Architexturez wrote:

Architecture as Military Strategy: A Review of Eyal Weizman’s Hollow
Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
by Ron Jacobs / July 18th, 2007

Behind Israel’s walls
Review by Edwin Heathcote

Published: August 4 2007 01:32 | Last updated: August 4 2007 01:32

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
By Eyal Weizman
Verso £19.99, 318 pages
FT bookshop: £15.99

 For an architect like me, the book’s most astonishing investigation is  the Israeli army’s study and adoption of avant-garde architectural and  spatial theory. Postmodernism exerted as powerful an effect on  architectural as on literary theory. From Derrida to Deleuze, philosophy  was used to deconstruct physical structure, space and hierarchies. The  wall was reinterpreted as a repressive device, which could be bypassed  to transgress the bourgeois order. The Israeli army, taking its cue from  such subversion, developed new techniques, avoiding the narrow streets  full of snipers and instead exploding its way through the walls of  dwellings. Houses are seen as potential routes, homes as a legitimate  theatre of war. Commanders also adopted the tropes of post-linearity and  chaos theory, troops “swarming” in multiple small units through  battle-zones. A ghost Arab city christened “Chicago” was built to  practice this new urban warfare. Through their adoption of avant-garde  philosophy, Weizman suggests, the Israeli military sets itself up as an  intellectual entity, lifting itself above a mere army.

This barely scratches the surface of the hugely complex spatial and  territorial web that Weizman explores. The literature of architecture is  largely self-serving, depoliticised and superficial. In Hollow Land  Weizman has achieved a rare amalgam of politics, aesthetics, sociology,  history and theory. He has produced a book which should be compulsory  reading for anyone who thinks architecture has reduced its cultural role  to the building of iconic galleries and silly skyscrapers. Rather, as  Weizman shows, it remains the most politicised and potentially dangerous  of all the arts.