"Architect of Ruins"

[Image: Refugee camp, southern Gaza strip/Guardian's Special Report on Mideast.]

On settlements, the security wall, and Sharon's run at the Pritzker...

"If you consider that in contemporary architectural discourse flexibility and the provisional have almost become fetishes, it is surprising that Sharon has not been offered the Pritzker Prize." (...) "The buildings of today are the trash of tomorrow, and so Ariel Sharon will be remembered in more than one respect as an architect of ruins." - Eyal Weizman (A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture)


[Image: Construction on the Modi'in Ilit settlement in 2001. Photo credit: Efrat Shvili/B'Tselem]

On prefab litter and the leftover metaphors of a failed master plan...

"The broad streets and prefab houses in Gaza now look like the remains of a distant past. The settlements are already history, deformed skeletons of concrete and gravel, although they were only abandoned a few months ago. But as such, they have become a metaphor for something else: for the master plan itself. And perhaps no one better described such an end to the master plan than Bertolt Brecht, who once said that the best plans were always ruined by the faint-heartedness of those who carry them out, while the rulers are powerless to do anything about it." - Hassan Khader (editor of the Palestinian literary review Al Karmel)

Reported on: sight and sound (In Today's Feuilletons, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10.01.2006) [via: ArchNewsNow]