Stones with a Human Heart: On Monuments, Modernism and Preservation at the Western Wall

Before the Six Day War (1967) was over, Israeli officials had already bulldozed the Mughrabi Quarter adjunct to the Western Wall. Architects were then asked to heal the urban rupture caused by the destruction.  This paper argerm  ues that their proposals for spatial changes of the site did not only try to reconstruct the urban fabric between the Jewish Quarter and Temple Mount, but forcefully exposed the Wall itself to new and renewed interpretations.  The paper examines how different parties negotiate the meaning of the Wall through the disciplinary domains of historic preservation, architecture and urban design.  It asks, how did they articulate competing visions for Israel’s nation-building project (mamlachtiyut, or literally, kingdomism) in their negotiation of space and urban form?

The discussion focuses on two periods — the 1970s, when architect Moshe Safdie’s controversial plan for the Western Wall Plaza was approved by the state but never built; and the late 1990s, when the Western Wall Tunnels and the Davidson Center were opened to the public, north and south of the praying plaza. An analysis of the related architectural plans, built sites, and the controversies they provoked reveals a dramatic shift between the two periods.  In each period, different parties — representatives of Zionist orthodoxies, archeological institutions, state and municipal authorities — tried to imbue the Wall with different values.  Since the spatial articulation of these values stands for political positions, the shift between the two periods also unravels the changing roles given to the Wall in the competition over the tenets of Israel’s mamlachtiyut project.