Rurality, a Playground for Design? Architecture and the Zionist Rural Village, 1870-1929

Rurality, a playground for design? Architecture and the Zionist rural village, 1870-1929. Axel Fisher

The emergence of Zionism and of its basic goal – the return to the (holy and promised) land and to agriculture – can be seen as a reaction, and a positive one, to Europe’s refusal of Jewish identity. From late 18th century onwards, the modern nation-building process questioned the role of ethnic and religious minorities within countries commanding national solidarity, sacrifice against the threat of rival nations, and active participation to the production of the national wealth. From a nationalist point of view, Jews did not comply with such requirements on the ground of their double allegiance to both their secular homeland and their religious community, but also because of their presumed natural unproductiveness and predisposition towards usury (fig. 1). Within this context, European Jews had only but a few choices: assimilation, which implied the sacrifice of their peculiar collective identity, or immigration. The large majority voted with their feet, and settled in the first effective and modern Promised Land: the United States of America. However, a third way came to the fore: the modernization and “normalization” of Jewish identity, which could be achieved through secular and vocational schooling, and though the adoption of the local language, habits and customs. Jewish Enlightenment intellectuals invited Jews to be “a man in the streets and a Jew at home, a brother to your countryman and a citizen to your king1”. Along the same line of thought, it were the Russian Tsars to actually promote the first campaigns of Jewish resettlement to the countryside, and foster the emergence of a Jewish peasantry more akin to the large majority of Russian people. The first villages were established in 1806-1807 in Ukraine. Within one century, about a hundred thousand Jewish farmers, among which the young Lev D. Bronstein (Trotsky), were tilling the land in more than 170 colonies (fig. 2). Around the same period, rural values gained popularity among

3 Axel Fisher 4 both gentile and Jewish Russian masses; the noble savage figure and the contention, solutions, means and results. First, Zionist agrarianism glory of agricultural work (depicted among others in Tolstoy’s Ana primarily appealed to uprooted individuals, crushed by the compressor of Karenina, 1875-1877) became valid alternatives to those conveyed by modernity, whom it proposed a landscaping device – agricultural Shakespeare’s Shylock. Soon enough, the ruralization of the Jewish people colonization – which activated a sort of reconciliation and identification emerged as an effective device to turn the luftmensch2 into a productive with the physical materiality of land. Second, the key of its success lays in a member of the modern nation. To be sure, such views were also popular promise; a messianic promise in the bargain. Whether it promised the within Jewish philanthropy3, involved in the establishment of vocational return to the Promised Land and the building of a new national identity, or schooling networks and agricultural colonies in Europe, North-Africa something else is here irrelevant. Third and finally, it responded to a colonies, the Middle-East, and the Americas. demographic issue with a demographic solution. The present essay draws on key experiments in the Jewish agricultural colonization of Palestine, to highlight the role of village architectural, urban and landscape design, in relation to farming models, to the issue of individual and collective identity, and to the quest for original alternatives to the city as privileged form of settlement.

The AIU’s farm-school: a human and vegetal produce pool

1. “Unproductive” Belorussian Jews at the 2. Late 19th century Jewish agricultural The AIU’s school of agriculture (1870), at the outskirts of Jaffa, shtetl market, early 1920s. settlement in Russia. preludes to the Jewish colonization of Palestine. It stands out for its The emergence of Zionism introduced a radical shift in the previous ambition to reach financial self-sufficiency by marketing its products, attempts to reform Jewish identity, moving from the realm of charity to the pursuing at first a subsistence farming model (barley, wheat, table grape, political, secular, and public scene. The auto-emancipation of the Jewish kitchen garden vegetables and fruits), and focusing later on “luxury crops” people, Zionism claimed, depended on its capacity to turn into a Nation for export (strawberries, asparagus, citrus, perfume flowers, vine grape4). It among the Nations, to establish a healthy national economy based on addresses the children of local Jewish urbanites, providing agricultural agriculture, and to settle within well-defined territorial boundaries, training and preparing them for the foundation of future colonies. This possibly in Palestine. There, the Jews would build to be (re)built, they first Jewish collective facility in the rural realm is a place of acclimation and would regenerate physically and morally and become a New Jew. experimentation for both students and plants: a genuine human and vegetal Looking back at historical roots of Zionist agrarianism allows to grasp produce pool. The school itself – a central building surrounded by teachers the Israeli national imagination’s peculiar style, but most and foremost, it houses and student halls – forms a compact and isolated group within the helps to appreciate the general issues addressed by Jewish agricultural estate; a settlement pattern closer to a European phalanstery than to a colonization and the conditions of its success. With due respect to the local khan, which inaugurated a long and enduring tradition of Jewish peculiarities and unrepeatability of Jewish history, Zionist agrarianism can grouped settlement (fig. 1). be read in more general terms, according to its aims, public, matter of

5 Axel Fisher 6 Despite the substantial flatness of the estate’s terrain, during the spontaneously to Palestine and found communities bound by strict school’s inauguration ceremony, the director walks across the fields, covenants8. These ad-libbed settlers consider the smallholder9 to be the identifying and naming a number of unperceivable topographic features pillar of colonization and private enterprise to be its driving force. Many according to Biblical names: mounts of Abraham, of Sarah, of Isaac and villages10, today called moshava (pl. moshavoth) or veteran colonies, are Jacob; plains of Moses and Samuel; valleys of Rebecca and Rachel… This established. Their salient features can be illustrated by the layout of otherwise insignificant episode actually initiated another powerful Rehovot (1890, fig. 5a), a moshava modeled after the traditional European tradition in Jewish rural settlement. Calling the founding community as street-village (Strassendorf11) and after its successful transplantation in witness, this ritual establishing of an imaginary topography5 acts as a Palestine on behalf of the German Templers12: a settlement arranged along symbolic appropriation of the settlement’s environment, which shall be one or more perpendicular streets serving strip plots hosting family farms, adopted as a common practice: “Metaphorically, perhaps, but not merely and a few square plots intended for non-farmer settlers, surrounded by figuratively, names became the true decorations and an inseparable part of extensive farming fields. In this kind of village, each family owns a number the style that emerged in these decades6” (fig. 4). of plots and fields in relation to its financial means, while one single plot is dedicated to public use: a municipal garden.

3. AIU’s farm-school buildings 4. AIU’s farm-school : schematic map. seen from the fields, 1930s : a transplantation of the European phalanstery.

The pre-Zionist moshavot: from autonomous communities to administrated domains In Palestine, the first properly modern Jewish colonies are established during the first immigration wave (1880-1900). Eastern-European middle-class religious families, with little capital but no agricultural 7 experience or skills, inspired by romantic proto-Zionism , migrate 5. LEVIN-EPSTEIN E.Z., Schemati c plan of the Rehovot moshav[a], Warsaw, 1897.

