Simple Functions as Deficient and Ideal Economic Bare Minimum

Returning to the book’s institutionally laden vocabulary, the roles simple, economic, and primary functions played in Sharon’s description of the first rural building and the civic complex testified to the ways these functionalist notions signified both an ideal and a challenge. Using lenses based on Bauhaus and development planning, Sharon emphasized an understanding of functions as primary economic requirements in the context of territorial development. His critical comment on the implementation of housing as a zoned function in Israeli new towns described this first phase as sterile, lacking in capacity to stimulate new territorial development. It defined a first stage of development that was based on a deficient economic bare minimum. Instead, Sharon used the terms first buildings and the civic comprehensive complex to suggest a sufficient and stimulating primary development.

The kibbutz and Bauhaus environments invoked the capacity of the simple function to conjure an ideal representation of an architectural program through the example of first buildings. These by extension also granted an optimal and hence effective framework for newly developed communities, be those of Jewish co-op society or the Bauhaus-designed co-op facilities. Bruno Zevi’s Preface provided the most concise and poetic formulation of this idea:

Israel is an almost unique phenomenon in this century. Even the shack had a utopian flavor for the emigrants from the ghettos. Aesthetics were nourished by ethics and founded on it. A building, before being good or bad, was great just because it existed. No

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matter how it was designed, its generation drive was a messianic yearning. In the initial decades of Sharon’s curriculum, a schism between content and image could not be conceived: the daily content was poetry, life was so pregnant with significance that the message did not require any expressive filter. 216

The preface was formulated in the pioneering spirit of the 1944 Federation of Jewish Workers’ 20 Years of Building publication and its idealization of first settlement buildings. As discussed in Chapter 2, this publication concluded with a claim regarding the edifying role of simple shacks and tents.217 In Zevi’s Preface, the shack, as a primary function, denoted what appeared to precede a disciplined act of design. The simple fact of its existence gave it meaning and legitimacy. Zevi used this figure as a metonym standing for Sharon’s pre-independence practice in which, by extension, no cultural or representational schism occurred between content and image (or between ethics and aesthetics). Close to Hannes Meyer’s understanding of buildingas devoid of superfluous contents, Zevi depicted the truthfulness of basic functions in terms of their effective representation of the establishment of settlement.218 Thus the shack stood for an idealization of the economic bare minimum in initial territorial development.

Sharon’s discussion of his early experiences in the kibbutzof Gan Shmuel, and in kibbutzplanning more broadly, exemplify a range of relations to what he understood to be the result of purely economic considerations. At times, these comments conjure a dry descriptive tone. For instance, describing improvements in rural production facilities in the chapter on kibbutz planning and social development, Sharon notes: “The farm

                                                                                                                216 _{Sharon, 6.}

217

20 Years of Building. Essay by the architect engineer M. Reiner, discussed in chapter 2.

218 _{See also Sharon’s description of how looking at the kibbutz rural production facilities gave him a simple urge}

to build: “On the following morning, going over the building shacks, stables and houses, examining and studying the newly erected farm and residential structures, I was strongly stirred by the urge to do something, to build, to contribute my share to my old-young kibbutz. There was an urbanite need for an additional floor to be built over an existing house” (46). These descriptions communicate the creed of functionalism, understood as a “direct expression” of inner contents without any mediation.

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buildings underwent many changes and improvements as a result of economy advances. The cowsheds, for example, are today well-equipped with elliptical milking platforms. The poultry runs have grown from small sheds into multi-story ‘egg factories’ lit day and night, in order to double and triple eggs production.”219In contrast with Bruno Zevi’s comment, this was a procedural description. It not only framed the calculation regarding the kibbutz’s economic functions as indifferent to questions of design and form making, but also as devoid of any particular expression.

However, in line with Zevi, the kibbutz chapters also described basic economic functions in the Jewish pioneering environment as ideal representations of preliminary stages of territorial development. Economic rationale was at the center of the geometric simplicity of beehives’ structure, the rejection of Sharon’s complex and costly design for a cowshed, and the resourcefulness of a rushed construction of a bridge in stone and concrete, which was reinforced with elements stolen from a railroad near the site.220 As noted above, Sharon refers to these designs as experiments in first buildings: “The first structures that could be termed buildings were the stables, cowsheds, beehives, and poultry runs”221 _{(Figures 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6). The farm buildings and temporary dwelling} huts were the initial acts of material assemblage corresponding to the minimal and optimal requirements of land development.

