Optimum of Development Stages – First Buildings and Infrastructure

Just as it does in Sharon’s book, an effort to articulate architectural thought in terms of comprehensive planning for development brackets the optimal minimum Yalan describes at the first stages of development. Yalan’s revision of inter-war functionalist terms responded, then, to the Jewish Agency’s planning engagement in these various scales. This revision stemmed more precisely from an effort to address the conflict between requirements of infrastructure and resource economy and the adaptability and growth of units of production. Framed in developmental terms, these requirements sought to preserve and enhance settlers’ initiative and opportunities to engage in different branches and economic sectors.

Indeed, the dual impetuses for economic compactness and adaptable systems, which Yalan described as equally vital, entailed a conflict. On the one hand, compact layouts would save scarce resources in regional development.270 Adaptability, on the other hand, required the capacity for future reuse and growth. Compactness would restrict multi-use of the sub-units.

                                                                                                                270

The Jewish Agency planners measured and judged compactness relative to several variables: the quantity of land for settlement allocated by the Jewish National Fund land (square of settlement Mishbetzet Hytyashvut), the Jewish Agency Technical Department infrastructure development (primarily roads, electricity and sewage systems) and the village and inter-regional-based services: “Infrastructure: Because of the relatively wide dispersal of population in a settlement, the infrastructure represents a large proportion of the preliminary investment and operating costs. As [an] indicator of efficient planning the road system can be used; its length influences the electricity, telephone water supply, drainage, and sewerage network, and so on. Figure 73 [in Yalan’s book, figure 3.23 in image appendix. M.h] shows various plans for roads and streets in moshavim.… Electricity: Compactness of planning improves efficiency both as regards the length of electricity lines and street lighting” (56).

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Multi-use, which was central to the various post-war revisions of inter-war modernism—especially, in the work of the members of Team Ten—was for Yalan rooted in a dual perspective: field practicality, based on a gradual acknowledgement of farmers’ daily experimental and contingent practices, and the Jewish Agency’s larger-scale perspective on the developmental management of economic, social, and natural resources.271

The requirements for optimal measures grounded an understanding of functions as mediators between scales and aspects of the rural habitat. Optimal components combined attention to both rural production facilities (Sharon’s “primary functions of development”) with infrastructure development. In turn, these two mutually determined the maximum constraints for planning and developing agencies, according to Yalan.

Yalan’s chapter on Nahalal village (designed by the Jewish German architect Richard Kaufman, 1921) addressed the conflict between the compact and the adaptable.272 The schemes that analyzed differences between planning, its realization, and adaptations in the village’s phases of development referred to the cowsheds as first buildings, as did this short note on the village’s first phases of development (Figure 3.25):

The double houses, which appear in a plan for water supply and drainage in the year 1923, are located at a distance of nearly 5 meters from the road. At the intersection between the long central street and the ring road there was a kind of plaza — a broadening of the street, with the distance of the double house from the square about 10 meters. Behind the houses, 60-80 meters from the road, double cowsheds serving two neighboring farmers were built. A number of settlers of Nahalal lived in the cowsheds until temporary huts were built. Only later were permanent houses erected. (82)

271 _{For the central texts and history of Team Ten’s notions of multi-use, see Joan Ockman, ibid; and Eric}

Mumford, ibid.

272

The village, located at the center of the Jezreel Valley, was the icon of Jewish cooperative villages originating from the third wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

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Defining the village’s outer built limit (before the final avenue), cowsheds played a central role in settlers’ agricultural education and in the race for productivity in Yitzhak Elazari-Volcani’s diverse farming model, which he promulgated during the 1910s and 1920s. The model envisioned a cooperative village economy based upon a balanced cultivation model, comprised of field crops and livestock economy, in which milking cows would be a stable income source, a hedge against the fluctuation of crop yields and the poultry branch.273 In the decade following the 1921 Jaffa riots, these schemes also defined a measure of village security against hostile infiltrations. Exemplifying village preliminary development functions, cowsheds displayed both the compactness of the village and its static nature.274

The point Yalan makes is that despite the cowsheds’ location and arrangement, which delimited the parcels and restricted the farmyard’s growth, Kaufman’s scheme managed to undergo small changes. However, such countering of the static nature of the village scheme required costly dismantling of facilities. Thus, the disadvantages of the scheme’s alterations overshadowed its compact distribution.275 As such, the iconic nature of the Nahalal scheme corresponded with an aesthetic understanding of the civic realm, hindering a developmental approach.

