Tag: sabbath plus one jersualem and tel aviv

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Architects Architecture Design Developers

SABBATH PLUS ONE Santiago Calatrava + Chords Bridge Jerusalem

Nathan the Prophet and Zadok and Abiathar the Priests

“Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet: praise Him with the psaltery and harp.” Psalm 150:3

Spanish-Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava has designed over 40 bridges – Dublin has two (James Joyce and Samuel Beckett) – but The Chords Bridge was the first to carry both trains and pedestrians. Completed in 2008, it arches over a traffic junction next to Barchana Architects’ Yitzhak Navon Railway Station in northwest Jerusalem. A 188 metre high cantilevered pylon provides mathematically rigorous support for 66 steel cables which hold the bridge’s 30 metre long deck. Santiago relates, “The Jerusalem light rail train bridge project started with the idea that we had to create a very light and very transparent bridge which would span a major new plaza at the entry to Jerusalem.” His work is a stimulating addition to the cityscape, capturing the spirit of the age montaged onto an indigo sky. The Chords Bridge is clad in Jerusalem stone which accords with the architect’s penchant for pale. “Calatrava’s geminal iconoclastic experiments with structure and movement spring out of a long historical tradition,” shares Alexander Tzonis in Santiago Calatrava: The Poetics of Movement (1999). Make that implied, potential and physical movement.

“The architect compares the final result with the form of a musical instrument such as a harp with its cables as strings,” explains Philip Jodidio in Calatrava Complete Works 1979 to Today (2018), “an apt metaphor in the City of David. According to Moshe Safdie in Jerusalem The Future of the Past (1984), “What Bach did with the fugue, we must learn to do in architecture. I feel architecture can, however rarely, move us as deeply as music can.” Sometimes architecture really is frozen music, accompanied by a light cordial on the rocks. At the Cathedral of St George the Martyr, the Mother Church of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, The Very Reverend Canon Richard Sewell hoped, “We might hear the chord that calls us up to dance!” Or the voice of harpers harping with their harps. Sourires d’été en musique.

“You strum away on your harps like David and improvise on musical instruments.” Amos 6:5

(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv)

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Architecture Art Design

SABBATH PLUS ONE HaYarkon Park + Environs Tel Aviv

It Could’ve Gone Either Way

“They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion; they will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord – the grain, the new wine and the olive oil, the young of the flocks and herds. They will be like a well watered garden, and they will sorrow no more.” Jeremiah 31:12

We are pretty and good and pretty good photographers and pretty good models and pretty good socialites and we have to do them all at once and we find it difficult being pretty good gardeners. Enter now the little owl, and the great owl, and the swan, and the gier eagle. Nature abounds at HaYarkon Park, the green lung breathing life into northern Tel Aviv. This wild and previous landscape, treescape and dreamscape hugs the pioned and twill brimmed banks of the River Yarkon – that molten mirror of gently rippling silver amalgam. Six gardens amidst the rolling riparian parkland include the four hectare Rock Garden filled with over 3,500 plant species as well as raucous birdsong. Hoopoe, Hooded Crow, Laughing Dove, White Throated Kingfisher and Black Crowned Night Heron all join in the dawn to dusk chorus. There’s more.

Come closer, draw nearer. An enigmatic sculpture in the middle of HaYarkon Park stretches our visual vocabulary. White concrete cylindrical and wave forms tip three metres at their tallest point. Berlin born Slade School of Fine Art London trained Yitzhak Danziger became a leading 20th century Israeli sculptor. His Serpentine sculpture was erected in 1973, just four years before he died aged 61. Expand your view, broaden your horizon.

There are certain certainties. There are certain things we are certain about. There are certain uncertainties. That is to say, there are things that we are certain we are uncertain about. But there are also uncertain uncertainties. We are certainly certain that we’ll never be pretty good gardeners but that doesn’t stop us loving HaYarkon Park. As Queen Diambi Kabatusuila Tshiyoyo Muata of the Bakwa Indu People of the Luba Empire Kasaï Democratic Republic of Congo once reminded us, “It’s a beautiful day to be alive!” And butterfly jewellery artist Wallace Chan whispered to us at the British Museum London, “Embrace every fleeting moment.” This is our summer of content and we mean content.

“… and I will bring my people Israel back from exile. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.” Amos 9:14

(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).

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Architecture Art Design People

SABBATH PLUS ONE Hayim Nahman Bialik + Trumpeldor Cemetery Tel Aviv

Scion of Sion

“Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because You will not abandon me to the grave, nor will You let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the path of life; You will find me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand.” Psalm 16:9 to 11

Every ridiculously smart place has one. Paris possesses Père Lachaise. Buenos Aires revels in Recoleta. Savannah boasts Bonaventure. Newtownstewart, Pubble. Tel Aviv trumps them all with Trumpeldor. A stylish resting place steeped in sublime presence and subliminal absence. A three dimensional requiem. An architectural danse macabre. A spectral spectacle. A necropolis in the metropolis. Amazing mausolea. A sepulchral sculpture garden imbued with meaning and nostalgia.

