Tel Baruch Beach - 6:30 AM. Copyright Rick Meghiddo. All Rights Reserved.

'>Normality “Lo-Normali” Snapshots of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem defies misconceptions about Israel's reality.

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Normality “Lo-Normali” (ambiguous Hebrew slang for ‘abnormal, crazy, exceptional, wonderful, insane, magnificent) synthesizes itwo previously published documentaries, “The City that Never Sleeps” and “Jerusalem Journal.” Although the editing is different, the message remains the same. It presents contrasts between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and within each of the two cities as a showcase intended to defeat misconceptions about Israel’s reality.

Normality usually does not produce headlines.  Stories related to terrorism, war and political scandals on the negative side, and innovations in science and technology on the positive does. During the five months that I spent in Israel in 2016, a focused my attention on capturing images of everyday life: riding a bus, walking by the beach, witnessing some of Israel’s unique events, such as having the entire population standing still for two minutes at the sound of the sirens during Memorial and Holocaust remembrance days, and the Pride Parade and White Night in Tel Aviv.

Although the two largest cities represent only a part of Israel’s reality, the contrast between the two make more legible the country’s complexity, usually oversimplified with reports on conflicts – right versus left, religious versus secular, sacred versus profane, Palestinians versus Israelis.

Israel is a unique country in a unique situation. That is why its normality is simply “Lo-Normali.”

Dancing in Jaffa - Copyright Ruth and Rick Meghiddo 2016 .All rights reserved.

'>NORMALITY “LO-NORMALI” Trailer Aspects of Israel's Everyday Life

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Normal everyday life in Israel is rarely portrayed by the media, which, understandably, is more interested in newsworthy extreme situations such as terror, war, disasters and scandals on the downside, and discoveries in science and technology on the positive. As an alternative, during my five-month journey in Israel, I focused mainly on documenting aspects of Israel’s  everyday life.

I lived in Ramat Aviv. Therefore, most of my shooting happened in the Nonstop City. Yet I also went several times to Jerusalem, which is for me the most complex conurbation I know. Although I visited other parts of Israel, I decided to focus my filmmaking on the contrast between these two cities and within each.

When I learned about a video contest titled “Inspired by Israel,” I decided to submit a 5-minute video, which I’ll include here once the competition is over. In the meantime, the 29-second trailer will give you some idea of the documentary content. 

Jerusalem Old City
Tel Aviv
Jerusalem Tram
Workout by the beach
Gay Parade 2016 in Tel Aviv
Dancing by Tel Aviv’s City Hall
Jesus Tomb. Jesus Tomb at the Basilica of the Holy Sepolcher
Dome of the Rock
Kotel – Western Wall

Human-Made Plastic Ocean

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The premiere of “A Plastic Ocean” at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills signaled the beginning of the long march of an eye-opener documentary, that shows to what degree we all contribute to pollute the ocean every day.  The film was shot in twenty different locations around the world and took four years to produce.

 

Ruth Meghiddo

Food for Thought

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Farm Urbana, as presented in “Food for Thought,” proposes practical solutions to help the rapidly growing urban population’s access to fresh food close to home. Ruth Meghiddo challenges developers, architects, and property owners to include urban farming as an integral part of the built environment. She sees bridging between urban farming and design a critical response to the planet’s sustainability problems.

Ruth founded Farm Urbana in 2013, with a vision for cities to be prosperous. Her clients, forward-thinking developers and owners, value innovation and anticipate rewards for advancing a lifestyle amenity for their residents. She helps them offer a desirable eco-friendly solution that is aesthetic and stimulates creating local communities.

The system consumes 90% less water, little labor, and a fraction of space and weight of traditional vegetable gardens. For more, visit: http://farmurbana.com/

Farm Urbana Website

Farm Urbana Website

 

From Architecture to Urban Farming

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A Brief Story of a Vision

“While doing research on solutions for sustainable mixed-use urban corridors, I came to foresee the advantage of incorporating a food-growth area integrated to the common spaces of the habitat at arm length of people’s home.”

In a brief story of her vision, Ruth brings us the case of urban farming as a growing movement to tackle problems that the world faces in the 21st century. Her story is personal.  She tells us how her vision evolved from childhood experiences in the Romanian countryside, to her life in Rome, to the mentorships of Zevi and Pellegrin, to her fascination with Wright’s thinking and works, to her practice as an architect, to her discovery of Permaculture, to her new passion for urban farming and local edible gardens.

She posed to herself some critical questions:

  • How can urban farming contribute to make the world a better place?
  • What is the connection between architecture, planning and urban farming?
  • What can each of us do to become self-reliable on the food we put on our table?
  • How can edible gardens become a design component integrated to urban development?
  • How can urban farming provide a stage for social interaction?