7 Axel Fisher 8 The first moshavot communities, torn between the vain pretension to administration buildings qualify the village layout and inner landscape. In replicate the extensive cereal-growing landscape of the Ukrainian plains Rishon leZion, a synagogue dominates and concludes the main street’s and the attempt to develop intensive viticulture, thrashed about between perspective. In Zikhron Ya’akov, the village’s cross-like layout (fig. 6a) two economic models (self-sufficiency or export-oriented farming), soon spatially expresses community’s social structure: the main street lines up face their inability to reach financial autonomy. One after the other, these the settlers’ houses (fig. 6b), while the administrators’ dwellings are communities seek for European philanthropy’s help. Within less than a arranged along the secondary street. At both ends of the administrator’s decade, the baron Edmond Benjamin James de Rothschild (1845-1934) street, one significantly finds the school responding to the wineries; an becomes the main sponsor of Jewish colonization, dominating the scene arrangement which draws a parable of the settler’s ideal lifecycle, from from 1885 to 1905. Notwithstanding his wishful thinking, the baron education to factory (fig. 6c). Another prominent features introduced in provides economic, technical, and commercial support only in exchange of the architecture of Jewish colonies are the public gardens. Similarly to the the colonies’ autonomy and sovereignty. Appointed experts manage each coeval Western urban parks, these publics spaces are places of leisure and settlement according to sophisticated programs devised by the baron sociability, but while their metropolitan counterparts lend themselves to himself13. The shift of societal values, from private ownership and free stimulate an escapist or a passively contemplative imaginary, these rural enterprise to the values of a wage-earning system, the previously popular municipal gardens are also used as acclimation, experimentation, and and democratic communities turn into the baron’s private administered nursery gardens. Therefore, rather than as compensatory devices to an domains. Rather than a benefactor, the baron shows to be more of a patron. urban life deemed ill-natured, they act as a domesticated foreshadowing of But, despite his authoritarian mark, Rothschild also implements many the future rural and productive landscape. critical agrarian reforms in the village economy: the mechanization of agriculture; a shift from a consumers’ agriculture (based on cereal-growing monoculture) to a high added-value market-oriented agriculture14; the development of a food-processing industry15; a rational regrouping and reallocation of land and fields; the introduction of forestry16, of ornamental plants17, and of eucalyptus (against swamps and malaria); infrastructural improvements (road network and artesian wells); and finally, the reorganization of the settlement network, sporadically located in the 6a. Map of Zikhron Ya’akov in 6b. View of Zikhron Ya’akov’s main 6c. Wineries in Rishon country, in highly hierarchical regional clusters18. 1890. street, mid-1930s. leZion, early 1930s. The modernization of the countryside under the Rothschild All in all, “the Rothschild administration […] was instrumental in administration involves to the village architecture too. The street-village giving form to the agricultural sector and producing a distinctive blend of model remains dominant, but thanks to ornamental plantations, streets are town and farm that stood out as a lush and verdant entity in the local raised from a merely functional infrastructure to an attractive, fresh, and landscape19”, but its authoritarianism contributes to undermine settlers’ shady public space. The first collective facilities are built in the villages, enthusiasm and autonomy. Besides, the colonies’ outlets are grant- standing out for their fine architecture and for being the only multi-storey maintained by one single buyer – the baron-patron himself – and the buildings. New ritual baths, synagogues, schools, infirmaries, and ongoing competition with low-wage Palestinian peasants pulls the carpet

9 Axel Fisher 10 under the feet to the demonstration of Jewish efficiency and productivity. group adopts workers’ self-management as soon as 1912. First among the Other philanthropic organizations, such as the JCA20, try to improve the modern Jewish colonies, the Kinneret group practices mixed farming, moshava model and the previous colonization programs, soon outmoded combining extensive crop-farming with intensive irrigated fruit-farming by the emergence of the Zionist organization (founded in 1897) and the and market gardening. An agricultural school for adult women (1911- second wave of Jewish immigration (1905-1914). 1917), a population until then excluded from agricultural work23, is even created within the farm. The settlement’s layout (fig. 7a-7b) is organized Zionist experimental farms: “miniature commonwealths” around a large enclosed courtyard, with productive activities and living quarters facing each other. The Zionist organization and its many agencies stand out of pre- Zionist romantic movements and philanthropy for being at both times democratic, popular and nationalist. The Zionist colonization program aims to establish a “national” land reserve – leant to the settlers by hereditary lease, but legally owned by the Zionist organization and, through it, by the Jewish people as a whole21 – and prohibits the use of waged labor in the colonies – either Jewish or Arab. The idea is to accommodate as many settlers as possible, compelling them to achieve financial autonomy through the establishment of a co-operative economy; two pre-conditions for the building of an economically and demographically cohesive and sound pre-national community. But most 7a. Schematic map of the 7b. KANN L., The Kinneret colony at the Sea of Tiberias, Palastina and foremost, the Zionist program differs from previous experiments for Kinneret experimental farm. im Bild, "Judische Zeitung" and Kunstanstalt Max Jaffe, actively involving the settlers’ subjectivity in the whole process. Indeed, Wien,1912. the so-called “human material” reaching the shores of Palestine bears no Just across the Jordan river, at Degania, the JNF settles (1909) a group resemblance with first-wave Jewish immigrants, both in terms of ideology of share-croppers organized as a strictly equalitarian workers’ self-managed and activism: they are now educated, modern, and secular Jews, migrating commune. Here too, the farming model combines extensive crop-raising individually or in organized groups, heavily influenced by European with intensive irrigated cultures, but this time adopting companion revolutionary utopias, with no financial means nor practical skills. The planting, ie. combining in proximity vegetable gardening, fruit farming, Jewish National Fund22 (JNF) responds to this new situation through the and dairy farming to increase beneficial ecological interactions and implementation of a number of experimentations, exploring the limits increase productivity24. The settlement’s original layout (fig. 8a-8b) harks between social engineering, farming models, cultural innovation and back to the enclosed courtyard model, but a large building for an typological invention. administrator’s dwelling and offices is built outside the farm’s precinct At Kinneret, for instance, the JNF establishes (1908) an experimental because the JNF hopes, sooner or later, to introduce an appointed expert farm leased to some thirty settlers. Initially bound by a crop-sharing to guide the undertaking. Now, the interesting thing is that, after a short agreement under the supervision of an appointed agronomist, the original conflict between settlers and JNF, any leaning to change the group’s social