273 _{Elazari Volcani, Rational Planning of Agricultural Settlement in Palestine (Jerusalem: Keren Hayesod, 1935),}

21. Volcani, a Jewish Russian agronomist, was hired in 1909 by the Jewish National Fund (see discussion in chapter 4). For Volcani’s research and planning on diverse farming, see Penslar, (1991).

274

The status of cowsheds as a key and initial role in settlement development is connected to the Jewish National Fund’s 1909 shift to the Elazari Volcani model of development based on the importance of diverse farming with security requirements. The status of cowsheds was initiated by both a family’s production moving away from dry land farming and the need of a village’s protection against hostile Palestinian incursions. See Raanan Weitz, ibid and Penslar, ibid.

275 _{A related issue that Yalan addresses in his discussion of static schemes (characteristic of Nahalal) is the}

immediate visual effect of the scheme upon realization. The dynamic scheme’s adaptability is thus deficient, as it pertains to its capacity to provide an accomplished vision of the settlement in the first phases of development. However, in view of the acknowledgment of alterations, this perfection of the static scheme is also a disadvantage as its modification weakens the primary claims of visual aesthetic completion. Yalan, ibid.

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Referring to the cowsheds through the temporal accent of first buildings, Yalan’s writing further shifted this use towards a systematic calculation. This type of locational, distributional, and economic reasoning promoted a diagrammatic reflection, in writing and drawing, on the organization of the farmstead production sector (Figure 3.26). It amounted not only to precise measuring and modeling but also to latent topological principles defining built and non-built programmatic entities and spatial partitions: 276

The location of the buildings along the axis of the plot permits the gradual enlargement of the buildings. Poultry and cattle sections are isolated by alternating rows from farmyard to farmyard. The brooder house is placed close to the farmhouse to enable constant supervision; a storeroom and laundry separate it from the poultry shed. The cowyard separates the poultry cowshed from the neighbor’s poultry shed. Space is left between the poultry shed and cowyard and the farmyard boundary…. All handling is carried out along non-crossing lanes. —Yalan, The Design of Agricultural Settlements, Technological Aspects of Community Development. (69) 277

Yalan draws upon the Rechovot Center’s applied research to define a posteriori development principles. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the Center had provided crucial insights for the functioning of the settlements founded in the 1950s. The state gradually structured regional councils based on this research (Moatzot Ezoriot).278 The Center’s in- house geographers used Central Place Theory, which led them to state that regional

276 _{Such principles amounted to a definition of design entities independently of shape and size. Entities instead}

were examined relative to their positions, proximity, and orientations. The source of this kind of thinking in Yalan’s design requires further inquiry. Rather than a precise disciplinary reference to the architectural culture of the post-war period in which a similar perspective of design and geometry was developed, in particular in the works of Aldo Van Eyck, Yalan’s resources may have been taken from Germanic precedents in the form of Ernst Neufert’s typological study. On Neufert’s notion of topology, see John Harwood, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, eds. Aggregate (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). For a theoretical account on this use of the notion of topology, see Jacques Fredet, De L’Usage de la Geometrie, ibid. Such a notion differs from the use that gained currency in digital (and parametric) inclined design discourses.

277 _{Weitz described this topological and economic calculation in “A Model for the Planning of New Settlement}

Projects” in World Development Vol. 8: “The effectiveness of the supporting system depends on the location and dispersal of its outlets throughout the project area” (708).

278 _{This question occupied a good part of the Research Center for Settlement’s work during the 1960s. (Prion,}

ibid). See also Weitz, From Peasant to Farmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

For more on the idea of developing the smaller scale unit first, and the portion of the regional infrastructure as a measure of risking disequilibrium in the region to the advantage of economizing preliminary costs of infrastructural development, see, Raanan Weitz, “Spatial Organization of Development and Developing Countries,” in Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 39, n.2 (April 1968): 179-185.

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organization should be based on economic, social, and physical planning analysis of the location and distribution of services and infrastructures. This analysis targeted the right framing of existing rural areas (an ensemble of villages and small towns) as regional units.279 As Figure 3.27 suggests, this analysis, similar to the reasoning at the level of the farmstead organization, relied on topological diagrams.