Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism. The Architecture of Israel
Concept Zvi Efrat, Mathias Görlich, Rebekka Kiesewetter
Graphic Design Studio Mathias Görlich, Darmstadt
952 pages, with numerous black-white and colour illustrations, thread-sewn hardcover, 6.75 x 9.5 in.
ISBN: 978-95905-133-0
Contrary to popular belief, the architecture and spatial politics of the State of Israel were not born haphazardly out of emergency or speculation. The Israeli built environment is the deliberate response to a unique objective—how to design and build a model state nearly instantaneously. To do this, space had to be remade: a new terrain was molded, and dozens of new towns and hundreds of rural settlements were constructed. Fashionable postwar architectural trends like Brutalism and Structuralism were appropriated as signifiers of national vigor.
The Object of Zionism. The Architecture of Israel is a critical study of Zionist spatial planning and the architectural fabrication of the State of Israel from the early 20th century to the 1960s and ’70s. Zvi Efrat scrutinizes Israel as a singular modernist project, unprecedented in its political and ethical circumstances and its hyper-production of spatial and structural experiments. Efrat explores the construction of the State of Israel in a book that promises to become a standard reference on Israeli architectural history.
“The Object of Zionism. The Architecture of Israel is a remarkable work of critical scholarship that relentlessly assembles and interprets a colossal archive. In a stunning hypothesis, Efrat argues that the State of Israel is a conscious architectural project. The book presents a multi-layered and highly detailed historical analysis of each phase of the self-construction of the state—investigating the motivations, philosophy, tactics, realization and impact of a single architectural project at the scale of a nation. Our perception of the entanglement of architecture and politics is permanently transformed.” –Beatriz Colomina
“Zvi Efrat’s The Object of Zionism is the most important research undertaken on the history of Israeli architecture to date. Architecture in Efrat’s hands is a means of interrogating the politics, culture and ideology of a state that sprung out of the drawing boards of young planners and landed atop the tabula rasa of destroyed and emptied Palestine. The decades-long, monumental research leading to this volume—based on thousands of documents, drawings, photographs and interviews and already iteratively exposed in a series of exhibitions and publications—has both constructed a comprehensive, critical account of the state’s formative decades and given rise to a new generation o critical architectural scholars, myself included. Full of original insight and closely tuned to detail, texture and form, this book is itself a piece of architectural construction, and as such is destined to become a contemporary classic.” –Eyal Weizman
Architect and architectural historian Zvi Efrat is a partner at Efrat-Kowalsky Architects in Tel-Aviv and was head of the Department of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, between 2002 and 2010. He studied at Pratt Institute, New York University and Princeton University and has curated numerous exhibitions, among them Borderline Disorder and The Object of Zionism. Efrat is a Graham Foundation awardee.