11 Axel Fisher 12 hierarchy is abandoned, but the farm is built according to the original part of the farm’s earnings serves the establishment of a common fund27. I n plans, and the settlers move their dormitories and dining hall to the outer fact, Oppenheimer’s cooperation model is a progressive device, whose buildings. This unexpected outcome gives birth to an original spatial evolution can be distinguished into three successive steps: “participation pattern, to become a typical feature of communal Zionist settlements: the to profits and preparation”, “foundation of the Cooperative Production unequivocal separation of productive activities, dwellings, and communal Association”, and “creation of the Cooperative Settlement Association”. facilities in distinctive functional zones. Along this model, the first pilot-farm is a future nation-state in embryo: during the first stage, settlers pay back the initial up investments; the second stage is dedicated to set up a self-sustained welfare and investment fund; finally, at the third stage, the cooperative association invests the accumulated capital in establishing non-farming settlements of a superior order (urban neighborhoods, company towns, cities…)28. In other words, and here stands Oppenheimer’s topical insight, the final scope of 8a. Schematic map of the 8b. View of Degania’s enclosed courtyard, conceived as a civil agricultural colonization is to build up its own consumer market and Degania experimental farm. forum. service industry, with the rural presiding over the urban realm, and While most Zionist experimental farms follow an empirical course of eventually over the nation as a whole: French 18th century physiocracy development, the Merhavia pilot-farm (1911) is a testing ground for the transplanted to Palestine. German sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer’s (1864-1943) agrarian and economic theories. According to Oppenheimer, the soundness of national polity depends on its economy health, ie. the fair and equitable division of wealth, built upon a robust rural economy25. For this purpose, Oppenheimer sustains a socio-economic model termed as liberal socialism, balancing the capitalistic encouragement of excellencies and monetization of individual liberties with the socialist subordination of individual subjectivities to collective interest. In Palestine, he claims, the problem is far from trivial: how can “a social class with no means26” nor 9a. Merhavia experimental farm: original sketch, 9b. View of Merhavia’s enclosed courtyard, experience be turned into a peasant constituency and upon which a future 1911. dominated by a majestic water tower. nation can be built? Oppenheimer’s scheme entails the establishment of Apart from his leaning to set up chief systems, Oppenheimer also new settlements as farming schools, where to-be settlers can be trained, introduces a critical innovation in the Zionist agricultural panorama. As an but also reach immediate financial sustainability. Therefore, under the alternative to the apparently opposed dominating models – land, capital, supervision of an expert agronomist, settlers are employed at the farm as and labor extensive subsistence grain monoculture versus land, capital, and wage laborers within an agricultural co-op. Their productivity and labor intensive market-oriented fruit farming –, Oppenheimer advocates a autonomy is to be stimulated by differentiated salaries: individual strategic agreement between cattle and men: “fodder in exchange of productivity, merits, and necessities must be rewarded accordingly, while fertilizers29”. The re-fertilization of Palestinian exhausted soils would

13 Axel Fisher 14 sustain subsistence farming for internal consumption, while the Migge (1881-1935) with the agronomist Selig E. Soskin (1873-1959), and development of dairy farming would allow Zionist agriculture to compete a scheme for a circular colony36 (fig. 12) proposed by agronomist Jacob within the international export market. Oettinger (1872-1945). As to the Merhavia farm’s layout (fig. 9a-9b), it reproduces previous models. Similar to an enclosed citadel30, three groups of buildings face upon a hundred-meters-large courtyard, dominated by a majestic water tower. Each side of the courtyard accommodates for different functions: technical, productive, residential, and an unimplemented side for the administration’s offices and a boarding house for single-settlers. All in all, the JNF experimental farms established before WWI are all based upon a marriage of convenience between public capital (provided by the Zionist organization) and labor (represented by settlers with no means). Each settlement differs by agrarian system, labor organization (tenant farming at Kinneret, self-management at Degania, cooperation at 10. Alexander Baerwald’s bird-eye view of a model garden-city, 1920. Merhavia), forms of cultivation (mixed farming at Kinneret, companion Each expert advocates different agrarian systems. Oppenheimer holds planting at Degania, mixed and dairy farming at Merhavia), but each has for a combination of cooperative management of dry and extensive common architectural roots: on one side, the late 19th century Prussian farming on the village’s external fields, with family-run intensive mixed and colonization scheme of Posen31, based on the enclosed farm layout; on the dairy farming on individual plots within the village. Soskin pleads for a other side, European utopias32 (Cabet, Fourier, Bellamy, Hertzka , tomato philosophy37, based on individual intensive farming of luxury-crops Rochdale, Tolstoj). As a consequence, the experimental Zionist farms, for export. Oettinger supports the family-run combination of subsistence with their enclosed courtyard conceived as a civil forum, emerged in the mixed farming and market-oriented dairy farming. Palestinian rural landscape as true “miniature commonwealths33.”

Roaring urban life in the Palestinian countryside: From the European garden-city to the Zionist village The outbreak of WWI inhibits Jewish colonization and immigration to Palestine, but stimulates the flow of ideas: agronomists, experts, planners, and architects engage in heated debates around the postwar colonization scheme through plans, pamphlets, essays and lectures. Three proposals deserve more attention: a model garden-city34 (fig. 10) imagined by architect Alexander Baerwald (1877-1930) with Franz Oppenheimer, a 35 model siedlung (fig. 11) prepared by landscape architect Leberecht 11. Leberecht Migge’s bird-eye view and schematic plan of a model intensive siedlung, 1920.

15 Axel Fisher 16 The architectural layout of each proposed scheme interestingly necessity to satisfy the settlers’ social, spiritual and intellectual needs 41 translates the corresponding agrarian system in an expressive spatial form. through the introduction of urban activities in the rural realm. Baerwald’s bird-eye view shows a compact hamlet surrounded by an extensive open field countryside. Forming a cross-like layout, two streets lined up with porticoes and public facilities are dominated by an impressively modern water tower, and accommodate for the village’s social and associated life. Along the side streets stand the individual family farms with their own stretch of land. As to the village’s overall character, it is entirely entrusted to the buildings’ vivid Orientalist architecture. On the contrary, Migge fiercely opposes the compact-settlement fanatics 38 with a diffused, isotropic, homogeneous, and potentially infinite colonization scheme based on a repeatable village pattern. Individual family farms with attached farmland are arranged in staggered rows along the streets, reducing the distance between home and fields. A tight pattern of 12 Jacob Oettinger’s scheme for 13. PARKER B., THOMPSON 14. Prototype of an agricultural a circular colony, 1916. F.L., Diagram suggestin g ideal colony and garden city to be plantations – made of ornamental trees along public spaces, of a common arrangement of holdings for a established in the Land of Israel: acclimatization garden, of the serial hedges dividing each individual field, fruit and market garden colony, a blatant copy of Howard’s n°3 and of ordered private orchards – draws a regular vegetal mat which Garden City Association, 1916. Garden City’s ward and center scheme, 1917. outshines the village’s built and mineral expression, but act as a green Looking at the Prototype of an agricultural colony and garden city to be basement underlining the major public buildings’ outcropping roofs. The established in the Land of Israel 42 (fig. 14) – a blatant copy of Howard’s n°3 resulting landscape echoes the Jeffersonian territorial grid and anticipates Garden City’s ward and center scheme 43 –, it is possible to appreciate the Frank L. Wright’s Broadacre City, suggesting that Migge attempts to influence of the European garden city movement on Zionist experts and establish a parallel between the egalitarian, individualistic, and agrarian pamphleteers44 in their quest constructive alternatives to the modern values conveyed by the American land partition system and the Zionist Western city patterns, and as a means to transfer urban liveliness to the project. Oettinger’s ideas are summarized by a rudimental diagram countryside. To put it in the words of a prominent Zionist leader such as showing the village’s ideal circular layout, with homesteads grouped Arthur Ruppin: “Everywhere in the world, one finds that the country around a “communal square for public institutions (schools, synagogues, population is gradually migrating into the towns. This is caused chiefly by people’s club, library; co-operative premises such as cellars, dairies, etc.), a the dull monotony and spiritual unproductiveness of village life. This market square, and in the centre a quarter for artisans, business people, tendency can, however, be counteracted by making village life more and representatives of the liberal professions39”. The emphasis placed on attractive (…) adequate measures must be taken to create and activate an collective facilities situated at the hearth of the village appear as the subtle active spiritual life in the settlements45.” transposition of a British Diagram suggesting ideal arrangement of holdings for a fruit and market garden colony40 (fig. 13), but also responds to the

