Peace centre with a panic room

Can architecture end a war? Steve Rose travels to Israel to see Peace House, a new building with big ambitions - and a bomb shelter on every floor

• 
• • Steve Rose
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 17 February 2009

Magical and mystical ... The Peres Peace House on the Jaffa seafront in Israel. Photograph: Moreno Maggi/Fuksas

With all the ironies crushing down on it, it's amazing this building is still standing. Opening shortly after a devastating conflict, the Peres Peace House is a venue for propagating peace and improving ties between Israel and its neighbours. Furthermore, this smart new piece of architecture is named after Shimon Peres, elder statesman of Israeli politics, Nobel peace prize laureate and founder of the Peres Centre for Peace, a successful non-governmental organisation. He is also the country's president, which complicates matters. While the Peres Centre arranges for the treatment of injured Gaza children in Israeli hospitals, Peres publicly defends the military attacks that put them there.

But the Peace House could yet live up to its name. When it opens next month, the building will serve as the Peres Centre's new HQ. Its ethos is that peace in the region will be made between people, not governments, and its activities range from organising football matches between mixed Israeli and Palestinian youth teams to establishing a cross-border chamber of commerce. The new building enables the Peres Centre to host conferences, talks and arts events. It will also house Shimon Peres's personal library and archives, for the benefit of researchers and students. A one-stop peace shop, if you like. But as well as helping to achieve peace, this building had to somehow represent it - to make solid an abstract quality.

Landed with this tall but prestigious order was Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas. Though little known in Britain, Fuksas is one of Europe's most renowned architects - an expressive innovator who would rather design with a paintbrush than a computer. His work varies wildly in style but is marked by a sculptural flair that gives rise to grand gestures and memorable forms. His recent Zenith music hall in Strasbourg, for example, is a wonky drum covered in an orange membrane that lights up at night like a lantern; his huge Milan Exhibition Centre, meanwhile, is draped in a swirling roof of steel and glass.

The Peace House is another of Fuksas's poetic one-offs, although it shows an appropriate degree of restraint. It is situated on the seafront in the ancient port town of Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, an area populated, peacefully, by both Israeli Arabs and Jews. In essence, it is simply a long box emerging out of the hillside. The short end, facing the sea, is a wall of clear glass; the other three sides are made up of thin horizontal bands of copper-green concrete and glass of various thicknesses, layered apparently randomly, like sedimentary rock. These strata, says Fuksas, allude to "time and patience, the stratification of the history of two peoples". The building materials, too, represent "places that have suffered heavily": solid concrete for times of stability, fragile glass for conflict and turmoil. The only clear view is out to the sea - to the future. "It is the representation of an emergency," says Fuksas of the building.

It all sounds rather literal but in reality it works marvellously. On the outside, the Peace House immediately stands out as something different - monumental yet light. To enter, you walk down from the road at the top, through a landscaped park alongside the building and round to the glass front doors facing the sea. While the walls are smooth and flat on the outside, on the inside the concrete strata project out, giving the sides an undulating, almost natural texture. Light entering between these concrete slabs illuminates the space magically, even mystically. At certain times, the low sun shines into the building, casting curious shadows, but generally it is filled with a soft, diffused glow that changes with the time of day. It feels, well, peaceful.

"I always try to do something I have never done before - that is my way," says Fuksas. "When you do a project, the first thing it has to be is useful for its tenants, but much more importantly, it has to have alchemy - like this magical light where you cannot see its origin. Because with this alchemy you have emotion. A building without emotion is not architecture."

The most dramatic space is Peres's library, at the back of the building, on the ground floor. You're basically standing underground here, since the building is half-submerged in the hillside, but an atrium rises up the back wall to skylights in the ceiling. There's a clear metaphor here - reaching upwards from the depths - but the space is powerful enough on its own terms. The other show-stopping area, and the climax of the public route through the building, is a wood-panelled auditorium on the first floor. Rather than the usual black box, its back wall is a giant window facing the Mediterranean. "If you don't want to listen to the people speaking, you can just watch the sea," says Fuksas.

The Peace House feels a bit like an inhabited monument - a beautiful art installation that unfortunately had to be divided into rooms. The interior tries its best not to disrupt the overall effect, though. In places, the upper floors don't quite touch the walls, with glass filling in the gaps. The internal divisions are also glass, where possible, although there is a concrete core running through the building containing stairs and services, plus a uniquely Israeli architectural feature: a reinforced "panic room" on each floor, a shelter in case of bomb or gas attack. Every new building in Israel is required to have them.