Trumpeldor Cemetery was established by Jewish settlers on empty land in 1902. Jerusalem stone on stone on stone. Today, it is surrounded by downtown Tel Aviv. The cemetery is named after Joseph Trumpeldor, a Zionist originally from Pyatigorsk in Russia who died in 1920. Noa Tishby lionises him in Israel: The Most Misunderstood Country on Earth (2021) as “a decorated Russian military war hero and former POW in Japan … a Jewish Russian idealist.” Joseph Trumpeldor’s biographer Pesah Lipovetzky eulogises in his biography (1953), “He fought for the establishment in the Holy Land of a free society of Jewish workers, and in defending the frontiers of his country met his untimely death.” The cemetery is the burial place of Hayim Nahman Bialik. His 1996 poem After My Death contains the lines: “There was a man – and look he is no more. He died before his time. The music of his life suddenly stopped. A pity! There was another song in him. Not now it is lost forever.”

In Decay and Death: Urban Topoi in Literary Depictions of Tel Aviv, an essay in Tel Aviv The First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities edited by Maoz Azaryahu (2012), Rachel Harris compares the city that never sleeps with the eternal rest: “The narrative of Tel Aviv as the White City with new, modern buildings contrasts with the decay of the city – through the image of death. Death takes two forms: that of the city and that of individuals. Death is represented in the city by its cemeteries. Shabtai’s novel and Amos Gitai’s adaptation Devarim open with a surreal hunt through the city’s graveyards to find Goldman’s father’s funeral.” Historian Barbara Mann writing in A Place in History (2006) views any cemetery as “a mnemonic space through which the visitor moves and activates images linked to a collective memory.”

“Madame de Valhubert died suddenly the very day she was to have left Bellandargues for Paris,” writes Nancy Mitford in The Blessing (1951), adding with a sparkle of graveyard humour, “She made the journey all the same, and was buried in the family grave at the Père Lachaise.”

“Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them.” Ezekiel 37:13

(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).

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Design Luxury People Restaurants

SABBATH PLUS ONE Shila Restaurant + Bar Tel Aviv

Quaffable Art

“Wine was served in goblets of gold, each one different from the other, and the royal wine was abundant, in keeping with the king’s liberality.” Esther 1:7

Stuffing the gnomic into gastronomic, palette to palate, culinary art courageously curated, platefuls of luxury signifiers. Outside may be sweating 39 degrees Celsius but inside this sanctum a coolly slick multisensory performance is underway. Welcome to the great indoors. The dining room and bar are reassuringly luxurious and luxuriously reassuring. Upmarket upscale top drawer top notch high class high octane, Shila on Ben Yehuda Street is a byword for brilliance, a deliverer of orchidaceous new delights. The ravishing people are here and there are some rather attractive couples at the other tables too. So … drum roll … the food is a triumph! Israeli fayre with an international sensibility personalised by local legendary Chef Sharon Cohen who knows his spring onions and summer truffle and cuts the mustard, never overegging the soufflé. It’s not cheap but what price umami? Worth every shekel.

Shila surpasses our wildest expectations and our expectations are pretty wild. Taste good dining in a good taste dining room. Flam Blanc from the Judean Hills, le goût de l’été, arrives in glasses big enough to swim in, capturing the lingering essence and aromatic bouquet of the grape. Knight that vintner! B’tayavon! L’chaim! Breathe in. Our amuse gueules, such appetising appetisers, are veritable constructs that look good enough to wear. Appealing to our inner epicureans are the Mexican fish burger, sea fish tartare on brioche and jalapeño aioli (Frances Scott Fitzgerald’s description in his short story My Lost City springs to mind: “a brilliant flag of food, called an hors d’oeuvre”). The main event is prawn and asparagus gnocchi with fresh tomato salsa, an engaging marriage of sea and farm, another orthonasal olfactory hit. Hervé This comes from a molecular gastronomy angle in Molecular Gastronomy, 2008, “As early as 1651 Nicholas de Bonnefons mentions small pieces of dough that have been ‘scalded’ in boiling water … from the oldest échaudés to potato gnocchi and gnocchi à la Parisienne the principle is the same: one begins with a dough composed of starch, egg, and water.”

“It is nearly impossible to not eat well in Israel,” raves local commentator Claudia Stein. Pudding, like revenge, is best served cold. Lemon and raspberry sorbet is as welcome as a snow-cooled drink at harvest time. Breathe out. Such a bacchanalian bout of riotous Augustan reminiscence! Our long languorous lunch, a carefully coordinated culinary voyage from primacy to regency, is coming to a climax. Service is so smooth. Ding-a-ling! You can get the staff these days. A postprandial elixir of strawberry daiquiri appears … ecstasy extended. It’s enough to stimulate the dopaminergic neurons of our ventral tegmental area into overdrive.

The beautiful changes. Later, much later, backed by the certainty of chance, we will ride through Tel Aviv in a sports car with the warm wind in our hair, channelling our inner Tamara in a Green Bugatti (she who was, “Possessed of a dazzling talent, a striking beauty, and an irresistible force of personality,”) sucking on our cheroot in a sherut, driving through the hazy mist of sweltering heat, finding forever in a fleeting moment, tasting the salty sultriness while nebulous desires persist and pursue us across a restless afternoon. Friday Street, plus one. Gilded days, halcyon days, hallowed days, happy days, hosted days, ordained days, salad days. Spinning round in the fields of freedom. The whole shebang and shenanigans. Such seductiveness; a momentary embrace; a dalliance to the cadence of time. A dynamic magnetised meeting. A hookah. A hooley. A hooray. As Elizabeth Bowen quipped in The House in Paris, “Any year of one’s life has to be lived.” In Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters she goes further, “no Irish people – Irish or Anglo-Irish – live a day unconsciously … for generations they have been lived at high pitch.” Our time is now. Élan has a new.

“People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God.” Luke 13:29

(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).