Rebelliousness & Retelling This is Inheritance of Peace and I’m Amy Shimshon-Santo. Today our guest is Sharon Rotbard. He’s an architect who has been equally concerned with design and construction as he has been critiquing demolitions. He’s a writer who also co-founded an independent press to increase access to literature through translation and publishing. Rotbard has written extensively on a difficult and important topic: urbicide — or the deliberate destruction of neighborhoods along with their social and cultural fabric. Stay tuned for our surprising conversation on rebelliousness, the importance of retelling the city, and ancient oaths passed down for centuries. Sharon Rotbard (SR): I’m a husband, father, and a grandfather — first and foremost. Also, I’m a son because my mother is still alive. For the rest, it is a little bit complicated because I’ve been practicing many professions since early adolescence. I’m basically an autodidact. The only school that I ever graduated from was the architecture school, and it was a little bit by accident. For example, I never graduated from high school. I was a working boy since the age of 16. I was living in the only communist kibbutz in Israel. In fact, it is the only place in Israel where you have a memorial to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Amy Shimshon-Santo (AS²): Wow. Really? SR: Yes. A few trees and a plaque. But the kibbutz was privatized quite some time ago. AS²: What is the name of the kibbutz? SR: Yad Hana. AS²: Is it still active? SR: It still exists, but it was privatized 15 years ago. It is a completely different place. I go there very rarely, usually to the cemetery to say farewell to old people who I knew in the past or friends’ parents. It has radically changed from a collective village to become a kind of suburb. The whole surrounding has changed, radically. I was educated in Paris. I studied architecture in Paris with some prominent figures. The one who really affected me was Paul Virilio. He was also an autodidact, and a theorist-philosopher, a very exceptional man. Later in Israel, I practiced architecture. I’m a registered licensed architect. But I quit practicing since the beginning of this century. I mainly work as a publisher, editor, book designer, and also a writer and a teacher. I’ve been teaching at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design for the past 25 years. I developed a program there called Spontaneous Architecture in which students build, by themselves, a structure that they design. Usually they sleep there on the last night of the semester. Within this framework, we erected many dozens of structures, both in Israel and also in India. Most of them were temporary, but there are still some structures that work, are still standing, and in use. I am more into literature than architecture nowadays. I’ve been moving, very constantly, from building to writing and publishing. I founded the first, and up to now the only, book series of architecture books in Hebrew. We did all the classics: Le Corbusier’s Vers une arcitecture, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Learning From Las Vegas by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, or Rem Kolhass’ Delirious New: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. This is something that I left to one of my former students, who is now directing this collection. In the past 20 years or so, I have directed a literary collection of books in which I’ve published most of the books of Georges Perec, Michel Houellebecq, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Thomas Bernhard, László Krasznahorkai who just got the Nobel Prize last year. Many others, including Georges Simenon and Werner Herzog. I prefer reading novels to architecture books. “What I understood already as a young architect came from doing things: building, writing, and publishing. When we write, or speak, or tell, we might change the physical reality in a much more profound way than with bulldozers or concrete.” AS²: Wonderful. The second question dovetails with what you were outlining. It is about what you get to do with your life force. You didn’t just accidentally stop practicing architecture, but you felt that the political and spatial impact on communities was not something you wanted to be a part of. I found that fascinating: the implications of architecture, liberatory architecture, or harming architecture. But if I ask you, what you get to do with your life force, do you feel a pulse beneath these shifts or changes, and actions that is driving you? SR: If I don’t have some kind of external need to go to class and give my seminar, I am kind of drifting in between all kinds of activities and arenas associated with my publishing activity, but also in neighborhood activity. What I understood already as a young architect — this already came from doing things: building and writing and publishing — I understood that, in fact, when we write, or speak, or tell, we might change the physical reality in a much more profound way than sometimes with bulldozers or concrete. Architects have this urge or desire to leave their marks, to change the reality. I discovered that in many cases, the built reality somehow follows a certain idea, or a narrative, or a story. At a certain point, I could really see it in my eyes already in my 20s. I was sitting in a room, and there was this spliff that moved from one person to another, and at a certain moment there was this guy who said, “Listen, this street — Sheinkin Street — this is the next thing. This is going to be the hippest street of Tel Aviv.” Everybody told him, “Oh! You are crazy.” But he said, “No.” A few months later, he went there and founded this small gallery. Since then, it is history. Nowadays, we are on the third wave of this street. “I thought to myself that maybe if I really care to change the city, perhaps a better way would be to rewrite it. Rewrite its story. Tell its story in a different fashion.” I saw it in my own eyes how just by deciding, in an almost arbitrary way, that “this is going to be the next thing,” “this is going to be rebranded,” it might generate, very quickly, physical changes. I thought to myself that maybe if I really care to change the city, perhaps a better way would be to rewrite it. Rewrite its story. To tell its story in a different fashion. I did this already once, when it comes to Tel Aviv’s story and its relation with Jaffa. But also in a more zoomed-in manner, when it comes to my own neighborhood Shapira. When I moved there, its story appeared only as a small paragraph in a very big book about Tel Aviv. One of my own projects was to find its story, to find its original or early inhabitants, and to finally publish the story in a book. Places which are somehow narrated, written, or told have more resources and more chances to resist all kinds of threats that they are subjected to. This is quite useful advice which I also share with my Bedouin or Palestinian students who are more likely to be subjected to such threats. My own neighborhood, at the time when I moved in, was considered as the second poorest neighborhood in Tel Aviv. (I guess also in the times of Shefir-Klein (שפיר-קליין), in the time of your mother, it was considered quite a poor, popular quarter. Quartier populaire, as they say in French. It was a working-class neighborhood. At the time, 25 or 30 years ago, there were already ideas to demolish it, to rebuild it, or to do all kinds of radical changes. This is, nowadays, completely impossible because we have the story and the book. “Places which are somehow narrated, written, or told have more resources and more chances to resist all kinds of threats that they are subjected to. This is quite useful advice which I also share with my Bedouin or Palestinian students who are more likely to be subjected to such threats.” If you’re speaking about my life force, I am sometimes envious about the life force of architects who are building. I mean, this is something which is fascinating and impressive. This kind of life force which bursts out in concrete. But I feel that it is sometimes much more efficient, and maybe even more honest, and fair to the people who are concerned, to try to generate changes through writing and publishing. AS²: I’m glad you felt that because it’s already helped my little life. When I found your book it was the first time I could read about where my mother spent her childhood, from 2 to 19. She has many wonderful memories as a younger person of playing with kids of different backgrounds, admiring and loving local art, culture, and embroidery. And feeling that the path that Israel was taking was away from her love, her wonder and her joy, towards a more obviously monotheistic, monocultural vision. I guess I always thought of her as an outlier, and then I realized from reading your work, and from looking at the census material from that period (Census 1931), that where you are matters. There are lots of stories that are asking for space and that are demanding to be heard. You’ve gotten to do that in your writing, so I thank you for that. So, the next question is about your connection to lands. How would you define that? SR: Do you mean soil, or countries, or land? I mean, I own a little piece of land, 250 square meters. When we came back from Paris, I wanted to build a house for my wife. AS²: Mmh. “There was this law of the properties of absentees which in fact confiscated — in one move — all the properties of Palestinians in the country. Which means that 93% of the lands available in Israel for construction got into our hands through this law. Which means it is a stolen land.” SR: I was mentioning it in our conversation before, there was this law of the properties of absentees which in fact confiscated — in one move — all the properties of Palestinians in the country. Which means that 93% of the lands available in Israel