 

Some facts may help to put a global problem into perspective:

  1. The First Agriculture Revolution started about 10,000 years ago. As nomads settled, cities were born. Until about a century ago, they were surrounded by farms, which supplied its population with fresh food.

    San Gimignano, Photo: Pablo Charin, Rick Meghiddo

    San Gimigniano surrounded by farms – Photo: Pablo Charin / Minube

  2. As the world’s population grew from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.5 billion today, the way we feed ourselves was transformed radically. Industrialized farming brought us ecological degradation, aggravated by the massive use of toxic chemicals. In addition, the path of food from the farm to the city became dependent on carbon-based fuel for transportation.
  3. As the temperatures will continue to raise, climate change is likely to expand the areas of drought hurricanes and floods, diminishing the existing cultivable areas.
    Nwesweek 10/30/2015

    Nwesweek 10/30/2015

    Milano EXPO 2015: Feeding the World, Rick Meghiddo

    Milano EXPO 2015: Feeding the World

  4. Today’s global growth is about 75 million a year. We are likely to reach ten billion around by 2050. Too far away? Not really! That is just “around the corner.” By 2050, children born today will be in their thirties.

    World Population-1800-2050

    World Population-1800-2050

  5. One acre of land is needed to feed one person for one year. By 2050 we will need additional not-yet-existing cultivable land of about 10 million km2, equal to the size of the United States.

How shall we continue to feed the planet? How shall we invent the future while we free cultivable land from the voracious appetite of urban sprawl?  If we want to create a decent living environment, action is needed NOW. Here are some possibilities:

  • Increase mixed-use urban density along urban corridors.
  • Create cultivable areas within residential multi-family buildings, office buildings, schools, factories, hotels, etc.
  • Design common edible gardens as places for social interaction.
  • Design workspaces that provide edible gardens to its tenants.
  • Plan neighborhoods that include collective cultivable areas.
  • Build multi-story farms.
  • Vertical Farming - Rendering: Blake Kurasek

    Vertical Farming – Rendering: Blake Kurasek

    Vertical Farming

    Vertical Farming

 

No single solution can fit all needs. The use of eco-friendly lightweight hydroponic systems that consume 90% less water than traditional farming can be incorporated into the built environment.

On the other hand, permaculture, first developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, brings a holistic approach that combines agricultural and social design principles. By increasing our awareness of “thinking globally and acting locally,” each of us can contribute to make the world a better place to inhabit.

 

Jean Phillipe Pargade Technical and Scientific School, Paris. Photo: Sergio Grazia

Jean Phillipe Pargade Technical and Scientific School, Paris. Photo: Sergio Grazia

The City That Never Sleeps

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Tel Aviv, “The City that Never Sleeps,” is on its way to become one of the world’s great metropolitan areas. It projects a sense of informal freedom, in plain contrast with the distortions frequently delivered by the media.

Cities are not just compilations of buildings, streets and open spaces; they are – or they are supposed to be – places where people can increase their chances of self-realization as happy human beings. The “State of Tel Aviv,” as is commonly labeled, to distinguish it from the rest of the country, is a city that looks more into the future than into the past.

The fourteen-hour non-stop flight from LAX to TLV brought me back to a place that has changed in many ways. Yet in spite of Israel’s contradictions, inequalities and extremes, I found the country exceptionally better than when I left it, back in 2001. Its energy cannot be described neither visually nor in writing; it must be felt.

I saw people of all ages, colors and countries of origin. I saw construction going on everywhere, with high-rise buildings becoming commonplace, and not only in Tel Aviv. During an “Architect’s Day Symposium” at the Cinematheque, the City’s Director of Planning told us that, at this time, there are in plan-check residential and commercial projects for a total of almost eight million square meters, or about 86 million square feet. That is the equivalent of four hundred twenty-story high building on the Wilshire Corridor.

The new wing of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, designed by architect Preston Scott Cohen as an addition to the museum’s Main Building, is the latest development in a process that started in the 1930s, when the city’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, created a municipal art museum in his own house.

The project’s main concept was the creation of an 87-foot-high atrium, called “the lightfall,” which brings natural light deep into the building. The program for the new addition was demanding. Rectangular galleries had to fit into a triangular site, which also had to accommodate a new art library that takes one third of the total 200,000 square feet, or about 18,000 square meters.

One may argue whether the design belongs to the trend triggered by the “Bilbao Effect,” which resonates in the works of Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. Yet, in spite of the building’s trendy aspects, the use of light in the atrium brings a poetic contribution to the building.

Ramat Aviv, the North Tel Aviv neighborhood, is a place of normality within abnormality. At its center is Neveh Avivim, where many notorious people lived, among them Prime Minister Ytzhak Rabin and President Shimon Peres. Besides being close to the sea, it has a powerful anchor: the Tel Aviv University campus, which serves as a magnet to a highly educated population. It is also strategically located next to important arteries of mobility.

