Ruin Preservation and the Etzel Museum

When we first presented our idea to study ruins, our advisers immediately warned us not to try something like the Etzel Museum in Tel Aviv. So what is this "infamous" building, which appears on the cover of White City, Black City as a metaphor for all that is wrong with Tel Aviv's hidden agenda?

The museum is designed within the ruins of a building that once was part of the Menashia neighborhood outside of Jaffa. It was designed by Niv, Schwartz & Schwartz, and completed in 1983. The only other remains from Menashia is a mosque. The neighborhood was conquered in 1948 by Etzel, a right-wing Jewish militant group from before the State of Israel. The ruins were primarily cleared, leaving only these two buildings.

The idea to turn this ruin into a museum arose in 1976, as a monument to Etzel members who died in the conquest of Jaffa. In a 1984 edition of Architecture in Israel, the architects explain that while visiting the site, they found a lone building which drew their attention.

"On the spot we suggested that it would be the site for the monument, to be used as a living museum that would explain to future generations both the story of the battle for Jaffa and the story of the Menashiya neighborhood, which was alive but is now gone, as it has made room for Tel Aviv.
...The uniqueness of the building is not its architecture but rather its power of survival, which allows it to be used for preserving the memory of the place. "(p.3)

In describing the design principles, the architects explain that they wished to freeze the ruins in time, and they wax poetically about the ruins and how they have been ravaged over time by the sea winds. However, they then epxlain that they want to introduce a glass box into the ruins to form the new museum. They felt this would not be intrusive and would allow the ruin to remain a ruin, and that the old and new would melt together.

In White City, Black City, Rotbard writes that this is the ultimate expression of his thesis. A Miesian glass box, set in the ruins of an Arab neighborhood, illustrates his point that Tel Aviv's pure white persona is a fraud. (p. 235) It should be noted that Rotbard follows this up immediately with an anecdote about Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, which is interesting but unrelated, and seems only to have been included to insidiously draw a parallel between the museum and fascism. (p. 237) Still, Rotbard sums up the oddity well, writing:

"In a strange way, the building makes use of ruins and ruin aesthetics in order to cover up the destruction and hide it. The building says the truth about the killing of Jaffa but in the same breath it also lies, when it uses the drama as "architecture" and "environmental art."

From my standpoint as a ruins researcher, I can understand why the architects thought this would work and would be nice symbolism, but I also understand why it falls flat. As in so many cases, the ruins here have been ruined. Had they been left alone, they truly would have been powerful. If a memorial had been built nearby, it could have been a tremendous space. I even feel like if the glass box had been built outside the stone walls, it would have been better. But instead what happened is that they stone walls have been robbed of their ruin-beauty and left sterile. This is particularly true on the back-side of the museum. In the front, the ration is perhaps 75% stone and 25% glass, and this proportion is at least palatable. Furthermore, the stone has enough detail to distract the eye and make the glass fall into the background. But in the back, we simply see too much of the glass - it is too dominant, too jarring. From a preservation point of view, there is a clear distinction between the ruins and the new museum. But from a ruins-preservation point of view, different rules apply. The intrusion of new, blatant walls to the ruins take away from the aesthetic and make the symbolism collapse. The ruins become a veneer, rather than the essence of the place.

Ruins in White City, Black City

Babel is one of the few Israeli publishing houses that deals with architecture. It both translates existing works from other languages, such as Learning from Las Vegas and Towards a New Architecture, and publishes original works in Hebrew. One of the co-owners of Babel, Sharon Rotbard, is a studio adviser in Bezalel and has authored two books. Two years ago, Rebecca and I were in Rotbard's studio, where we, along with Yiska Katz, produced egg crate architecture.

Rotbard's first book, White City, Black City, touches on the subject of ruins. The book discusses how Tel Aviv gained a reputation as a "white city," which refers both to its supposed concentration of Bauhaus architecture and its ideological purity, having been built on a clean slate as the first Hebrew city. Rotbard points out many inconsistencies with this view, and contrasts the mythical view of Tel Aviv with a hard look at the concurrent development of Jaffa, the ancient Arab city next to Tel Aviv. Rotbard writes that Jaffa was systematically displaced and dismantled by Tel Aviv. This image of a "black city" contrasts with the other vision of Tel Aviv.

There are a number of things I like about the book. Firstly, I've found that many Israeli books of this type are remarkably un-scholarly. It is quite common to find information repeated as fact in multiple books, only to trace the footnotes and find that all secondary sources lead back to a single, questionable reference that is itself a secondary source and has no footnote. I found it particularly welcome that White City, Black City brought a number of primary sources, such as writings of Ben Gurion or Herzl. Secondly, Rotbard does a good job of pacing, and intersperses his thesis with interesting anecdotes, such as the marketing of Jaffa Oranges (p.245). This makes the book interesting and highly readable. I read through it in a week, and normally it takes me a month to finish a book of this size in Hebrew. On the downside, there were a number of paragraphs in which radical left-wing ideas are thrown in as if every sane person believes them, but this is practically to be expected in Israeli academia.

The book raises a number of interesting and compelling points about ruins, particularly in the Israeli narrative. Early in the book, Rotbard makes the point that the destruction or preservation of a building is a way of writing history:

"The decision to destroy an old building, to build a new building, or to preserve an existing building, sets what will be forgotten, what will remain and what is worth remembering." (p. 15)

When it comes to ruins, this is true as well. A decision to leave ruins, rather than bulldoze them, sets in action a certain historical memory. In many ways, this is even more powerful than deciding to rebuild a building or replace it. The ruin is actually a super-powerful way of reinforcing memory. One of the lasting impressions I took from the book is that ruins can be very important reminders of the past. Only once a building is completely removed it is "out of sight, out of mind." In Jaffa, this seems to have, for the most part, been the goal. Rotbard describes the destruction as complete, going as far as saying that it was more thorough than the destruction of Hiroshima and Dresden (p.191. Comparing destruction is an interesting sport, but it takes a certain mindset to make a claim such as this.) The point seems to be that removing buildings completely leaves no historical record whatsoever. In contrast, leaving ruins gives a remarkably good historical record of a particular past event or process.

The most relevant section of the book begins with the chapter titled "The Large Area" (השטח הגדול). This refers to the large section of the old city of Jaffa that was left in ruins after 1948. Most of the buildings in Old Jaffa were destroyed, while others were given to new immigrants to inhabit. In 1961, a decision was made to rehabilitate this area and turn it into a tourist site/artists colony. This is seen as a further act of erasure of the history of the city, with only Crusader and Napoleonic remains displayed, as a type of exotic ruins that one would find on a grand voyage. (p.239) This is certainly the vibe in old Jaffa today. I would have to agree that, as someone who visited the site as a high school student, the architectural record does not attempt to tell the story of displaced Arabs at all.

Another section of the book, which deals with the Etzel Museum, will be dealt with in a later post.