Sharon’s emphasis on their classificatory role (“first to be termed”) suggested in addition that “first” signified an ontological dimension as well as temporal precedence. Using the notion of building, Sharon retrospectively projected on these construction

                                                                                                                219 _{Sharon, 62.}

220 _ibid 221

This description appears on the cover page and image album of the chapter on his years at the kibbutz of Gan Shmuel. Sharon. 23.

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experiences the term Bauhaus professors and students used to define a revised domain of architectural intervention. He suggested in fact the environment of the kibbutz and of pioneering activity as the primary site for such a conceptual delineation. As such, these structures and environment designated the conditions of possibility of language and attention defining the field of practice of the modern architect.

The critique of the sterility of housing without employment in Israeli new towns should be read in the context of Sharon’s designation of rural production facilities and temporary huts as first buildings. It is this deficiency in new towns’ housing that the civic complex as a developmental measure seeks to remedy. Introducing the comprehensive civic complex, through the example of the Beer Sheva hospital, argued for the need of programmatic, spatial, and modular re-articulation of functions. Sharon’s description of the complex reused the terminology of simple and economic solutions, both for the discussion of its parts and the whole. It communicated his understanding of this kind of institution (and of himself accordingly) as the bearer, after independence, of design and cultural values attributed to the kibbutz and Bauhaus amalgam (which dates prior to independence and appears earlier in the book).222

Sharon’s discussion of his and Eidelsohn’s risky response to the Ife campus project in Nigeria resembled their response to the hospital complex. They described a rationale concerning what defines sufficient preliminary functions of territorial development. In so doing they ignored the brief’s requirement for a first phase of a temporary huts-based campus plan. Instead, they immediately presented the client with a

                                                                                                                222

Chapter 2 has shown how this displacement of rural simplicity to the metropolitan realm was characteristic of Israeli architectural writings on civic monuments during the 1950s and 1960s.

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fully designed and physically modeled final project.223 _{In this they expressed a belief that}

the clients’ definition of the campus’s provisional stage of development was deficient; this belief served Sharon’s aim to present the finalized design proposal as an optimal development phase, substituting the one that the commission has stipulated. As with the critique of housing, they assumed that this provisional stage consisted of an economic bare minimum that was devoid of representational and developmental value.

In the case of Ife campus and in relation to Israeli new towns, Sharon and Eidelsohn’s comprehensive approach stood for the modern design’s ability to devise an accomplished institutional representation. This representation evokes the simplicity of first buildings (and by extension the kibbutz and the Bauhaus amalgam) through the post- independence institution, to claim a unique developmental approach that is both basic and comprehensive.

Moreover, Sharon’s functionalist-developmental vocabulary (based on inter-war and post-World War II approaches) with which he asserted the civic complex representation of a bare minimum, supported his claim to being a cultural and institutional mediator.According to this assertion, the civic complex, as much as Sharon the architect, translated, displaced and preserved the values of optimal and ideal primary functions. This raises the issue of his understanding of professional expertise, the subject

                                                                                                                223

“According to the program, we started to prepare the first master plan. Then the Government decided suddenly to delay our work on the university: instead it decided to set up a provisional campus of wooden pavilions, to be erected in Ibadan, until the plans and buildings for Ife would be completed. We made up our minds to take a chance and to prepare parallel to the sketches for the provisional wooden campus—a detailed layout for the Ife university site, as well as preliminary plans for the faculties of humanities, the halls of residence, the library and secretariat. We tried to convince them that they would lose notice by erecting the Ife campus instead of the wooden barracks in Ibadan. The premier became very enthusiastic and asked us to present the plans on the following day. To our surprise, the decision to set up a provisional campus was never mentioned again, and our plans for the detailed campus layouts and buildings were enthusiastically accepted, it was a useful lesson in how to inflect clients and politicians by presenting attractive plans and models” (127).

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