Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture Of Occupation

Description

Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation.

In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged.  Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations.

In exploring Israel's methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

Reviews

The most astonishing book on architecture that I have read in years. -- Edwin Heathcote * Financial Times *
A masterpiece of political analysis. -- James Ron * The Nation *
Eyal Weizman has taken Edward Said's thesis to a new level, generating extraordinary, and at times surreally uncomfortable, conclusions...Weizman's book is of salutary interest. -- Jay Merrick * Independent *
Weizman takes his readers on a tour of the visible and invisible ways in which Israel implements its control over Palestinians ... Hollow Land is eloquent about the architectural chaos and confusion created by Israel in the Occupied Territories. -- Yonatan Mendel * London Review of Books *

 

 

Author Biography: Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he directs the Centre for Research Architecture and the European Research Council funded project Forensic Architecture. He is also a founder member of the collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Bethlehem, Palestine. He is the author of Hollow Land, The Least of All Possible Evils, and co-editor of A Civilian Occupation. He lives in London.