| the wall, again, as architecture stands between a divided
| world the 'semantic' book search on google gives us these as
| Berlin wall as architecture:
|
http://books.google.co.in/books?q=berlin+wall+as+architecture&oi=print
But on a fundamental level, it is also a piece of architecture. And its
construction has generated an architectural debate as charged as any in
the political realm.
That debate has pitted strategists who mine the leftist architectural
theories of the 1960's for ideas on contemporary urban warfare, against
architects who see the barrier as a perversion of those ideas, along
with the utopian visions of Modernists who believed society's problems
could be solved with concrete, glass and steel. It is not only unfolding
in the halls of academia, but in Israeli and American military circles.
And it presents a vision of the wall as a system of complex,
interweaving spaces - some concrete, some invisible - that is far from
our normal perception of an international border.
At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, a 35-year-old Israeli
architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his
homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights
organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being
collaborators in the colonization of the West Bank.
....
Compared to such a dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to
separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from
antiquity, a contemporary counterpart to the Roman "limes," the crude
wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warring tribes - to separate
civilization from barbarity.
Yet to Mr. Weizman, these are simply two forms of the same evil. General
Navez, he said, "is simply trying to replace one form of control with
another that is less visible."
| and the war machine
THE so-called smooth space that is part of General Navez's military
vision contrasts strikingly with the experience of the average Israeli
or Palestinian on the ground, where it is harder to escape from concrete
reality. In the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis, for example, the
former road to Jericho now ends at a part of the wall spray-painted with
anti-American and anti-Israeli graffiti. A freshly paved road leading to
an Israeli settlement runs alongside the barrier.
cont'd...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/arts/design/01ouro.html