Building the Peace House hasn't been easy, Fuksas says. The project began more than 10 years ago - at a time when peace in the region did not seem such a distant prospect. Then, it was a joint initiative between Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, to be situated in Tulkarem, close to the West Bank-Israeli border. After Arafat's death, it proceeded in its current form, but there were myriad problems with acquiring the site and the funding (from private donors - Peres is nothing if not well-connected). Fuksas's grand vision was not easy to translate into reality either. It was imagined that the horizontal concrete elements would be made offsite then simply stacked on to columns, like a giant child's game. But this proved to be logistically impossible. So a local architect had to work out an alternative, whereby the walls were patiently built up one layer at a time. On the metaphorical level, that's somehow appropriate.

There's still an uneasy split running through this project, though. As well as that crushing irony (Peres strives to be the big peacemaker while defending Israeli military action), the Peace House wants to be both a US-style presidential memorial library and a grassroots NGO headquarters, part gift to humanity, part vanity project. "Sometimes, this fact is awkward," acknowledges Ron Pundak, the Peres Centre's director. "But basically we are putting a very clear distance between his activity as president and our activities as the Peres Centre for Peace."

Pundak also admits to some discomfort about the prospect of receiving, say, a Palestinian partner from a refugee camp in his shiny new HQ. At present, the Peres Centre operates out of a nondescript office block in Tel Aviv, which is probably better suited to its activities. "I won't find myself very comfortable there," says Pundak of the Peace House. "But it does not reflect the Peres Centre for Peace - it reflects the vision and life and future of Mr Peres. This is the innovative approach of Mr Peres. He's not a normal politician."

Nor, it bears remembering, is Israel a normal place in which to build. Architecture has almost become an instrument of warfare in this region. There is the notorious West Bank barrier, for example, which Israel has unilaterally built (and continues to build) around Palestinian areas. Israel says the barrier has improved security against cross-border terrorist attacks; Palestinians say it severs and imprisons communities, and amounts to a land grab. Architecture has also been used as a weapon in territorial disputes. Best known are the Israeli settlements that have been built across the West Bank over the last 40 years. Israelis counter that Arabs have also built up areas, particularly around Jerusalem, in order to reinforce future territorial claims, even though many of the buildings stand empty.

Above all, of course, there is the destruction of buildings and infrastructure in Gaza, and the sisyphean task of rebuilding them. In this context, the Peace House is a much-needed contrast. Whether or not it cultivates peace, it at least sends an alternative message. Fuksas is the first to acknowledge that such expressions can easily be dismissed as hopelessly idealistic - but, he adds, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be making them. "We must never stop thinking peace is possible," he says.

..................................................................................................................................................Webmaster's Note: As a background to this article, here is the situation in Jaffa for the remnants of its original inhabitants, belying the peaceful intentions proclaimed by the Peres Peace Centre.

Unfinished Business of Ethnic Cleansing - The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

http://www.counterpunch.org/cook09152008.html

By JONATHAN COOK

September 15 2008

Jaffa.

The ground floor of Zaki Khimayl’s home is a cafe where patrons can drink mint tea or fresh juice as they smoke on a water pipe. Located by Jaffa’s beach, a stone’s throw from Tel Aviv, the business should be thriving.

Mr Khimayl, however, like hundreds of other families in the Arab neighbourhoods of Ajami and Jabaliya, is up to his eyes in debt and trapped in a world of bureaucratic regulations apparently designed with only one end in mind: his eviction from Jaffa.

Sitting on the cafe’s balcony, Mr Khimayl, 59, said he feels besieged. Bulldozers are tearing up the land by the beach for redevelopment and luxury apartments are springing up all around his dilapidated two-storey home.

He opened a briefcase, one of five he has stuffed with demands and fines from official bodies, as well as bills from four lawyers dealing with the flood of paperwork.

“I owe 1.8 million shekels [$500,000] in water and business rates alone,” he said in exasperation. “The crazy thing is the municipality recently valued the property and told me it’s worth much less than the sum I owe.”

Jaffa is one of half a dozen “mixed cities” in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian citizens supposedly live together. The rest of Israel’s Palestinian minority, relatives of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, live in their own separate and deprived communities.

Despite the image of coexistence cultivated by the Israeli authorities, Jaffa is far from offering a shared space for Jews and Palestinians, according to Sami Shehadeh of the Popular Committee for the Defence of Jaffa’s Homes. Instead, Palestinian residents live in their own largely segregated neighbourhoods, especially Ajami, the city’s poorest district.

Only last month, Mr Shehadeh said, the Jewish residents’ committees proposed creating days when the municipal pool could be used only by Jews.