17 Axel Fisher 18 Designing unprecedented forms of rural settlement: village’s elliptical figure47. From this vantage point, the extension of the Richard Kauffmann and the composition of moshav and kibbutz. village’s farming area can be visually controlled, and the cool night breezes can favorably freshen up the settlers’ dwellings during the hot summer. At the war’s ending, the previous proposals are discussed at the London Conference (1920) and at the 12th Zionist Congress at Carlsbad (1921), where Oettinger’s scheme is adopted. The new type of colony, known as moshav ovdim (“workers settlement”; or simply moshav, pl. moshavim), is a co-operative village founded on the nuclear family as a form of natural society. The collectivist village type, or kibbutz (pl. kibbutzi m) which emerged a decade earlier, is instead based on the commune whose members form a sort of enlarged family as a form of elective society. This latter type is disfavored by the Zionist leadership (generally liberal bourgeois based in Europe), reluctant to sustain “a communistic experiment in Palestine46”; the kibbutz movement is seen as an infantile disorder. Still, Zionist Labor is tolerated as a transitory experiment, hoping that kibbutzim shall sooner or later turn into moshavim. However, now that the agrarian and social program of the Zionist village have been precisely 15. Richard Kauffmann’s bird-eye view of moshav Nahalal, 1921. defined, this new settlement form is awaiting for an effective architectural A second design gesture stands in the gathering of collective facilities at expression to convey new ideological and identity values. We owe to the the “hearth of the village”: the “beth-ha’am [People’s House], the school, German-born architect Richard Kauffmann (1887-1958) the set up of the the day nursery, the sickbay, the dairy, the consumers’ co-op warehouse basic design principles of Zionist villages, which we can distinguish in four (…) and some land reserves for future collective buildings48”, as well as a morphological types: the large circular moshav, the small egg-shaped lodging, a water tower, a storehouse for agricultural products, the farm moshav, the small kibbutz and the large kibbutz. machinery’s deposit and workshop, and finally the dwellings of non agricultural settlers (craftsmen, technicians, teachers, physicians, nurses, The large circular moshav’s authentic prototype, Nahalal (1921, fig. 2), …). At the entrance of this central nucleus, Kauffmann places “on either illustrates this type’s three main features: its overall figure, its dialogue sides of the main drive (…) [the wings] of the women’s agricultural between private and public spaces, the role assigned to vegetation within school49”, as an evocation of a medieval urban gate. Two concentric ring the village’s layout. roads define the village’s internal and external limits: the first one delimits In designing this settlement, Kauffmann’s first gesture consists in the central nucleus and lines up the individual family farm’s plot along a tracing a street layout in relation to site conditions, granting access to the fan-like pattern; the second one marks off the boundary between the village and allowing the control of the landscape relations between the village itself and its surrounding farming area. village and its surrounding countryside. At the bottom of an alluvial terrace, In their combination, these two first design gestures can be seen as the the village is sited on top of a sedimentary mound which dictates the transformation of the moshava’s linear layout into a round one50 ,

19 Axel Fisher 20 “conferring an expression to the objective of mutual cooperation in the use concentric and centripetal pattern, Kfar Yehezkiel’s (1921, fig. 16) of common facilities51”. To put it into Kauffmann’s own words, “the large octagonal layout responds to a radial and centrifuge one, while Kfar moshav’s urban layout is conceived in such a way that the economic and Yehoshua’s (1927, fig. 17) double specular spiral scheme evokes a more social life intensifies gradually when one gets closer to the settlement’s organic figure. Such variations are not merely formalistic or wanton core52”, physically reflecting and visually expressing the shared values of gestures, but precise solutions to concrete issues. Kfar Yehezkiel’s radial equality and cooperation among the community members. pattern and Kfar Yehoshua’s open geometry provide for unlimited growth Finally, the third design gesture adopted by Kauffmann stands in the possibilities where the Nahalal’s finite geometry imposed a natural limit to use of vegetation as a counterpoint to the village’s rational zoning, further village extension. In addition, these recognizable geometries also federating the village’s “four vital functions”: dwelling, recreation, work, convey precise significance and values: the formal analogy between and transportation. Indeed, a sequence of public gardens arranged along Nahalal’s absolutist layout and that of Ledoux’s Salines-de-Chauds can be the minor axis of the village’s elliptical layout, stages a sort of architectural seen as an attempt to establish ideological affinities between Zionism section across the village. Strolling along these gardens, the rambler can agrarianism and 18th century French physiocracy55. literally walk across the village’s diagram of daily activities. Starting at the village’s center, one finds the main access road and the major productive activities. From there, the gardens slope down along the People’s House and the school into lofty malls lined up with trees and shrubs, before reaching the external ring road at the sedimentary mound’s foothill. There, “a fruit-tree line-up encircles the moshav, and shall soon form a shady alley; the ideal location for Saturday [Shabbat] promenades which in the future could be equipped with comfortable benches53.” As a result, the public gardens’ arrangement sets the scenery for a physical and didactic experience, where the passer-by can visually seize and understand the villages’ spatial structure. Arousing his emotional reaction, the arrangement of public gardens confers a sense of grounding in the place. In addition, 16. Richard Kauffmann’s scheme for 17. Richard Kauffmann’s scheme for moshav Kfar vegetation also plays an active role in building the village identity, moshav Kfar Yehezkiel, 1921. Yehoshua, 1927. foreshadowing the settlement’s spatial pattern. In fact, since the implementation of buildings within the village generally comes as its last The small egg-shaped moshav’s features can be illustrated by Kfar stage of development, elements such as ornamental plantations along the Hittin (1923, fig. 18), where Kauffmann also takes advantage of the site’s main streets and the radiant hedges dividing each individual plot draw a conditions to develop picturesque effects. Located in Eastern Galilee, physical pattern forming, “with no additional intervention, a small natural along the edge of a sediment tableland encased between two hills, this fortress, than can be appreciated at glance from the plain downhill54”. village overlooks the Lake and ancient city of Tiberias. It is accessed from The large circular moshav allows for many variations; in fact, each the foothill through a sinuous road which, ascending the hillside, Zionist village has a different layout. If Nahalal’s elliptical layout shows a

21 Axel Fisher 22 highlights the village’s dominant location. The moshav’s layout is side, the communal management of every single daily activity – from organized around a single bean-shaped circular road, lining up individual working to dwelling, from meals to the child education – in such farmsteads and defining a central area for collective facilities. A main street settlements imply the grouping of functions in specialized buildings, the runs across the village and connects three small squares along a single abolition of land ownership and division, the absence of individual access linear sequence. A first square gathers the dwellings of non-farmer settlers, roads and the predominance of pedestrian paths. On the other side, to put marking the articulation between the circular road and the entrance to the in Kauffmann’s own words, “the desire to create a new society demands a village core. The second square, located at the very hearth of the village, specific architectural expression. Collectivism is the founding principle of groups the major collective facilities (school, dairy, co-op warehouse, the kibbutz life, and must find its expression in the kibbutz architecture57”. storehouse, farm machinery deposit). Finally, the third square assembles the places of sociality (temple, hospital and lodging) around a space opened to the surrounding landscape, from where access is granted to a park laid along the steep slope below. This village layout sets a sort of symbolic walkway made of a crescendo suite of spatial effects reaching its climax in a panoramic spot, from where “the view on the Lake is of an incommensurable beauty 56 ”. Conversely, this arrangement of the settlement’s different elements make the village appear from downhill as a lofty crown on top of a large sylvan pedestal.

