Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Finding Natural Jerusalem
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Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Finding Natural Jerusalem Modern Jerusalem is a confusing city. The names of contiguous streets change every few blocks, and rectilinear avenues are very few and far between. Lurking underneath the difficult patchworks of alleyways and highways, the hilly landscape is the ultimate factor in confusing the navigator. The myriad hills reveal themselves around the most unexpected corners, shattering any sense of enclosure and continuity in neighborhoods that are otherwise whole. Hidden in the complex calculus of modern Jerusalem’s fabric lies an order that can only be obtained through various levels of abstraction, a logic that is worth uncovering for numerous reasons. Insofar as Jerusalem’s plan can successfully be simplified, a few of the benefits to reap from this endeavor are: it might help guide the uninitiated through the Jerusalemite labyrinth from origin to destination. Beyond that most basic function, it can potentially serve as a template against which to compare and contrast to actual Jerusalem, and to other cities; this clarification of the city’s physical nature can provide new social and political insight about the city, and a sense of whether Jerusalem is as unique a place as its heavenly profile would have it.1 1 Gandelsonas, Mario, X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City, Princeton Architectural Press, New York: 1999, 75. Architectural students “read” the dimensions of Rome, but the “exploration of the plans of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, New Haven, Chicago, Des Moines and Atlantic City between 1984-1994 reveals an ignored formal universe in the American City”, 77. “The process was based on drawings that described only the pertinent elements that belonged to the parti, while the features that did not relate to the architectural idea were’edited out.’ Finding Natural Jerusalem 1 Many cities have street plans that lend themselves to easy navigation.Benjamin Lehrer’03 They Near Eastern Studies Department are organized by some explicable, predictable logic. The simplest of these is the grid, a form expressed quite purely in Manhattan, among other places. Manhattan’s dumb orthogonal layout assures that at each intersection, pedestrian and cabbie alike are both confronted with the same perpendicular views. Though the crow may fly in a straight line from point A to B, rarely does such pure form exist in nature—rectilinear blocks are essentially artificial. Human infants cannot distinguish abstract shapes for some time after birth; straight lines are a manmade construct used to exert control over the world at large.2 And useful they are. In places like Jerusalem where urban form is not so readily distinguishable, where the next corner is hidden by a broad curve and a hill, it is helpful to find one’s position vis-à-vis that hidden place by drawing a straight line through the hill or over the curvy fabric of the city, to triangulate into thin air the place where both spots are visible. This gives a basic sense of how different places relate to each other in a city. In this analysis, causality will be excluded from the equation, as will local inconsistencies in the larger scheme. Regardless of how it ended up as it is, there is an overall logic to Jerusalem, and since history obscures that, we should push chronology aside for the time being. “By working with the plan of Chicago rather than with buildings, my studio, based on the assumption of the autonomy of the plan, ‘eliminated’ the perceptual level and focused on architectural questions derived from the symptoms, disruptions, and discontinuities that interrupt the continuous spatial flow implied by the grid of streets of the Chicago plan.” This paper bears a clear debt to Gandelsonas’ method of abstracting the city in order to discover underlying reasons for why the city is what it is. Finding Natural Jerusalem 2 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Modern Jerusalem bears an uncanny resemblance to Washington, D.C. It is the capital of the State of Israel, and its political and cultural institutions occupy the center of the Jerusalem plateau. Likewise, Washington is the capital of the United States of America; its beacons of governance and memorialized history sit in its central Mall. This unlikely comparison requires proof, lest disbelief and shock remain lodged in the reader’s mind. The most dubious part of this claim is that Givat Ram, the home of a large chunk of the Israeli government, is also the central geographical point in Jerusalem. Washington, D.C.’s Mall sits smack dab in the middle of its diamond borders; this is not a result of happenstance, but of the deliberate 1791 scheme of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who envisioned an intimidating European order for the capital of America’s young democracy.3 On the contrary, Kiryat Ben Gurion, the government “village”, was established in the 1960’s on what was at the time the western extreme of Jerusalem, Givat Ram—“High Hill”. The Old City of Jerusalem was and is entrenched in the collective imagination as the heart of the city, both because of its historical gravity and its quite discernable location in the center of the Old City Basin. To make a claim that a forty year old outcropping trumps a polis more than three millennia of age is therefore outrageous. Though the Old City 2 Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Princeton University Press: 1956, 2nd Ed. Revised, 3rd Printing, 1969, 291. The inability of infants to discern straight lines is due to their undeveloped perceptual abilities; though these abilities are intrinsically inscribed in the brain, Finding Natural Jerusalem 3 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department merits an intense closer look, it is not a form giver to greater Jerusalem, and that is what we are looking for first. The Jerusalem Plateau stands about 2500 feet above the Mediterranean Sea and the Sharon Plain to its west, and 4000 feet above the Dead Sea to its east. It also stands head and shoulders above the hills of Judea to its south and Samaria and to its north; it is separated from all by a ringlet of ridges.4 Two main internal ridges partition the plateau into three small basins, a southern, northern, and eastern. The distinct nature of this larger circular form is obscured by history—for over three thousand years, only one corner of it was occupied, and so it wasn’t understood as a whole entity all unto itself. From its founding as the seat of the Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe, Jerusalem occupied only a little sliver of land at the bottom of the bowl that formed the Old City Basin, the easternmost basin.5 It took the lion’s share of Jerusalem’s history for the city to fitfully expand beyond that tiny outpost to cover the full Old City Basin; while this cautious, often timid expansion spanned more than 99% of the Jerusalem timeline, it in fact covers a relatively much tinier percentage of the whole plateau’s surface area. Because of this fact, when Jerusalemites are asked to draw a conceptual map of the city, they invariably draw the Old City Basin much larger than it actually is, often taking up and nature does contain geometries, like in snowflakes, it is a ma�er of time before the brain is able to apply these tools. 3 Gandelsonas, 20. “Washington is the American city that condensates European and architectural desires; it Finding Natural Jerusalem 4 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department the lion’s share of the whole Jerusalem Plateau.6 In the mind’s eye, the Old City Basin, which also consists of Arab East Jerusalem and modern “West” Jerusalem, is so important, that this relatively small geographical feature, the Old City Basin, even conceals the existence of the larger plateau. The very fact that Downtown Jerusalem, which barely comprises the western ridge of the tiny Old City Basin, is called West Jerusalem shows a certain misunderstanding of everything in the western two thirds of the whole plateau. All the hills to the west are anathema, shapeless and confusing. Jerusalemites do know the difference between what is and what is not Jerusalem, but this is not because of any real spatial understanding. The probable reasons illuminate much about Jerusalem. JERUSALEM, SANS TOPOGRAPHY The first reason Jerusalemites can identify where Jerusalem begins and ends is sheer familiarity. They know the city because they have traveled its curvy back streets hundreds of times. This is not a useful method for analysis, because it does stands for the European city with an American scale and grid.” 4 Kutcher, Arthur, The New Jerusalem: Planning and Politics, The M.I.T.Press, Cambridge, Massachuse�s: 1975, 11. Though Kutcher mentions the circularity of the plateau, he focuses only on the Old City and its basin, thereby ignoring our field of inquiry. 5 Kroyanker, David, Jerusalem Architecture, The Vendome Press, New York: 1997, 21. 6 Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachuse�s, 1960, as interpreted in Tuan, Yi-Fu, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Preception, A�itudes, and Values, Columbia University Press, Morningside Edition, New York: 1990, 205-7. A perceptual map of Jerusalem with accurate scale was Finding Natural Jerusalem 5 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department not illuminate anything beyond the fact that even the most byzantine of labyrinths can be navigated by memorization.