"So in White City, Black City architecture is dragged into history and conversation, maybe malgré lui. It is foremost a story where buildings have only walk-on parts. With more than a nod to Franz Fanon, the meaning of the colours comes from people, the buildings reflected (on) in their light. The importance ofwriting about architecture is something Israelis like Rotbard have been fighting for – in words – since the schism of architects over the censoring of A Civilian Occupation in 2002. Prepared by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, with Rotbard as one of the contributors, the catalogue was set to accompany an exhibition making conspicuous the role of architecture in Israel’s project of domination; the lauding of Tel Aviv’s “International” Style and the concrete enclosure of the Palestinians were almost simultaneous. Despite its initial support, the Israel Association of United Architects claimed that the catalogue’s ‘ideas’ were ‘not architecture’ and destroyed five-thousand copies. But enough people disagreed for it to be published by other means.
The edifice tried to kill the book. Nevertheless, the actual result was a multiplication of books and words and exhibitions – a second tower of Babel, as Hugo puts it. Rotbard’s book, and later Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, were nothing if not provoked. There is a sense, though, in which the ‘not architecture’ claim was correct, but it missed the point that it is essential to architecture to be open to the non-architectural – open to people, and therefore open to history. 3 Buildings that are designed to be dead already, or for the quality of their anticipated death – as in Albert Speer’s theory of ‘ruin value’, which Rotbard says is the key to the Etzel Museum commemorating Israeli paramilitaries – are therefore in a deeper sense ‘not architecture’. "
http://www.onsitereview.ca/34writing/2015/9/1/daniel-fairbrother-the-book-will-kill-the-edifice.html