Although Jaffa’s 18,000 Palestinian residents constitute one-third of the city’s population, they have been left powerless politically since a municipal fusion with Jaffa’s much larger neighbour, Tel Aviv, in 1950. Of the cities’ joint population, Palestinians are just three per cent.

After years of neglect, Mr Shehadeh said, the residents are finally attracting attention from the authorities – but the interest is far from benign. A “renewal plan” for Jaffa, ostensibly designed to improve the inhabitants’ quality of life, is in fact seeking the Palestinian residents’ removal on the harshest terms possible, he said.

“The municipality talks a lot about ‘developing’ and ‘rehabilitating’ the area, but what it means by development is attracting wealthy Jews looking to live close by Tel Aviv but within view of the sea,” he said.

“The Palestinian residents here are simply seen as an obstacle to the plan, so they are being evicted from their homes under any pretext that can be devised.

“Some of the families have lived in these homes since well before the state of Israel was established, and yet they are being left with nothing.”

The current pressure on the residents to leave Ajami has painful echoes of the 1948 war that followed Israel’s declaration of its existence. Once, Jaffa was the most powerful city in Palestine, its wealth derived from the area’s huge orange exports.

As Israeli historians have noted, however, one of the Jewish leadership’s main aims in the 1948 war was the expulsion of the Palestinian population from Jaffa, especially given its proximity to Tel Aviv, the new Jewish state’s largest city.

Ilan Pappe, an historian, writes that the people of Jaffa were “literally pushed into the sea” to board fishing boats destined for Gaza as “Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion”.

By the end of the war, no more than 4,000 of Jaffa’s 70,000 Palestinians remained. The Israeli government nationalised all their property and corralled the residents into the Ajami neighbourhood, south of Jaffa port. For two years they were sealed off from the rest of Jaffa behind barbed wire.

In the meantime, Jaffa’s properties were either demolished or redistributed to new Jewish immigrants. The heart of old Jaffa, next to the port, was developed as a touristic playground, with palatial Palestinian homes turned into exclusive restaurants and art galleries run by Jewish entrepreneurs.

The Ajami district, on the other hand, was quickly transformed from a distinguished neighbourhood of Jaffa into its most deprived area, which became a magnet for crime and drugs. “The municipality showed its disdain for us by dumping all the city’s waste, even dangerous chemicals, on our beach,” Mr Shehadeh said.

The residents – even those who continued to live in their families’ original homes – lost their status as owners and overnight became tenants in confiscated property, forced to pay rent to a state-controlled company, Amidar.

Today, Amidar wants the families out to make way for wealthy Jewish investors and real estate developers.

Over the past 18 months, it has issued 497 eviction orders against Ajami families, threatening to make 3,000 people homeless.

“The problem for the families is that for six decades they have been ignored,” said Mr Shehadeh, who is standing in the local elections to the council next month.

“Four-fifths of Ajami’s population is Palestinian and no investments were made by the municipality. Amidar refused to renovate the homes, and the planning authorities refused to issue permits to the families to build new properties or alter existing ones.”

Faced with crumbling old homes and growing families, the residents had little choice but to fix and extend their properties themselves. Now years, sometimes decades, later Amidar is using these alterations as grounds for eviction, arguing that the residents have broken the terms of their rental agreements.

Mental Lahavi, vice-chairman of the local building and planning committee, recently admitted to the local media: “The municipality froze all [building] permits in the area for a long period and would not even let people replace an asbestos roof. They turned all the residents of the neighbourhood into offenders.”

Mr Khimayl has amassed large debts because he used parts of his home that, according to Amidar, were not covered by his contract – even though the house has been owned by his family since 1902.

Amidar has also been waging a legal battle over a minor alteration he made to the property.

Many years ago, Mr Khimayl rebuilt the dangerous external stone steps that provided the only access to the house’s second floor. In 2005, Amidar inspectors told him he had broken the terms of his contract and should remove the new steps.

Unable to reach his home in any other way, he replaced the stone steps with a metal staircase. Another inspector declared the staircase a violation of the agreement, too.

Mr Khimayl is currently using a metal staircase on wheels, arguing that the moveable steps are not a permanent alteration. Nonetheless, Amidar is pursuing him through the courts. Other families face similar problems.

A recent report by the Human Rights Association in Nazareth concluded the government was seeking to use a “quiet” form of ethnic cleansing, using administrative and legal pressure, to make Jaffa entirely Jewish.

Amidar has said it is simply upholding the law. “In cases in which the law has been broken, the company acts to protect the state’s rights, regardless of the value of the property or the religion or nationality of the tenants.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

This article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

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