Blending Past and Present

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Jerusalem is becoming a showcase of enlightened planning

Not all news from the Middle East is atrocious. Amid turmoil, inflation and internal dissension, unperturbed by recent terrorist bombings in West Jerusalem, some Israelis are persistent in building a truly modern city whose past is a living part of the present.

Officially divided in 1949 as a result of the Israeli-Jordanian armistice agreement, Jerusalem was reunited by the Israelis in the Six-Day War of 1967. The city's urban designers now see their task as the creation of a city so livable and so interwoven that no one will ever want or be able to divide it again. This is being accomplished cooperatively by Jews, Muslims and Christians, whose often volatile emotions are embedded in every stone.

"At first, in the euphoria of clearing minefields and barbed-wire fences," says Jerusalem's city engineer and chief planner, Amnon Niv, "we shared the conventional modern planning wisdom that progress comes rushing down on a network of superhighways and that affluence shoots up only in skyscrapers." Jerusalem's mayor, Teddy Kollek, recalls that David Ben-Gurion, who had been Israel's first Prime Minister, even talked of demolishing the Old City wall to make Jerusalem free and open.

But the Israeli planners soon turned to studying Jerusalem's needs instead of international-style manifestoes to fashion their own city rather than another Brasilia. Heeding Historian Lewis Mumford's advice, they looked not to Baron Haussmann, who in the mid-19th century modernized Paris by cutting boulevards through the city's medieval fabric, but to Isaiah 65: 19, 21: "And I will rejoice in Jerusalem and joy in my people . .. and they shall build houses, and inhabit them."

In the walled Old City, which rests like a crown above the new sectors, modern buildings mingle harmoniously with ancient shrines and even millenniums-old archaeological finds. Beyond the restored wall, a few bare and square high-rises and housing projects, built during the '60s, mar the serene drama of the biblical landscape with its cypresses, legendary hills and craggy valleys. But almost everything else built since reunification shows respect for history and nature as well as hope for human harmony.

The shift from an emphasis on technocratic grandiosity to humanistic sensitivity, an approach that other cities might heed, is largely due to the work of the Jerusalem Committee, initiated in 1968 by Mayor Kollek. The group is made up of some 100 architects, urbanists, historians and theologians from 25 countries; its members include Mumford, Architect Philip Johnson, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame, former CBS Chairman William S. Paley and German Educator Hellmut Becker. Asking the committee's advice is Kollek's way of saying that Jerusalem belongs not only to Jews but to world civilization. Said the mayor to the committee after the first meeting: "You are like parents trying to tell your children not to make the same mistakes you made."

Kollek opposes his national government's policy of planting Jewish settlements on the West Bank, only a few miles from Jerusalem's city limits, because they "sap strength and people from our national capital." His One City plan for the development of the greater capital area would create an urban environment where human values are not run over by automobiles and where Jewish, Muslim and Christian neighborhoods form a cohesive entity. City districts are bonded by bustling streets that serve both traffic and shopping, as well as parks and recreation areas that provide contact and interaction. Says Kollek, extravagantly: "We are not trying to create a monolithic melting pot but a multicultural mosaic in a pluralistic society."

Like virtually every other city today, Jerusalem is beset by traffic jams, insufficient parking, illegal building and lack of maintenance. Yet Kollek's new planning approach is aesthetically successful, largely because it recognizes and emphasizes Jerusalem's two most striking aspects: its uniform golden color, which assures the blending of old and new, and the solemn majesty of the Old City wall, which symbolizes the pre-eminence of the Jerusalem where Jews built their first Temple, Christians mark the Resurrection, and Muslims commemorate Muhammad's ascension to heaven.

Prior to 1947, The British began restoration of the badly eroded wall, which was built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century on Roman ruins that are 1,400 years older. The Israelis have completed the wall's restoration and built a safe walkway on its ramparts. Strollers can now amble around most of the Old City. The walk is interrupted by the Temple Mount, where Herod's Temple was eventually replaced by the Dome of the Rock, which is under Muslim administration. The wall is surrounded by a national park that is studded with archaeological finds and historic sites. Each of the wall's seven gates will be given special architectural treatment. So far, only Damascus Gate has been fully restored. It has been enhanced by a modern setting, a kind of amphitheater, that dramatizes goings and comings, vendors and human encounters.

Much of the restoration of Jerusalem and its new public parks, gardens and art works is being funded by the Jerusalem Foundation, established in 1966 as a clearinghouse for donations from abroad.

To date it has collected more than $100 million. Its most impressive accomplishment is a galaxy of museums, theaters, gardens, historic monuments and a cinematheque along a stretch of the city wall extending down the Valley of Hinnom, called "the cultural mile." It serves Arabs, whose population has almost doubled since reunification, as well as Jews. The foundation also helps finance some of the city's extensive archaeological work.

Archaeology is something of a national sport in Israel. The most recently completed excavation is a 200-yd.-long stretch of the original Roman main street, called the Cardo. Under Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century, the Romans made it a grand boulevard lined with columns and shopping arcades. It continued to be maintained under Byzantine rule. In 1971 a plan was devised to build a cluster of town houses and a shopping mall along the nearby Street of the Jews. But when ancient column stubs were found, from both Roman and Byzantine times, Architects Peter Bugod and Esther Niv-Kren-del kept redesigning the prizewinning project to keep pace with the digging. The result is a stunning feat of urban design. Shops have opened in the ancient arcades. The great columns lend drama to the mall. Above this living museum are new houses. Nearly 2,000 years are linked by light that filters down from shafts in the town-house courts to the Roman pavement some 30 yds. below. The Cardo connects with the famous Arab market in the Muslim quarter.

Before Jerusalem's reunification, the Jewish Quarter in the Old City was almost totally destroyed. A simple arch rising from the ruins of the Hurva, the most prominent of the old synagogues, is a deliberate reminder of the ravage, and a rebuilt quarter is emerging as a showcase for a new architecture of context. About a third of the residential work was done by internationally known Moshe Safdie, who teaches at Harvard and has done some of his best work in Jerusalem. It is as "modern" as anything touted in the architectural magazines, yet disciplined by the unique constraints of traditional stone, traditional arches and domes, and tight, medieval alleys, stairways and interior courts. Constraints, it seems, free true creativity, in sharp contrast to originality for its own sake. But only 5 1/2% of the total population live in the Old City. The rest live in old residential districts or new communities built on the nearby hills.

The most recent new neighborhoods, Ramot, East Talpiot and Gilo, on the outskirts, have also eschewed Bauhaus banality in favor of Jerusalem architecture.

That is quite a feat in a world in which most new housing from Alaska to Zanzibar looks distressingly alike.

Kollek's vision is not popular with all factions, but then no idea could be in such a disputed arena. Yet at its best, it tries to pull together this beleaguered city by developing its historic corridors not with freeways that tear up land and divide neighborhoods but with carefully planned "strip developments." They would slowly weave Jerusalem more closely together to make it again an inspiration to the world. --By Wolf Von Eckardt