CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/6/2019

'The Object of Zionism: The Architecture of Israel' is a stunning, critical colossus

Featured spreads (from the chapter on Brutalism, "the architecture of Israeli patriotism," at top, and a section on the Sodom Dead Sea salt mines, where "Zionist utopia is collapsing into apocalypse," below) are reproduced from Zvi Efrat's monumental new study of the architecture of Israel, The Object of Zionism. Weighing in at 1,000 pages, with 1,200 mostly black-and-white images dating mostly from the 1930s to the 1970s, this remarkable work of critical scholarship "relentlessly assembles and interprets a colossal archive," according to noted architectural historian Beatriz Colomina. "In a stunning hypothesis, Efrat argues that the State of Israel is a conscious architectural project. The book presents a multi-layered and highly detailed historical analysis of each phase of the self-construction of the state—investigating the motivations, philosophy, tactics, realization and impact of a single architectural project at the scale of a nation. Our perception of the entanglement of architecture and politics is permanently transformed."