19. Richard Kauffmann’s scheme for the twin kibbutzim Beit Alfa and Heftzibah, 1925. As a result, Kauffmann develops the small kibbutz type, best illustrated by the twin-settlements Beit Alfa and Heftzibah (1925, fig. 19). This kind of village revisits two design principles of pre-war experimental farms: functional zoning and the centrality of the enclosed courtyard. Kauffmann groups the main activities – dwelling, farming, and communal facilities – in separate functional cores, organized around a large open space, and isolated from each other by a green belt. As a result, Beit Alfa and

18. Richard Kauffmann’s scheme for moshav Kfar Hittin, 1923. Heftzibah both have their own dwelling and farming core, but are separated by a shared public park and a children’s district including a Kibbutzim, instead, respond to very a different physical pattern: an school, a nursery and the Children’s House. The use of green belts open urban layout independent from the street network. Indeed, on one individualize each core and contemporarily serve as a public space, a sanitary and climatic device, and a land reserve, solving at once the issue of

23 Axel Fisher 24 future extension and that of the intelligibility of the village’s spatial pattern. Concerning each core’s central open space, it is significant that Kauffmann alternatively uses different terms to define it: forum, lawn or communal park, central square, hearth, crown. This hesitation can be read as an attempt to incorporate the entire Western urban tradition – from Ancient Rome to Bruno Taut’s utopian visions58 – in the kibbutz’s unprecedented architecture. However, green belts and central open space do not suffice to balance the uncertainty implied by the open layout of the kibbutz, which appears as an incoherent patchwork of buildings freely arranged according to the heliocentric axis. Here, as in the moshav, vegetation plays an important part in defining the kibbutz’s identity and overall image. The contrapuntal interplay between the voids left over by the built masses and the vegetal masses composed by communal plantations and shared gardens actually confers compactness to the village structure (fig. 20), marking points of reference in an otherwise loose and undetermined urban space.

21. Richard Kauffmann’s scheme for the twin kibbu tzim Ein Harod and Tel Yosef, 1927. The last village type, the large kibbutz, shows many analogies with the small kibbutz type as can be appreciated in Kauffmann’s scheme for two other twin-settlements: Ein Harod and Tel Yosef (1927, fig. 21). The two villages are sited on the gentle slopes of a hillside, separated by an afforested strip planted along the bed of a seasonal torrent (wadi). Along each slope dip, two analogous sequences of open spaces organize each village’s functional cores: a collective farmyard, a green lawn bordered by the communal buildings, and a garden at the hearth of the Children’s core. The dwellings and other buildings are aligned along the slope and the heliocentric axis, in a fan-like pattern. However, the peculiarity of this unique example of the large kibbutz type is to be found down- and uphill. Running parallel to the foothill, a county road and a railway line, grant access to the village entrance marked by an agro-food industrial plant and

20. View of kibbutz Ein Harod, late 1930s: t he interplay between built and vegetal masses confers a power station. Indeed, the members of these communes advocate the compactness to the village structure. introduction of industrial activities in rural villages, to sustain a larger

25 Axel Fisher 26 population and to support the countryside’s autonomy towards the urban realm, seen as the evil embodiment of capitalism59. But the hegemonic ambitions of Ein Harod and Tel Yosef are not limited to demographic and productive issues; these communes actually lay claims upon the Palestinian countryside as a whole. In fact, the two spatial sequences running across each village meet again on top of the Kumia Hill, “crowned by communal buildings60”. This impressive communal citadel, the whole settlement’s architectural climax, counts three specialized cores lined up along the mountain ridge: a district schooling complex encircled by a system of terraced gardens, a central workers’ hospital, and an imposing Assembly Hall (nothing less than a self-appointed rural capitol!). Although never achieved, this part of the scheme expresses the large 23a. Land reclamation and preparation as 23b. Land reclamation and preparation as kibbutz’s declared political agenda: gaining a pivotal role within the training process and community building training process and community building regional context, in open competition with the large circular moshav which device: drainage works. device: freeing the fields from stones. until then held the lead role in the Zionist rural landscape. The opposition between large circular moshav and large kibbutz is not only the reflection of the ongoing political conflict within the Zionist movement, between Labor Zionism in the field and synthetic Zionism abroad; it entails radically different regional planning policies. Indeed, Zionist villages are not isolated and autonomous objects laid down in a barren Palestinian landscape, but take part to a larger physical frame. Looking at some unpublished maps prepared by JNF experts (fig. 22), it appears clear that each village participates to a settlement bloc or rural district, counting at least one large circular moshav and a number of smaller settlements gravitating around it. In line with the colonization program established by Oettinger, would-be settlers are enrolled upon their arrival in a training program before they can actually settle down. Grouped in occupation and preparation brigades (fig. 23a-23b), they are entrusted first with the reclamation, drainage, and improvement of future settlements’ lands, before actually conducting the first cultivation and harvest cycle. Only then are the basic infrastructures of a village laid down, 22. JNF, dep. for agricultural colonization, Oriental Kishon rural settlemen t bloc, 1927: micro- so that older and more experienced candidates can settle in the village. As polycentric area planning around a large circular moshav, Kfar Yehoshua. a result, the preparation of a settlement bloc’s large circular moshav is the priority; upon its completion, the brigades involved in its building are

