Introduction
A walk through the city of Jerusalem reveals a remarkable variety of changing urban textures. Until the 1860s the city was contained within the city walls build by Suleiman the Magnificent; with the arrival of the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, a small settlement was set up across the valley to the west with a windmill to provide employment for the brave souls who dared (at first only during the day) to leave the safety of the Jewish Quarter.
Sir Moses' little colony now called "Yemin Moshe" in his honour, was the first example of modern planning in the city. He built others and towards the end of the nineteenth century, the city began to grow as new immigrants came. They came in waves and built modest low stone houses: a careful look at a map will reveal tight warrens of courtyards and streets, some scarcely two metres wide, irregularly spread around the city wherever land was available. Very often the exact pattern of the streets reveals the favoured characteristics of a particular community: some preferred large open courtyards; others, narrow streets. Two of these settlements, named Mazkeret Moshe and Ohel Moshe and built in testimony to Montefiore, show the efforts of philanthropic builders trying to reflect traditional living patterns in slightly superior surroundings.
But even the most cursory glance at a map will reveal one of the most remarkable features of Jerusalem's planning history - the garden suburb with its geometrical layout, narrow avenues of trees and garden walkways. Modern planning was established in the city as soon as the British establishment their military government there at the end of the First World War. The new rulers established planning procedures and enforced building regulations; famously, most (and eventually all) new buildings in the city were to be faced in stone.
The British influence was not however a matter of dry colonial lawmaking The combination of the essentially rather anarchist arts-and-crafts approach of Charles Ashbee, brought in to hold the novel appointment of city planning adviser and the high-minded, pragmatic Anglicism of Ronald Storrs, the first military governor of the city, created much of the modern image of the city.
The Old City became essentially an object: something to be looked at and learned from. It was therefore to be set in isolation and surrounded (at any rate on the western side where growth was most pressing) by a park. Ashbee built a walk around the Old City walls: he wanted the townspeople to see the way the buildings had grown one upon the other; it was this gradual accumulation over the centuries that fascinated him. He saw planning as essentially an educational matter - the hallmark of the modern planner.
He restored the fourteenth-century cotton market - both the building and the market itself. He saw the activity as inseparable from the place: he realised that the continual transformation of the ancient city was dependent upon maintaining city life itself.
During this period the city council's planning committee approved plans for Richard Kaufmann's garden suburbs which were built for the various Jewish organisations concerned with making the city a centre for their life and activities. Rehavia, designed in three stages from 1924, is scarcely more than a few streets wide and yet its atmosphere is probably the most evocative in the whole of the city. The villas and small blocks of flats were built for the new elite of professionals and academics; those coming from Germany were built in the most progressive German style which found a late Spring in Mandatory Palestine: sometimes these new houses were built of German materials by German builders.
The new garden suburbs weaved around the old settlements: the gaps in between were filled with houses in more esoteric styles. Every short walk through the centre of Jerusalem's residential districts is a journey across fifty or more years of planning history; everywhere one goes, one sees another story from another past; sometimes poignant, sometimes brave, sometimes sad and sometimes startling.
This exhibition is a series of views of buildings that lie along a route through the centre of the city. It does not include some well-known large modern projects, which succeed in creating private worlds of their own; rather it is a look at the buildings which speak the complex and introspective language of the tangled web of the centre of the city. In many cases the photographer Shuki Kook has captured the atmosphere of the buildings especially for the current exhibition. The projects are drawn from the different layers of the past; some are restorations, some substantial extensions or alterations, and some are entirely new. The aim is to give an idea of the complexity of a city which for some exerts an almost mystical pull.