A new exhibition in the Israeli Pavilion at Venice’s Architecture Biennale gazes at the past and future of communications infrastructure in Israel – a subject that proves far more interesting than it sounds
VENICE – Since 1952, the white Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture has received visitors through a glass facade. Exposed and inviting, architect Zeev Rechter’s design stood for many years. However, since the 18th Biennale opened last month, it has for the first time been sealed. Now it resembles a white cube – just like one of the works in the exhibit in its backyard.
Titled “cloud-to-ground” (the name refers to the scientific term for the moment when lightning strikes the earth), the exhibit was curated by architects Oren Eldar and Edith Kofsky, together with curator Hadas Maor, and also has an accompanying book. It examines our present moment in time, which has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Eldar says that at this point, “everything takes place somewhere on computers, which of course aren’t the computers we have at home but are somewhere online, in a cloud – which, although it looks light to us, is actually super-heavy and composed of gigantic structures and huge cable networks.”
Kofsky adds that “the exhibition deals with this moment, in Israel and globally, with the transition from analog to digital communications, from telephone exchange structures that were located in city centers to server farms. The use of the word ‘farm’ is confusing, since it obscures the heaviness of the structures that are being quickly built in distant areas, far from a population that would oppose the construction processes. Those same farms are, in effect, the dwelling place of the cloud.”
Maor, meanwhile, notes that “analog communications used copper cables and were based on sound; digital communications use optic fibers and are based on light.”
These two elements – sound and light – are the main raw materials with which the exhibition creators worked.
A buzzing sound of various systems emerges from the pavilion itself. “It breathes, it vibrates, it confronts you with the knowledge that something is happening inside and you have no way of knowing what,” says Eldar, explaining the result of their collaboration with sound designer Daniel Meir. In the pavilion’s courtyard, the extensive sound installation continues from inside a number of sculptures, hollow concrete molds of sealed buildings.
What used to be the pavilion’s back entrance was sealed with a plaster relief of the floor plan of a server farm, which is exposed and disappears under a bright light that alternately lights up and is extinguished. On the opposite wall is a map showing cable networks and the region’s ancient commercial routes.
Why did the curators choose this seemingly boring subject? “We realized that there’s a lot of power and interest in buildings that look very uninteresting,” Eldar explains. He adds that the decision to close the pavilion hints at the physical nature of state-of-the-art communications. “Telephone exchanges are impenetrable buildings,” Kofsky says. “They’re kind of ‘black boxes’ attached to huge quantities of cables running underground, on the surface and underwater. Closing the pavilion was an act of extremism.”
The exhibition is actually rather small and is composed of a map, five sculptures and another drawing. “The visitors’ encounter with the objects is first of all physical – the farm in the exhibition is experiential-sensual – and the book is a significant expansion of the subjects that come up in the exhibition,” say Kofsky and Maor, explaining the choice to keep it modest.
On the one hand, this is a radical decision, perhaps the right one considering the visual overload at a Biennale boasting dozens of national pavilions and other major exhibitions. Conversely, it makes the Israeli Pavilion somewhat anemic compared to prominent pavilions in its surroundings – for instance, the adjacent American Pavilion – and loses some of the comprehensive research that was conducted prior to the exhibition. We can only hope that one of the major Israeli museums will adopt this research and expand it into an exhibition at home.
Somewhat spoiling the interesting artistic effect of sealing the Israeli Pavilion is the fact that it isn’t the only closed pavilion this year. The Russian Pavilion is closed for the second year in a row (for obvious reasons), as is the Czech Pavilion, which is undergoing renovations – which could confuse the visitor.
Maor stresses that “there’s a substantial difference between a closed pavilion and a sealed one,” whereas Kofsky says it doesn’t concern her at all if visitors skip the pavilion. “If they don’t notice, they don’t,” she shrugs. “We decided to take that risk, just as people don’t generally notice communications structures.”
In the accompanying book, there is a list of nearly 40 server farms that have been built in Israel or are being planned by giant companies. Some of the ones mentioned are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, MedOne and the Israeli telecommunications companies Bezeq, Partner and Cellcom. Some of them cover tens of thousands of square meters, but information about them is scarce.
