Professions in periods of social change: the case of architectural discourse and design

ABSTRACT

This article examines how professions behave in periods of social change. The article considers whether professions take positions vis-à-vis broader social discourse, and explores the relationship between the professions’ positions and those of the government. The article examines these questions through the case of the Israeli architectural profession’s behavior after the 1967 war in both the newly occupied territories, over which Israeli control is under dispute among Israeli Jews, as well as the pre-1967 areas, in which Israeli sovereignty enjoys a consensus among Israeli Jews. The article traces both design and construction activities, as well as the discourse that followed in their wake. The article’s conclusion is that changes in professional discourse are a way to understand the profession’s position regarding a given set of social changes. We argue that the transition from an inward-facing professional discourse to an outward-facing professional discourse that addresses the larger society is both an indication of that profession’s condition as well as the condition of the social group to which it belongs.

KEYWORDS:

• Professions
• architecture
• social change
• professional discourse
• Israeli society

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Architect Jacov Haina for his help and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Dr Hadas Shadar is an architect, a researcher and a senior lecturer at the Technion and NB Haifa School of Design. Shadar specialized in the history of the public housing in Israel and published articles on this subject. Her studies focus on the Israeli architecture as a part of ideology and culture, from 1948 to the present day. Shadar is the co-founder of the Society for the Promotion of the Brutalistic Architectural Heritage in Israel. She has published several books: The Construction of the Public Housing: Six Decades of Urban Construction, Beer-Sheva: Brutalist and Neo-Brutalist Architecture and Sunstroke: Brutalist Construction in Be'er Sheva: Re-examination of National Architecture.

Dr Zvika Orr is a lecturer at the Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT), in the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences. He is also the co-founding director of JCT’s Flagship Community Engagement Program. In 2017/18 he is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Anthropology and Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. He has published on professions and professionalism, health and medicine, human rights, civil society and civic engagement. His latest publication is a co-edited book with D. Golan and J. Rosenfeld entitled Bridges of Knowledge: Campus-Community Partnerships in Israel (in Hebrew).

Notes

1. In many cases, it is the state that grants members of a given profession their official authority, while at the same time legitimizing its decisions on the basis of the professionals’ 'expertise' (Evetts, 2003).

2. The campus was built in a place that was, until 1967, a UN-protected Israeli enclave within Jordanian territory. This enclave is located in East Jerusalem that was occupied in 1967.

3. Currently, this faculty is called Faculty of Natural Sciences. We will use the former name stated in the documents at the time of construction.

4. In the vernacular architecture, each family could build one room at a time and as time goes on the structure becomes more complex and diverse.

5. The British ruled Palestine through the British Mandate between 1917 and 1948.

6. Karmi is important for our purposes not only because of his high level of self-awareness, but also because of his decisive role: between 1974 and 1979, he served as the Housing Ministry's chief architect. In that capacity, he would change the architectural plans that were submitted to him for evaluation (Golani, 1999, interview). As a lecturer at the Technion, he would mark the plans that were submitted to him with a thick pencil, thus literally delineating his outlook. This, in combination with his dominant personality and the way that he saw his role, made him a tremendously influential figure.

7. Karmi's use of the term 'Mediterranean architecture' can be misleading, as if he was not referring to Palestinian Arab architecture. However, Karmi's subsequent explication of the term reveals that this choice of label is purely discursive in nature. Architecturally speaking, his description of 'The wall […], the gate […], [the] streets and [the] alleys’ confirms that he often refers to the Old City of Jerusalem and draws his inspiration from there.

8. An in-depth theoretical discussion of the meaning of architectural discourse took place in the 1960s and 1970s in the USA at the same time as the buildings in questions were being constructed. This discussion sparked two movements: the first movement, known as 'the Whites,’ preferred abstract imagery that primarily addresses architects (Museum of Modern Art, 1972), whereas the second movement, known as 'the Greys,' preferred making architectural imagery accessible by using symbols that are universally familiar (Jencks, 1977; Venturi, Scott Brown, & Izenour, 1972).