27 Axel Fisher 28 granted the right to settle in an adjacent smaller village, according to their Off the beaten track: looking awry own preferences in terms of social organization. This training and building Across a six decades-long experimentation process, the Jewish process guarantees a sense of mutual acquaintance, of shared identity, and agricultural village sought for inspiration in many different planning of inter-village solidarity among the different communities of a single rural models – from Fourier’s phalanstery to the traditional European street- district. Therefore, most of the collective facilities of a district are village, from the German farm to the garden city – before finding its own concentrated in its large circular moshav, as an attempt to establish scale peculiar architecture. Hesitating between different social models, from economies as far as cultural and service facilities are concerned. To be sure, paternalism to autonomy, from administered tutelage to negotiated self- contrarily to the commonly accepted view61, the communal area of large management, from cooperation to mutualism, it was only when its funding circular moshavim are not oversized, their importance reflecting an original bodies left behind their top-down social engineering ambitions in favor of form of rural micro-polycentrism dominated by this type of settlement. the “human material’s” bottom-up subjectivity and active participation, The privilege conferred to the large circular moshavim is targeted and that the return to land and agriculture gained momentum and enthusiasm. contested by labor Zionism during the 1920s62. After the 1929 and 1936- On the economic front, the choice of the most adapted agrarian system 1939 Arab Revolts, however, the kibbutz movement develops its own did not depend only on technical considerations, but conveyed moral organizational and military capacity, maintaining their presence in the values and geo-economic ambitions. While extensive subsistence countryside while moshav-settlers abandoned their villages for the city. agriculture pertained to the Labor ethos and prefigured an autarchic From that moment onwards, labor Zionism establishes its political economic development, intensive profit-making agriculture responded to hegemony over the agricultural colonization of Palestine, through an a capitalistic spirit of free enterprise and initiative, foreshadowing an explosive mixture of socialism, nationalism and militarism (fig. 24). economic development based on the export of tropical fruits and highly Relating the further developments of this unique experiment goes beyond dependent on fluctuant Western markets. Similarly, mixed farming and our present aims. companion planting called for a complementary role of each farmstead member, animals included, and pointed to a self-centered economic development. The limited part played by architecture as built and mineral form in this essay is not an innocent omission. A peculiar rural architecture did develop in Jewish agricultural villages, but never as meaningful and ripe as their landscape architecture. In coeval European urban parks and promenades, planting was used as an ornamental device, to foster passive contemplation, aesthetic pleasure, with hygienic and moralizing purposes. In modernist architecture, “greenery” evoked an abstract nature and set up a neutral background for isolated architectural objects. In Jewish agricultural villages, instead, public gardens always combined a landscape rationale – 24. Keren Hayesod – Palestine Foundation Fund, Fundraising propaganda leaflet: the village as military outpost. building and qualifying public space in the village – with productive and

29 Axel Fisher 30 useful aims, while anticipating the transformation of the rural landscape as second generation members of an utopian community. In fact, kibbutz can a whole63. In this sense, the experience of Jewish rural planning can be seen be seen as a total institution69, as showed in a recent Israeli movie as an early case study of vegetal urbanism. significantly subtitled Trapped in heaven in its in German release70. What is more, the sapient combination of agriculture and vegetal Nowadays, some Israeli villages have found a way to fit within the new architecture represented, at my sense, an effective physical support for the liberal context, but many are dramatically being abandoned: People’s (re)construction of identity and sense of belonging to the place of the Houses are empty, communal Dining halls are falling apart, sometimes uprooted man, if we are to believe the thoughts attributed to second constituting a perfectly anxious background for novels such as Amos Oz’s generation settlers in a controversial Israeli novel: Scenes from Village Life 71. While the Israeli public opinion and cultural We examined the entire agricultu ral plan of the village and its fields, we fathomed intelligentsia72 is rallying in favor of the preservation of Zionist village’s their purpose in selecting places for plant ing, and we gra sped their reasonin g in built and cultural heritage, the future of the Israeli rural realm is still at the layout of the vegetable plots; the purpose of the field crops, the fallow land, stake. and the crop rotation became clear to us, it was all so evident (even if you could have planned something better suited to our tastes, and we had already started to However, the present-day issues raised by the historical experiment of do so, without realizing it, each of us in his own mind) and all that wa s needed wa s Zionist rural villages go beyond the peculiar Israeli context. In line with for them to come and carry on with what they were doing. Some plots were left Aldo Cibic’s73 or Andrea Branzi’s74 recent experiments with designing fallow, and others were sown, by design , everythin g was carefully thought out, contemporary forms of rural settlement, I tried to suggest in this essay how they had looked at the clouds and observed the wind, and they might also have the rural village can be seen as a rich and stimulating theme for foreseen drought, flooding, mildew, and even mice; they had also calculated the implications of risin g and falling prices, so that if you were beset by a loss in one architectural design, and as a program for fresh and original societal sector you’d be sa ved by ga in in another, and if you lo st on grain, the on ions migh t projects to take place. Looking to current issues and challenges in Europe come to rescue (…)64. – with a welfare state disintegrating under the pressure of debt reduction, imminent food and environmental risks, loss of national sovereignty In 2010, the “first” kibbutz, Degania, celebrated the centennial from the paired by the necessity to redefine plural concepts of citizenship – it may establishment of its founding group, while both moshavim and kibbutzi m be useful to bend anew towards the experience of agricultural have been experiencing a deep financial crisis after the reduction of state colonizations75 in rethinking our contribution as architects to the aid since 198565, and are seeking for new roles within the national redefinition of rurality within our evolving societies. 66 economy . Such crisis, however, is not merely economical. As early as 67 1946, Arthur Koestler captured in Thieves in the night an awkward 1. J.L. GORDON’s Awake, my people (1866), in: MENDES-FLOHR P.R., REINHARZ J., The Jew in the paradox of Zionist agrarianism, describing the simultaneity between the Modern World: A Documentary History, Oxford University Press, 1995, p34. epic achievement of a group of pioneers – laying overnight the 2. Yiddis h for a contemplative and visionary person, devoid of practical skill, profession and financial means, living of air, which obsessively haunts Marc Chagall’s works. foundations of a kibbutz – and their comrades’ preparations for warfare 3. Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU, founded 1860 in Paris for the diffusi on and the defense of with the British authority and the local population. Closer to us, Amos the values of the 1789’s Man and citizen right’s declaration), Organisation Reconstruction Oz’s 1982 novel A perfect peace68 narrates a young kibbutznik’s run away in Travail (ORT, founded 1880 in Saint-Petersburg, for manual work, craftsmanship and agriculture), Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA, founded 1891 in Paris and London for the a personal and existential quest for a reason for living, emphasizing the immigration of Russian and other European Jews to countries granting equal economic, social issue of personal freedom and of the access to alternative social forms for and political rights), American Jewish Committee (founded 1906), to cite only a few.

