פרופ׳ אדר׳ נוף אליסה רוזנברג

The question of place has always been a vexed issue in Israeli culture, reflecting a deep ambivalence towards the local landscape. Most European-trained landscape gardeners practicing in Palestine in the early twentieth century perceived the landscape as depleted and barren, a tabula rasa on which the new Zionist homeland would be designed.

Landscape gardeners and architects have extensively transformed the Israeli landscape at all scales. A new, modernist landscape was designed de novo— “yesh m’ayin” (“something from nothing”) —creating new forms of housing, recreation, roads, campuses and hospitals, and other new spatial typologies. They redefined the Mediterranean landscape of the Israeli public realm into a new pastoral arcadia of green lawns and flowing water, exotic flowering trees, and gently sculpted topography. Greening the landscape was central to the prevailing ethos of “yesh m’ayin,” which defined the modernist project of Zionism, a project of national renewal. But the work was also shaped by a seemingly contradictory impulse: to give expression to the local landscape, its desert and mountains, its native vegetation and local stone.

This research focuses on the productive tension between these two opposite poles in Israeli landscape architecture in the works of three seminal and prolific landscape architecture offices: Yahalom Zur, Gideon Sarig and Tichnun Nof, who together, had an outsize influence on shaping the Israeli landscape. Through an analysis of selected projects, I explore how these three offices invented a new grammar of locality while adapting modernist landscape design principles of the post-war period in Europe and America. I address how the local landscape was read, represented, reinterpreted, or erased in their work to create a uniquely Israeli discourse of landscape modernism.