It’s not clear what the structures will look like or how they will affect the urban landscape, though Dr. Lior Zalmanson – a senior lecturer at the Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University – is quoted in the book as saying that we are entering “an era of posthuman structures that are fully operated by robots, without any need for human interaction or even basic needs that make life possible, such as oxygen and light.”
He notes that in a world where data centers are already distant and inaccessible, the system that controls our information (and us), and manages it, becomes closed and extreme. “The rise of artificial intelligence proves that most of the machines will not only be produced by machines – they’ll also be managed by them,” he sums up.
Until the founding of the state, very few post offices and telephone exchanges were built in British Mandatory Palestine. Among the most famous are the post office buildings planned by architect Austen St. Barbe Harrison on Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa and Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. After the establishment of the state, Ma’atz (the public works unit in the Transportation Ministry) succeeded the British Mandate P.W.A. (Public Works Department).
Gad Ascher, who worked for the company starting in 1941, was appointed its chief architect. His name is not as well known as those of other architects of his generation, including Yaakov Rechter, Dov Karmi or Arieh Sharon, but the exhibition curators chose him as a source of inspiration. He was an architect with a unique and surprising approach, insisting on designing structures characterized by a human dimension – everyday buildings such as post offices, telephone exchanges, hospitals and government buildings.
His personal story and his death at age 57, after a series of heart attacks, are connected to his refusal to align himself with the spirit of the times, which favored architectural duplication of public and residential buildings. Eldar’s research for the exhibition made him realize that Ascher was a far more important architect than the history books might suggest. He was an artist whose spirit was repressed by the system in an attempt to turn him into a bureaucrat.
In Ascher’s day, the Ma’atz structures were simple and aesthetic. The telephone exchange area is located in one cube and the post office area in another. He managed to include windows in them and created enticing entrances so they would be integrated into the streets. Despite his stubbornness, two of his plans were duplicated – the Ma’atz building on Hamered Street in Tel Aviv and an identical building on the city’s Weizmann Street, which still serves as a post office. The 1954 post office in Zichron Yaakov was also copied in Binyamina and Tirat Carmel.
Ascher’s first architectural partner was Yohanan Ratner, the father of the so-called Tower and Stockade settlement method, but the transition to the era of duplication was led by Ascher’s successor, Mordechai Shoshani. He led the usage of duplicated models, which were usually built on the outskirts of new neighborhoods built around old cities, as part of the accelerated suburbanization that has characterized Israel since its inception.
Shoshani opposed the use of exposed concrete and promoted the use of various surfacings, and included works of art on the walls. In a 1973 interview he said: “I don’t know why a building has to be made of gray and boring exposed concrete, which will soon be covered with dust. Why not use attractive, ‘happy,’ colorful materials? I think it will be very pretty.”
The dozens of communications buildings that are now being demolished in Israel are represented at the exhibition by five exposed concrete sculptures. The unique sound they emit is created by sound engineer Meir, who accompanied the curators to the new server farms, as well as to the abandoned buildings, and sampled the reverberation of the empty tech buildings and the urban or suburban surroundings where they were located.
The first sculpture is similar to the 1959 telephone exchange building in Yeruham designed by Ascher. This is a typical modern building, composed of two simple cubes, with the top cube smaller and deviating a bit from the lower cube and shading it.
The next two sculptures represent the Ma’atz buildings that were planned by Shoshani and Leah Appel and built in the late 1960s. These are cubist, brutalist buildings, almost totally sealed, which stand out in their surroundings and are dubbed the “Slit Windows” model.
A fourth sculpture represents the Bezeq era: In the ’80s, the company built dozens of buildings based on three models designed by architect Amizur Porat. The sculpture represents the model that the curators dub “Fortress” – a totally sealed building with turrets on its four corners, through which cables passed. The unique aspect of each building is different surfacing.
The last sculpture represents the model duplicated in Arab cities such as Taibeh and Tamra in the ’90s, designed by architect Yaakov Stoler. The curators dub this model “Orientalism,” since arched windows with matching awnings were attached to the standard cubes that typified the architecture.
