaw throughout the entire though compact Jordanian city. On the other side of the partition lines, until the 1967 war, Jerusalem’s 1955 planning codes separated the Israeli part of the city into rings in which the use of stone was required to varying degrees.17 At the centre, comprehensive use of stone cladding on all visible planes of the building was still required. In the second ring out from the centre, the requirement became more lenient, allowing the use of other materials to varying degrees, while the outermost circle, which included the industrial areas, was entirely liberated from the requirement to use stone. In the post-1967 period, this logic was effectively inverted. The demand for a varied application of stone was replaced by a unifying regulation that demanded the most rigorous application of stone cladding throughout the entire expanded municipal area. Since most new construction now took place on the periphery of the city, remote West Bank hilltops, never historically part of Jerusalem and now gerrymandered into it as sites for new construction, fell within the legal boundaries of the most rigorous application of the stone bylaw.
This time, the demand to stone clad the housing projects in the new Jewish neighbourhoods met with the resistance of Israeli developers. Indeed, two political considerations seemed to meet head on over this issue. The Ministry of Housing, implementing government policy, wanted to promote new construction as fast and as far away as possible from the city centre in order to buttress Israeli claims to the entire annexed area. Fast construction meant doing it cheaply and there was no place in such a scheme for the rigorous use of expensive stone cladding. The alternative, political-aesthetic consideration was presented by Mayor Kollek and his Deputy Mayor for Physical Planning, the historian Meron Benvenisti, who wanted a smaller, denser city, and to make new neighbourhoods appear as parts of an organic whole by demanding the use of stone cladding.18 Facing intense government pressure, the municipality has been unable to determine the location and size of the new neighbourhoods. Furthermore, although the Jerusalem planning department and even Mayor Kollek personally insisted that the extra investment in stone cladding would repay itself in little over a decade through savings on repainting and other maintenance costs, developers were under pressure to reduce their immediate expenses, and so insisted on a relaxing of the bylaw.19 Under the jurisdiction of the municipality, the bylaw was not relaxed, but developers were granted a bizarre but revealing concession: the stone cladding was allowed to project beyond the building’s envelope. Where this jutted out into a public thoroughfare, the layer of stone 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