Tel Aviv’s 18th annual Pride Parade was officially titled “Women for Change.” Although it joins similar manifestations around the world to assert tolerance and equal rights for all, this event, under the particular situation of the Middle East, and given Israel’s political map, is not just about personal liberty. It is about freedom from coercion of any kind. It has the symptoms of a revolt against all establishments.

Tel Aviv’s “White Night,” unlike its siblings “Nuit Blanche,” “Notte Bianca,” “La Noche en Blanco,” “Noaptea Alba,” and so on, carries a powerful message to many who still have hard time to accept Israel as a vibrant civilization. It sais: we, the people, young, old, men, women, straight and gay, secular and religious, Jews, Muslims, Christians and atheists, enjoy life and contribute to culture and any way we can.”

The festival was spread throughout the city. I counted at least eighteen areas, from the City Harbor, the University of Tel Aviv and the Haaretz Museum in the north, to Jaffa in the south, from the beaches in the west to the new Sarona development area in the east. They included dancing, theater for adults and children, artworks, music, public singing, magic, image projections, DJ’s stages, art events, poetry readings, exhibitions and street performances. My video covers only a fraction of what went on, an approximately ten-kilometer walk along Rothschild Blvd., the Habima Square, Dizengoff Street and Rabin Square.

My observations through the lens of a camera tried to capture some of the elements that reflect some aspects of a country that is a mosaic of cultures, tribes and ideas, frequently clashing to one another: right (nationalist, secular or religious) vs. left (liberal-progressive,) orthodox-religious vs. secular-cosmopolitan, straight vs. gay, machismo vs. feminism. And yet, coexistence is possible, in spite of the many differences.

Rabin Square, Tel Aviv

Jerusalem Journal

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My love affair with Jerusalem has been a long one. It is actually linked to love. On September 4, 1966, I married Ruth under the sky of Jerusalem, by the University of Jerusalem’s synagogue. Designed by architects Rau and Resnick, it was, at that time, the only modern synagogue in the city. Although we were not residents of Jerusalem and we are not religious, the choice of the place was a conscious decision to symbolically integrate love, history and architecture.

During the Six Day War we were students of architecture in Rome. We managed to land in Israel on June 27, 1967, just on time to be at the Jaffa Gate on June 29, at noon, when the gates were first opened to the Jews following nineteen years of Jordanian occupation.

Between then and now, forty-nine years had gone by. During this period I visited the city on many times occasions. This time however, I wanted to see with new eyes some places that I knew (the Old City, the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book, the Machane Yehuda market) and to explore some architectural works that I had not been at (Safdie’s Yad Vashem and the Mamilla Mall, the Karmi brothers’ Supreme Court and Calatrava’s Cord Bridge.) Above all, I wanted to observe people. During three non-consecutive days I walked throughout the city miles upon miles and also used the new light rail. I traveled with people of all walks of life, ages and belief systems. I heard chatting in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, English, Italian…the list of languages and ethnicities goes on and on.

I could have spent years studying Jerusalem’s Old City’s many layers, which exceeds the multiple layers of Rome, a place where I lived for seven years. I knew that I wanted to visit the Holy Sepulcher and the Western Wall, but most of all I wanted to immerse myself into the labyrinth of its streets. On one of these I got lost and ended up walking into the Al-haram ash-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, as it is known in English.

I had been there before and knew my way around. As I took off my shoes to walk into the Dome, I was asked by the guard “Are you Jewish?” I said, “Yes.” “You can’t be here,” he said. He asked me to seat and called Arab security. I was politely detained for about half hour, and was then escorted to leave the place through the same gate from which I had walked in. Two Palestinian guards stood there. The officer who accompanied me asked them “why did you let him in?” “He looked Arab,” one of the guards said. That was a first: “An Arab of Russian ancestry!” Maybe we come from the same pull of genes, who knows?

I found Calatrava’s bridge beautiful, in spite of some criticism that “it does not belong there.” I think it does. I think that it added another layer of uniqueness to the city. I found Safdie’s Holocaust Museum “sign into the land” powerful and appropriate for the unspeakable drama that it contains. I think also that Ram Karmi (for whom I worked for as a young architect) and Ada Karmi-Melamede’s Supreme Court are not only a remarkable piece of architecture, but also well integrated to the site. I was surprise to see that the building was smaller than I imagined it.

The revisit to the Shrine of the Book did not disappoint me. I think that it withstands well the test of time. It is remarkable that a man like Friedrich Kiesler, an Austro-Hungarian artist, theater designer and sculptor who lived in New York, made out of his first and last architectural work one of the city’s best.
Moshe Safdie made it again in his design of the Mamilla Mall and hotel. Although it contains the same type of brands that one can find in shopping centers around the world, this open mall uniquely “belongs to the place” without recurring to gimmicks.

My seventh and last film on Israel for this period, “Jerusalem Journal,” illustrates through images more than I could ever put into words.