31 Axel Fisher 32 4. GORDON B.L., New Judea: Jewish life in modern Palestine and E gypt, JH Greenstone, 21. OPPENHEIMER F., OETTINGER J., Land tenure in Palestine: Collective ownership and private Philadelphia (PA), 1919, p40; SAMPTE R J.E., A Guide to Zionism: Chap. XXXI. Jewish Educa tion ownership of land – The practical advantages of hereditary lease, Jewish National Fund, The in Palestine, Zionist Organization of America, New York, 1920; SHAPIRO Y., Le centenaire de Hague, 1917. Mikvéh-Israël - A cen tury of Mikveh-Israel [Hebr.], Mifaley Tarbut Wechinuch, Tel Aviv, 1970; 22. The Jewish National Fund (JNF, or Hebr. Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael: KKL), is the central fund of AARONSOHN R., Rothschild and early Jewish colonization in Palestine, Rowman & Littlefield - the Zionist organization, founded in 1901, and entrusted with the purchase of land, and with Hebrew University - Magnes Press, Lanham (MD) - Jerusalem, 2000. the preparation and the establishment of settlers in Palestine. 5. HALBWACHS M., La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: étude de mémoire 23. RUPPIN A., The agricultural coloniza tion of the Zionist Organiza tion in Palesti ne, M. Hopkinson, collective, PUF, Paris, 1941. London, 1926 (c1925), p18; PENSLAR D.J., Op.cit., 1991, p127. 6. TROEN I.S., Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale 24. TROEN I.S., Op.cit., 2003, pp24-25. University Press, New Haven (CT) – London, 2003, p150. 25. “He who wishes to create cities must create peasants” (OPPENHEIMER F., Op.cit., 1914, p4). 7. A movement of ideas gathering Jewish individuals and organizations, mainly based in Eastern 26. OPPENHEIMER F., Merchavia: a Jewish co-operative settlement in Palestine, The co-operative Europe, that foreran and laid the foundations of modern Zionism as they sought to establish a Society Erez-Israel and The Head Office of the Jewish National Fund, New York - Cologne, Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. 1914, p4. 8. TROEN I.S., “Covenantal Communities”, in: Ibid, Op.cit., 2003, pp3-14. 27. Ibid, Op.cit., 1914, p23. 9. PENSLAR D.J., Zionism and tec hnocracy: the engineer ing of Jewish settleme nt in Palestine, 1870- 28. Ibid, Op.cit., 1914, p8. 1918, Bloomington, Indianapolis (IN), 1991, p23. 29. SHILONY Z., Ideology and Settlement. The Jewish National Fund, 1897-1914, Hebrew University 10. Among which: Petah Tikva (1878), Rishon leZion (1882), Zikhr on Ya’akov (1882), Rosh – Magnes Press, Jerusalem, 1998, pp254. Pina (1882), Rehovot (1890), Hadera (1891), etc. 30. OPPENHEIMER F., Op.cit., 1914, p19. 11. For two radically opposed explanations of the street-village type, see: MEITZEN A., Siedlung 31. REICHMAN S., HASSON S., “A Cross-Cultural Di ffusion of Col onization: From Posen to und agrarwesen der Westgermanen und Ostgermanen, der Kelten, Römer, Finnen und Slawen, Palestine”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, v. 74, n. 1, 1984, pp57-70; Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin, 1895; TRICART J., Cours de Géographie Humaine: Fascicule I RABINOWITZ R.H., “The agricultural colonization methods in Germany, 1916-1886” [Hebr.], - L’habitat rural, Centre de Documentation Universitaire, Paris, 3rd ed., 1963. in: Ibid, Garden colony and school farms as models for the Zionist Cooperative settlements [Hebr.], 12. The German Templars were a protestant millenarian sect active in agricultural colonization in Pardes, Haifa, 2006, pp18-21. Palestine (1869-1947), see: BEN-ARTZ I Y., “Religious ideology and landscape formation: The 32. HEINZE-GRENBERG I., “Paths in Utopia: on the development of the early kibboutzim”, in: case of the German Templars in Eretz-Israel”, in: BAKER A.R.H., Bigger G. (eds.), Ideology and FIEDLER J. (ed.), Social Utopias of the Twenties. Bauhaus, Kibbutz and the Dream of the New landscape in his torical perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK) – New York, Man, Müller+Busman Press for Bauhaus Dessau Foundation & Friedrich – Ebert Foundation, 1992; GLENK H., BLAICH H., HAERING M., From desert sands to golden oranges: the history of the Tel Aviv – Wuppertal, 1995. German Templar settl ement of Sarona in Palestine 1871-1947, Trafford Publishing, Victoria 33. TROEN I.S., Op.cit., 2003, p22. In ancient English, the term commonwealth derives from the (Canada), 2005. expression common wealth or the co mmon weal, where weal th means “well-being”. It referred to 13. AARONSOHN R., Op.cit., 2000, pp61-65. a State ruling for the common “well-being” as opposed to the benefit of a single social class. 14. Combining viticulture or citrus-growing with cereal-growing on the model of French colonies 34. [OPPENHEIMER F., BAERWALD A.] Eine Gartenstadt fuer Palaestina. Festgabe zum siebzigsten in Algeria, in addition to fruit farming (Ibid, Op.cit., 2000, pp235, 277). Geburtstag von Max Nordau, Hauptbureau des Jüdischen Nationalfonds – Juedischer Verlag, 15. Wineries, fruit preserves factories,… Berlin, 1920. 16. Cypress, she-oak, fig tree, bamboo,… 35. SOSKIN S.E., Small holdin g and irriga tion, a new form of settleme nt for Palestine, George Allen 17. Pine, mulberry tree, white cedar, Caribbean palm, sycamore, garden roses,… and Unwin, London, 1920. 18. Focused on citrus around Rishon leZion in the Jaffa area, on vine around Zikhron Ya’akov in 36. OETTINGER J. (aka ETTINGER A.), Methoden und Kapitalbedarf judischer Kolonisation in the Haifa area, and on silk, exotic fruits, and perfumes around Rosh in the Safed area. Palastina - Jewish colonization in Palestine: methods, plans and capital, Head office of t he Jewish 19. AARONSOHN R., Op.cit., 2000, p235. National Fund – Hauptbureau des Judischen Nationalfonds, New York – The Hague, 1916. 20. For a brief description of the JCA’s activities in Palestine, see: PENSLAR D.J., Op.cit., 1991, 37. SOSKIN S.E., “Book review: Intensivism as a universal idea. The creed of an intensivist”, pp27-37. Palestine & Near East Economic Magazine, v. 1, n. 4, August 1926, pp175-176. 38. SOSKIN S.E., Op.cit., 1920. 39. OETTINGER J., Op.cit., 1916, p94.

