par Fisher, Axel 
Editeur scientifique Versteegh, Pieter;Meeres, Sophia
Référence Alterrurality,, exploring representations and ‘repeasantations’, ARENA Architectural Research Network, Fribourg (CH), Ed. 1, page (171-203)
Publication Publié, 2015-02-13
Editeur scientifique Versteegh, Pieter;Meeres, Sophia
Référence Alterrurality,, exploring representations and ‘repeasantations’, ARENA Architectural Research Network, Fribourg (CH), Ed. 1, page (171-203)
Publication Publié, 2015-02-13
Partie d'ouvrage collectif
| Résumé : | “Town air breathes free”, so the medieval German saying went. Go figure why, then, rurality and especially the village form of settlement is on the current architectural agenda anew? After all, in the city peasants were freed from serfdom and corvées, modern workers pursued a promise of well-being and opportunities, and more than half of today’s world population lives in urban settlements. But the sharp and violent machinery of progress brings urban rationality and efficiency to supersede rural superstitions and customary habits, and to disintegrate traditional bearings and social structures. Overwhelmed by the anonymity of mass culture, urbanites are forced to a perpetual redefinition of their individual and collective identity. The modern Western city, bowel and brain of world economy, feeds on the tensions between two apparently opposed destinies: emancipation and uprooting. Paradoxically, the city’s centralizing effort is very soon paired by a desire of conquest and escapism. The increasing urban malaise which surfaced in the early 19th century is soon compensated by the emergence of Sunday getaways, such as those immortalized by Auguste Renoir’s paintings and his son Jean’s movies after him, but also by a revaluation of nature already registered by Elisée Reclus.Hence, the primacy of rurality and the “return to the land” invoked by a number of urban utopias in the 19th and 20th century represent the epiphenomenon of an blatant social demand for landscape and for a sense of grounding, but also alternative models to metropolitanism. Read through this lens, the experience of Zionist agricultural colonization conducted between 19th and 20th century opens to many general and timely issues – not to minimize its peculiarities nor its past and present dramatic consequences. To be sure, the “return to the land and to agriculture” advocated by the Zionist self-emancipation project addresses a paradigm of uprooted man: the luftmensch or wandering Jew. In agricultural colonization, as a device of physical and moral reconstruction of individual and collective identities, the agricultural village is the privileged topos for the reconquest of a productive role within society, for the adoption of a daily life paced by natural cycles, for the building of a physical and sense-bearing landscape.From the agricultural colleges promoted by European philanthropy to the invention of the kibbutz and moshav, the array of modern Jewish village prototypes in Palestine is impressive. Such experiments have one dominant issue of general significance: how can the authenticity and the sense of community of the rural village compete with the boasting attractiveness of urban life? In the early 1920s, the Zionist village emerged as form of modern and progressive settlement, radically alternative to the modern Western city. Reviewing key experiments in Zionist rural urbanism, some recurrent architectural design issues can be highlighted, in the face of the many original solutions proposed. From this perspective, this paper argues that, in parallel to the present hegemony of the urban in architectural and urban design, rurality and the agricultural village are relevant playgrounds for design in relation to some of today’s societal challenges. |