The center of everything
Another strand, in both the exhibition and book, is Israel’s return to being a strategic global transfer hub. In a lovely series of maps and information, the book describes the development of the region as a global crossroads. They begin with the time when the land where Israel is located was a crossroads and an immigration point of Homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago, during their journey from Africa northward.
The next point in time is the third millennium B.C.E. (the Early Bronze period), when Egypt ruled the land of Canaan. It had two main commercial traffic routes, east of the Arava – the Via Maris (sea route) and the King’s Highway, which remain almost unchanged to this day.
The next route, which also still exists, is via the mountain – on the path of Highway 60 in the West Bank. That route is from the days of the Kingdom of Israel, from the second millennium B.C.E., and connected Jerusalem to additional cities, turning it into a central site in the region.
Among the roads described is the Incense Route, which in its northern section passed through cities of the Nabataean kingdom: Shivta, Ovdat, Mamshit and Haluza (which have been recognized as World Heritage Sites). After the soldiers of the Roman Empire defeated the Nabataeans in the year 106 and took over the Incense Route, the trail (which passed north of areas of the Land of Israel in regions now in Lebanon and Syria) became the dominant route to the Far East.
The central road during the Mamluk period was the Post Road that connected Cairo and Damascus. Bridges, khans (inns) and sabils (historical public water fountains) were built along it. Vestiges can be found throughout the country to this day.
During the Ottoman era, European colonialism and an improvement in the availability of ships increased European commerce with India and China. The opening of the Suez Canal made the region very central once again, and also contributed to the building of the Hejaz Railway (from Damascus to Medina) and the installation of the telegraph system that connected the area to other parts of the empire.
When the British occupied Palestine, they turned it into one of the hubs of their empire’s infrastructure. They built the 942-kilometer (585-mile) Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline, which transported crude oil from the oilfields of Iraq via Jordan to the refineries in Haifa. The pipeline is displayed in the book by means of a historical map.
It was not only countries in the region that saw Israel as a well-located strategic asset: After Egypt took control of the Suez Canal, the United States conducted a series of atomic tests in the context of Project Plowshare (which considered using nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes). One of the fantasies was to build an alternative to the Egyptian canal via the Negev. According to a 1957 proposal, nuclear bombs were supposed to be placed every 400 meters for about 210 kilometers. The canal project, whose estimated destructive power was 35 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was shelved due to its high cost.
“For thousands of years we see that the area where the State of Israel is located is very central. In 1948, with the founding of the state and the Arab boycott, this stopped,” says Eldar. Israel tried over the years to resolve this isolation with various unsuccessful initiatives.
What changed Israel’s geostrategic situation was the construction of Google’s Blue-Raman cable system, which passes through Israel in the direction of Saudi Arabia and connects Europe and India. We see that commercial firms today can resolve global conflicts (Israel’s recent discussions with Saudi Arabia are partly related to the laying of the fiber-optic cable).
There’s a large map at the exhibition – a photochemical etching on stainless steel – that was inspired by those historical maps in the book. The curators included the modern cables on it, which confuses the viewer who doesn’t know whether they’re looking at a historical map or a modern one.
What ultimately remains of those economic-global efforts are the signs they left behind on the ground. The exhibition information page features a picture of a small concrete monument in the desert – the only visible sign of the fiber-optic network of cables that is upsetting the balance in the region. It is perhaps the only sign that will remain, “exactly like the Roman milestones, which were left throughout the empire when it fell. This also points to the fragility of that infrastructure, and its power to exalt but also to bring down various rulers,” Eldar says.
The book concludes with an article by architect Dr. Erez Golani Solomon, who is involved in a new initiative to build a server farm in cisterns left behind by the Timna copper mines, near the route of Google’s new cables in the Israeli desert. Golani Solomon wonders what future archaeologists will learn about the present culture when they discover those empty halls during excavations. In doing so, he is expressing a thought about the future implications of that same “gold rush” of building modern server farms.
“The key statement in infrastructure studies is that infrastructure is invisible – you only notice it when it breaks. That’s what we’re alluding to: that just as it’s invisible, so is the power stored in it,” Eldar says.
Kofsky adds: “The same relatively marginal elements in the area are of far greater political importance than we can imagine. That’s true of buildings, cables and the milestones they’ll leave behind.”