33 Axel Fisher 34 40. The link between the two schemes was originally established by RABIN OWI TZ R.H., Op.cit., 59. ORNI E., Forms of settlement: Jewish villages in Israel and their history, Overseas Youth Dept., 2006. Head Office – Jewish National Fund, Jerusalem, 1950, pp35-36. 41. OETTINGER J., Op.cit., 1916, pp11, 16, 20 and especially p74: “Experience has shown that the 60. KAUFFMANN R., Op.cit., 1926, pp114-115. Jewish colonist clings all the more firmly to the soil when his intellectual needs are gratified to 61. CHYUTIN M. and B., Op.cit., 2007, p175. a certain degree in the colony.” 62. STERNHELL Z., “The Cult of Discipline and Authority: the Destruction of Gdud Ha’Avoda 42. Aguda leYesod Mochav u’Ir-Ganim leMofet beEretz Israel: Ma’agal - Gezelschaft zu grindn a (the Labor Corps)”, in: Ibid, The Founding Myths of Israel : Na tionalism, Socialism, and th e muster-haften colonie mit a garten-stadt in Eretz Isroel [Hebr. and Yiddis h], Ma’agal, Warsaw, Making of the Jewish State, Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ), 1999, pp198-216. 1917. 63. “There is a special gardener for the lawns and green areas round the dining hall and cultural 43. HOWARD E., To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, London, 1898; Ibid, Garden Cities of centre, while the gardens adjoining the residential and children’s quarters are tended by adult To-morrow, Swan Sonnechein & Co., London, 1902. and young residents of the neighbouring houses. In landscape planning there is a desire to link 44. TAL E., “The Garden City Idea as adopted by the Zionist establishment”, in: FIEDLER J., Op.cit., the internal gardens with the general landscape of the vicinity, and to introduce the 1995, pp63-71; SONDER I., Gartenstä dte für Erez Israel: zionistische Stad tplanun gsvisionen von surrounding landscape and plant varieties into the centre of the kibboutz.” (SHARO N A., Theodor Herzl bis Richard Kauffmann, Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 2005. “Collective settlements in Israel”, Town Planning Review, v. 25, n. 4, January 1955, p270). 45. RUPPIN A., Op.cit., 1926. 64. YZHAR S. (aka SMILANSKY Y.), Khirbet Khizeh, Granta books, London, 2011 (c1949). This 46. GRAICER I., “The valley of Jezreel: Social ideologies and settlement landscape, 1920-1929”, novel is an early description (and acknowledgement) of the forced expulsion of an Arab village Studies in Zionism (Journal of Israeli History), v. 11, n. 1, 1990, p9. by Zionist soldiers during the first Arab-Israeli war (1947-1948). In this sense, the proposed 47. KAUFFMANN R., “Planning of Jewish settlements in Palestine”, Town Planning Review, v. 12, n. quote’s ending clause is omitted since it raises issues beyond the purpose of this essay: “(…), 2, November 1926, p110. apart, of course, from the one calculation they had failed to make, and that was stalking around, 48. KAUFFMANN R., “Aménagement des colonies juives en Palestine et principalement des here and now, descending into their spacious fields in order to dispossess them.” colonies agricoles de l’organisation sioniste”, in: ROYER J. (dir.), L’Urbanisme aux Colonies et 65. MARON S., Kibbutz in a market society, Yad Tabenkin, Ramat Efal (IL), 1993; GAVR ON D., Th e dans les Pays tropicaux, Delayance, La Charité sur Loire, v. 1, 1932, pp224-238. kibbutz: awake ning from U topia, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham (MD), 2000. 49. RUNDT A., BERMANN R.A., “L’architetto”, in: Ibid, Palestina: Impressioni di Viaggio, Casa 66. SOFER M., APPLEBAUM L., “The rural space in Israel in search of renewed identity: The case of Editrice Israel, Florence, 1925, pp87-88, 93-95. the moshav”, Journal of Rural Studies, n. 22, 2006, pp323–336. 50. RUPPIN A., Op.cit., 1926. 67. KOESTLER A., Thieves in the night: Chronicle of an Experiment, Macmillan, London, 1946. 51. AMITI M., Nahalal: dream and achievement. The first co-operative moshav: 1921-1971 [Hebr.], 68. OZ A., A Perfect Peace, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Orlando (FL), 1993 (c1982). Mif’alei Tarbut veKhinukh, Tel Aviv, 1971, pp479-481 [cited by CHYUTIN M. and B., 69. For attempts to extend the concept of “total institution” popularized by GOFFMAN E. Architecture and utopia: the Israeli experiment, Ashgate Pub., Aldershot (GB), 2007, p175]. (Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and O ther Inma tes, Anchor books, 52. KAUFFMANN R., Op.cit., 1932. New York, 1961), see: GOLDENBERG S., WEKERLE G.R., “From Utopia to Total Institutions in 53. KAUFFMANN R., Die Bebauungsplaene der Kleinsiedlungen Kfar-Nahalal und Kfar-Yecheskiel, a Single Generation: the Kibbutz and the Bruderhof”, International Review of Modern Sociology, Department fuer Landwirtschaftliche Kolonisation der Zionistischen Exekutive, Jerusalem, v. 2, n. 2, September 1972, pp224-232; COHEN E., “The Israeli kibbutz – the Dynamics of 1923. Pragmatic Utopianism”, in: ARIELI Y., ROTENSTREICH N. (eds.), Totalitarian Democracy and 54. KAUFFMANN R., Op.cit., 1923. After, Hebrew University - Magnes Press, Jerusalem, 1984, p362-376. 55. This link was originally established by CANELLA G., Un ruolo per l’architettura, Clup, Milan, 70. SHAUL D., Adama Meshuga’at (Sweet Mud - Im Himmel gefangen), DVD, IsraeliFilms, 1969 [republishe d in: AYMONINO C. et al., Per un'idea di città: la ricerca del Gruppo architettura Israel/Germany, 2006. a Venezia 1968-1974, Cluva, Venice, 1985]. 71. OZ A., Scene from Village Life, Houg hton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2011 (c2009). th 56. KAUFFMANN R., Op.cit., 1926, p111. 72. YASKY Y., BAR-OR G. (eds.), Kibbutz: Architecture without precedents (Israeli Pavilion, 12 57. KAUFFMANN R., Twenty Years of Planning Agricultural Settlements [Hebr.], in: A LLWEILL A. International Architecture .Exhibition, Venice Biennale), Keterpress Enterprises, Jerusalem, (ed.), Twenty Years of Construction : workers, settlemen t, housing, an d public i nstitutions [Hebr.], 2010. haHistadruth – Agudat haMehandessim Adreikhalim vehaModedim (Engineers, Architects 73. CIBIC A., Rethinking Happiness: Do unto others as you would have them do unto, Corraini, and Surveyors Union), Tel Aviv, 1940, pp65-69. Mantova, 2010 58. TAUT B., Die Städtkröne, Eugen Diederichs, Jena, 1919. 74. BRANZI A., Weak and diffuse modernity: the world of projects at the beginning of the 21st century, Skira, Milan, 2006.

35 Axel Fisher 36 75. See: FISHER A., MISIANI S., GOMEZ C. (eds.), Promised Lands: Internal colonization in 20th century Mediterranean history. Proceedings of the ESF exploratory workshop (Rome-Sabaudia, 7- 10 October 2013), aAccademia University Press, Turin, 2014 (forthcoming).

Illustrations sources

Front picture: Kibbutz Degania Bet, southern end of Lake Tiberias, late 1920s (Source: G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Divisi on, Library of Congress). Figure 1: DYMSHITS V. A. (ed.), The Hope and the Illusion: The search for a Russian Jewish homeland, A remarkable period in the history of ORT. Photo Album, World Ort, London, 2006. Figure 2: KANKRIN I., Jewish agricultural colonies in the Province of Aleksandrov Uyezd Ekaterinoslav [Russ.], Ekaterinoslav, 1893. Figures 3, 6b, 6c, 23b : G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Figure 4: SHAPIR O Y., Op.cit., 1970. Figure 5: The Jewish National & University Library, David and Fela Shapell Family Digitization Project, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Figure 6: AARONSOH N R., Op.cit., 2000. Figure 7a, 8a: SHILONY Z., Op.cit., 1998. Figures 7b, 15: Haifa University Library Digital Media Center. Figures 8b, 9b: author’s photographs, 2010. Figure 9a: Alexander Baerwald Archive, Elyachar Central Library, Technion IIT, Haifa. Figure 10: Eine Gartenstadt fuer Palaestina..., 1920. Figure 11: SOSKIN S.E., Op.cit., 1920. Figure 12: OETTINGER J., Op.cit., 1916. Figure 13: The Times of London, March 22nd 1916. Figure 14: Agu da leYesod…, 1917. Figure 16: KAUFFMANN R., Op.cit., 1923. Figures 17, 20, 24: Habinyan, a magazine of architecture and to wn-planning, n. 3, 1938. Figures 18, 19: K AUFFMANN R., Op.cit., 1926. Figure 21, 22: Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem. Figure 23a: JNF-KKL, Sanitation Works in the Jesreel Valley, JNF, Jerusalem, 1925.

37 Axel Fisher