The Temporary Eruv Shelter

(published in: Unschärferelationen - Uncertainty Principles, Nelte, 2002)

The design of a house for orthodox Jews in north London, formerly the ‘Jews Temporary Shelter’.The ‘Temporary Eruv Shelter’ is the design of a house for orthodox Jews in north London. It is a house where orthodox Jews will come every Friday evening to spend the Sabbath in. It is architecture in time. The site of the building is the site of the former ‘Jews Temporary Shelter’, at 5 Mapesbury Road, in Kilburn, London. Since the beginning of the century this Jews Temporary Shelter, originally located in east London, has housed new Jewish immigrants coming to London. It used to be an important and very famous institution in England, the first stable building that the Jews arriving from Eastern Europe and Russia by boat would set foot in. In some areas of Russia the Jews Temporary Shelter was better known than any other building or institution in England, better known than St. Pauls Cathedral, Westminster Abbey or the Big Ben. Now, that the influx of Jews into England has declined sharply compared with the first half of this century, and that other organisations and institutions exist which offer help and services of integration to immigrants, the Jews Temporary Shelter has lost most of its original function, and fame, and offers certain community services like old peoples recreation etc. The proposal aims therefore to establish a different project on its site, the Temporary Eruv Shelter.
The Temporary Eruv Shelter (TES) is a building where orthodox Jews can move to in order to spend their Sabbath. It is a building, the layout of which is not structured according to the functions and uses that it should fulfil, but it is structured according to time. Every Sabbath, orthodox Jews come to the building and move through it, in the 25 hours of the Day of Rest. All functions are offered alongside this movement through the building. At the final hour of the Shabbat, one leaves the building at its other end. It is a wandering through the Sabbath, a movement through time where small events are played out and enact the space. A timely building for the ‘Palace in Time.’1
This structure of the Temporary Eruv Shelter references the time of the Exodus, where it was exactly that movement, through which a space was appropriated. During the flight through the desert, the idea of a portable space, one’s personal ‘place’, to be carried along, emerged. And it was at that moment, at that time of wandering, that the definition of what makes up a place, was formulated. It is this time of restlessness which lies at the source of everyone’s place. Thus, the Sabbath is at the same time deeply linked with the definition of ones personal place as it is with moving, the Temporary Eruv Shelter combines these two aspects and establishes a building as an Eruv in a temporal structure, to be moved through.
The design and the planning of the TES does not employ the standard tools of the conventional architectural practice, like floorplan, elevation or section. The TES is designed and planned through the use and description of narratives and events which will enact and play out its physical and stage-like setting. The representation of the full 25 hour long building is only the stage, the platform on which events are played out. The complete representation of the house is achieved through the narratives and events that are depicted in four stages or four frames. These events are placed into the physical environment of the Temporary Eruv Shelter and start to interact with it, infiltrate it and transform it. Similarly to the Talmud, it represents a space where events that normally happen in different places and at different times are spatially located within it and act out this environment. The Talmud is a constructed space where Rabbis and Sages from different times and places come together and made to argue with each other. Very often these Rabbis had never met in their real life, never known of each other. All the hundreds of pages are filled with these fabricated arguments by the redactors of the Talmud. The Talmud therefore represents an environment, a stage, for constructed discourse. Only rarely, these arguments lead to a definite result, while most of the time they are open ended. In the Temporary Eruv Shelter it is events and discourses or conflicts which normally occur in different areas, in various scales and do not necessarily take place on a spatial level at all, which are spatially located and placed into that environment and enact that physical layer of the TES. After a short preface, where the techniques of representation are introduced with the help of micro-episodes, all the components of the coming events and narratives are presented: the characters of the events, the scales at which they take place and techniques and methods with which they operate. Already as these components are being introduced, they start to enact the space of the Temporary Eruv Shelter, making use of the props, of its physical layer, intervening in it and transforming it. Two main events are then played out in the environment of the TES: the conflict between three Jewish groups, the orthodox, the reform and the ultra-orthodox Jews, triggered by the proposal of an Eruv in Northern London and a chimerical narrative involving two specific characters, the Collector and the Inspector, with their personal traits and attributes. Following this are six actual proposals of Eruvim (plural of Eruv) within the TES, all at different scales and for different periods of time. After these proposals of Eruvim, which form the central part of the design of the Temporary Eruv Shelter - in fact, these are the temporary Eruvim - follow two further narratives and ‘afterimages’, impressions and details of the TES. In these ‘afterimages’, I zoom in, I enlarge the scale of the representation to show detail situation of the building, fragments of an episode, or results of a debate. The echos of the Eruvim.
