CHARLES JENCKS TALKS ON THE ISRAELI PAVILION

RM: This is Rowan Moore and I am with Charles Jencks for the Venice superblog. Charles we are going to talk about the Israeli pavilion, which I think has provoked people more than many of the exhibits in this Biennale. Could you firstly explain to me why?

CJ: Well the Israelis more than any other pavilion have, gone to a subject which is political, inflammatory and questionable for architects today, especially given the Lebanese situation. I don’t think they intended to raise these issues but inadvertently they have and inasmuch as September l1 is being commemorated in two days in America and is an American memorialisation through architecture of death, suffering and bereavement. I am a great believer that architecture should take a symbolic role and this exhibition does that. The problem is that it doesn’t have any place for the Palestinians who represent either 20 % or 50 % of the population. The Palestinians are not allowed to commemorate or memorialize anything in their past that has been repressed; such as the 560 villages towns and cities which have been destroyed and wiped out. And this after all is a Biennale on cities and I am interested in the critical, the critical modernism and the critical has to take a position on this, it can’t wash its hands and walk away. You have to stand up.

RM: So you are saying that Palestinians have tried to erect memorials and they have been forcefully prevented from doing so?

CJ: The Palestinians have since 1948, like Israelis, like all of us have tried to memorialise their past as it has been erased, and that has not been possible under the Israeli occupation of their territories. Now I am not asking architects to do what everybody else in the country cannot allow of course, architects can’t be heroes. I accept that, I accept that this is an honest exhibition, very well done, with people who are friends of mine, Israelis, Moshe Safdie who I’ve talked to about this. And I understand that there is an argument that Israelis can only memorialize the Jews who have died and suffered, and that it is unthinkable for them to memorialize those people that they consider to be interested in burying them, their opponents, however, you cannot divorce the memorialisation from the future. And this exhibition says as much, it says that it is political, it is propaganda for the future, and so it raises all these difficult questions. How do we as architects not become complicit with power and a negative national situation? Americans find themselves in the same situation, although it is less draconian because no one is going to destroy America tomorrow. And so it is more easy to say what I am saying as an American, that there must be a place in commemoration for ‘the other’. Now when I raised this with the organizer from Israel, she was, to say the least, condescending and furious with the notion that the very moment that you’re memorializing your own people you can memorialize ‘the other’. But I believe that is absolutely necessary today to do that in architecture, but it is extremely complicated, I know the client wouldn’t want it, our culture wouldn’t want it, but we have to do it because if we don’t we are a part of the problem and not a part of the solution. So I am calling upon, as my group Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, have said there must be something from this organization saying this situation is not acceptable in a future of cities, we cannot condone this complicity albeit, and I have to say this again, I don’t believe architects willingly knew they were letting themselves in to be an arm of the Israeli defence department, but that is the way it has come out.

RM: And when you discuss this with Moshe Safdie for example does he see your point of view?

CJ: No Moshe Safdie says he’ll never speak to me again; he hates me for saying this. I still regard him as a great architect and a friend. I understand why he won’t abide by me saying this, but, you know, one has to say it, I say this for architects as much as I say it for citizens or for people, because arch always find themselves in the role of the paid-for artists and they always have to always listen to their clients, so architects are pushed down into this inferior role. We have to stand up for architectural freedom. So I say this aside from the Israeli thing I say this is an architectural issue which has to be fought. And it is a critical one, and critical modernists have to fight it.

RM: Do you think that last week we saw the latest proposals for ground zero for example; do you think the memorialisation of these issues is being done any better in the Untied States?
CJ: No, I think as architecture its worse. The thing about these Israeli monuments as architecture they are quite well done, I would say half of them, and some of them are very good architecture. With ground zero we have had good proposals lead to mediocre solutions and then to worse. So today we have Lord Foster, Lord Rogers, and the Japanese architect Maki producing some of the most banal symbols ever produced by great architects on a super scale. Because they have been shaken down by the American system of power and Ground Zero now is the greatest symbol of failed architecture in the world, anyplace and it is a shame on America and shame on architecture and it should be stopped instead Marcus Finney came out saying it is a triumph of architecture in yesterday’s Times. It is not a triumph of architecture, every single critic who is independent in America has said it is a catastrophe. It is really compromised, it is not what we need, and of course everyone will be saying that, as they said about Iraq five years ago, it is clear that this it is not great architecture. But our voices are really marginalised, my voice is marginalised. And I think intelligent voices and critics are marginalised. One must say it stronger and louder.

RM: I would like to ask you one last question, which is, in the Biennale as a whole have you seen anything that has inspired you?

CJ: I see many many brilliant works and moving works. I have to say that the overall theme of course is very positive on the city and for that reason I think everybody here is in a mood of positive feelings because we needed an exhibition on the city that wasn’t focused on celebrity icons all that is good but frankly in a way the problem with the exhibition is that it is a book on the wall. It is a book on statistics and photos and that isn’t good enough. After fifty years of Jane Jacobs talking about what a city is we can’t, this exhibition itself is slightly regressive, in the sense that it shows statistics and shows photographs from the air and doesn’t get into what makes a city work. Jane Jacobs said very clearly it is a problem in organized complexity and that means if you discuss density it is not density per se that matters because that can lead to monoculture it is density with complexity and diversity-that’s the message that should have come through with Barcelona loud and clear and it’s completely muted and I find that very sad from a critical modern position. Again we have to say what is the theory on how city’s work and that the fact of the city is great that its an exhibition, but if you ask me what I saw that was interesting and wonderful there were some plans of the Cairo structure, figure ground drawings taken over ten years which just were the most beautiful drawings of the (…) city in one of the rooms. There is very interesting work in the Ireland exhibition in this pavilion on how suburban structures can disappear and reappear. There are many worthy individual things like the northern cities of Scandinavia because we know the north is where sustainability will be fought out with the oil in the Russian and especially gas fields that the northern cold climates are where the action is going to be. So there are many really good provocative individual things but they get I think put into the margins again partly because the Biennale has not ever been, and I was on the 1980 or the beginning of the organization the Architecture Biennale, has not been funded in a way which allows the critical to emerge. It’s creative, it shows very creative things but it doesn’t synthesize all this vast information in a pointed way. I mean one always hopes that it will be doing that, but it seems to me that this exhibition is the beginning of the next exhibition for which it will form the background.

RM: Thank you very much.