Tolerance Is a Wasteland by Saree Makdisi;

Author:Saree Makdisi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520346253
Publisher: University of California Press

were often idiosyncratic, but they were also grounded in two ways—in an LA vernacular of common materials and against an International Style of purist forms. As these gestures began to lose the specificity of the former and the foil of the latter, they became not only more extravagant (almost neo-Expressionist or neo-Surrealist) but also more detached: they became signs of “artistic expression” that could be dropped, indifferently, almost anywhere—in LA, Bilbao, Seattle, Berlin, New York. Why this curve, swirl or blob here, and not that one? If there is not much in the way of apparent constraint—of formal articulation derived from a resistant material, structure or context—architecture quickly becomes arbitrary or self-indulgent.41

And that is exactly why—on the other hand—it made perfect sense for Gehry to have been chosen as the architect for the Jerusalem museum: his design would have drawn the site out of and away from the specificities of the local context. The Museum of Tolerance is based in Los Angeles; Gehry is an LA-based architect. In a way, this entire project is really a projection not just of a certain kind of American Zionism but specifically of a Hollywood-infused LA strand of Zionism. With Gehry in charge, the former site of Ma’man Allah Cemetery would become much closer (in a sense) to Los Angeles than to, say, the Mount of Olives, on the other side of Jerusalem. The logic of separation in play in the museum plan would be made complete by this last stage of removal from local context and the ground occupied. Occupation would in fact be turned into removal and symbolic transfer of bodies and indeed of the entire site. The doubts and hesitations expressed in other Israeli projects (Independence Park, the wall) would be transcended in an effort to enable the construction of a form of belonging or claim to the land that, at once, finally erases the last traces of the Palestinian Other and lifts the very land, as it were, away from itself and plugs it immediately into global space. This is emphasized in the artists’ impressions of the design, which occlude the project’s urban context: this museum could be anywhere in the world—and that is part of the point.

But on this point another set of contradictions now has to be taken into account. Although Hal Foster and others argue that there is a kind of self-referential arbitrariness in Gehry’s late style, Gehry himself insists that his work is always site sensitive, and so do many of his admirers (Foster’s point, indeed, is that that very insistence itself suggests its opposite). “The important urban idea is to fit a building into the fabric of the city,” Gehry says; “it takes time to get the body language of a building, to fit it into an environment.”42 J. Fiona Ragheb writes that “Gehry’s building looks to its physical site for its definition, twisting and bending in order to root itself more firmly into its surroundings.”43 Jean-Louis Cohen says that Gehry’s buildings are designed with “what he calls the specific ‘body language’ of each city” in mind.

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