When we talk about architectures and sacred spaces we maybe tend to picture in our minds buildings designed according to specific traditions and respecting precise beliefs. But in the past there have been architectural studios that tried to come up with more original visions to provide different solutions. Quite a few architects and design studios worked for example on re-imagining The Western Wall Plaza area in Jerusalem.
The Western or Wailing Wall - Kotel in Hebrew and Al-Buraq in Arabic - is the retaining wall supporting the platform of what Jews refer to as the Temple Mount and what Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. After Israel gained control of the Old City of Jerusalem in June 1967 during the Six-Day War, the Mughrabi Quarter - an eight-hundred-year-old Muslim neighborhood adjacent to the Western Wall - was destroyed to allow thousands of Jews to access the holy site.
The Western Wall area turned therefore into a vast plaza, a sort of tabula rasa and architects often tried to present proposals and manifestos for this space, among them Louis Kahn, Isamu Noguchi, Moshe Safdie and Superstudio.
The various suggestions, recreated via 3-D printed models, are currently on display at the Pavilion of Israel at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (until Sunday). Entitled "In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation" (a reference to the Latin phrase "in statu quo res erant ante bellum", literally, "in the state in which things were before the war"), the exhibition explores the Status quo mechanism established in the 19th century to regulate conflicts and facilitate co-existence in the Holy places.
The exhibition features five major contested holy sites - The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, explored via a color-coded, 3-D model of the church by German architect Conrad Schick (1822–1901), the Mughrabi Ascent, The Western Wall Plaza, The Cave of the Patriarchs, and Rachel's Tomb.
In the '80s the Israel Museum in Jerusalem invited Adolfo Natalini and David Palterer of Italian radical architecture group Superstudio (an architectural practice that has directly and indirectly inspired in the last few years fashion collections but also sets for art exhibitions) to propose their design for the Western Wall Plaza.
Natalini and Palterer came up with a grid which they overlaid on the entire precinct, their infinite linear web was lightly materialised only at its intersections which turned into vertical indicators - a hybrid of a tree, a column and a sign. Near the walls the indicators grew into perforated stone pillars, "shade towers" for lighting and ventilation, which also carried a double platform, the lower one for prayer, the upper for ceremonies. Both hovered over the extended archaeological zone underneath.
As the designers noted: "The open space around the Temple Mount is a place between the holy and the secular, a place between past and future, between memory and hope, ruin and architectural design. The design is therefore about a zone that is both inside and outside space and time; an intersection of space and insterstice of time. We are working between spaces and between times."
The exhibition notes about Superstudio's plan explain how the grid was primarily a strategy of silencing historical narratives and nationalist zeal and was conceived as an introverted process of turning the design back onto itself.
Superstudio's plan was supposed to leave a mark on society rather than merely improving the design of the plaza and solidifying its function as a holy place and national symbol. The grid turned therefore into an antidote to all nationalisms, transforming the plaza from monolithic container or arena of bitter struggle into a real Supersurface where a multiplicity of identities could live together in peace. There's definitely a lesson for us all here as maybe it's about time that, rather than thinking about building walls, we rediscovered the unifying power of grids.
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