Each representation of an event consists of three parts on two layers: the physical layer of the narrative with its props and stage-like setting, the notation of the dynamics of the narrative, and the text describing the narrative and sometimes linking to and interferring with the notation. A catalog of geometrical, architectural and behavioural items is set up to define this notation system. In each ‘chapter’ of the catalog a simple figure is taken from the geometrical framework, into the architectural to gain additional meaning. From there, it is placed into the behavioural framework where it adopts, again further significance. Together, they build up a catalog of conventions. All these three categories define each specific unit of the notation system and make it possible to read the narrative’s notation. This catalogue becomes a portable, more general, system for describing and recording events, but also for the prescription of future events. It becomes an architectural tool. The notation of the event infiltrates the physical environment like the event intervening in the stage-like setting. It stays purely within the frame, within the chosen cutout of the TES. In fact it establishes the frame; it is the frame. The notation becomes a behavioural landscape in the Temporary Eruv Shelter.
The text surrounding the cut-out describes the events taking place. It does not intervene directly with the physical layer, nor with the notation. It links to it by means of references, numbers, and through referral and allusion within the text. Although spatially the text stays outside of the events taking place or being planned, it has the potential to connect to it. It provides a commentary and discussion of the narrative being depicted in its center. Oscillating between the two modes of being descriptive or prescriptive, always with a certain ambiguity about it, it adds a richness and complexity to the events.
The furniture, the physical layer of the Temporary Eruv Shelter, are programmatic. They prescribe certain functions to take place in specific locations: eating, sleeping, reading, discussing, washing etc. They prescribe the programme of the TES. But they also have an additional function in representing on a physical layer non-physical aspects of the events taking place: emotional aspects, conscious, sacred and spiritual aspects. They tell their own story about the events taking place or having taken place in the environment of the TES. In the Talmud it is often very banal and profane objects that are used to in discussions to represent complex and sacred concepts. The complexity of the different qualities of spaces within the city, public, private, accessible, inaccessible - all connected with different laws and rules of behaviour - is demonstrated by a cow standing with its back in a house, with its front on the street and drinking with its mouth water from a well. It is also often the case, that these profane and common objects are taken to express non-physical or non-representational concepts under discussion in the Talmud: the olives and their sizes are expressive of the laws of a country or the moving tree expresses spatial boundaries and the rules guiding behaviour in specific situations. The furniture, the props on the stage-like setting, do both. In their apparent simplicity they convey - in combination with the text-narrative and the notation - the complexity of the events taking place. And they become the carrier of emotional-, structural- or conflict-based conditions of the events which have been located in that space. They point with their naive banality at aspects of the events which are non-representable.
After all the narratives and events are presented, described and prescribed, I increase the scale of the drawings, I zoom in. I show details of the building, close-ups of the furniture. They are ghosts of the episodes, remnants of the dynamics of their usage. They are, what physically remains after the events having been placed in to the environment of the Temporary Eruv Shelter. Afterimages.
The architecture of the TES is a description of a house. This description is always threefold: it exists on three distinct layers, each with their own technique of representation, each adding its own personal story to the reading at large; to the architectural construction. „Because 'the way' is now divided into law, language and labour, archetypical speech in which words were deeds - the Hebrew “da'bar” means act, event, deed, thing, word - and in which there is no distinction between thought, word, thing, is replaced by the notion of language itself as a signifying system distinct from law and labour, in which word, thought, thing may not coincide. Architecture, whether the wall around Paradise or the Tower of Babel, exhibits the limit at which human and divine agency encounter each other. It registers in the visible world outcomes of that encounter which would otherwise remain intangible.“

M Herz ©