Homage and Resistance

PUBLISHER: Asia Publishers
EDITOR: Dan Handel
GRAPHIC DESIGN: Avigail Reiner (The Studio), Or Segal
YEAR: 2022
LANGUAGE: Hebrew

Homage and Resistance is a book on the work of Asaf Lerman, edited by architect and curator Dan Handel. It presents nine of the office's principal projects alongside personal texts written by Lerman over the years.

The title, coined by Handel, names the two tracks along which the work moves: homage, in the carving out of a professional niche devoted to intervening in existing buildings, some of them architectural icons of public and social significance; and resistance, in ideological arguments with fellow architects and with policy makers.

In the golden age of social democracy, the fateful bond between modern architecture and public buildings rested on the economic and social foundations of the welfare state. The moment privatization began to crack that foundation, architecture—whose labour lay in giving form to the public sphere—found itself in a problematic position. In today's Israel, at a time of fundamental disagreement over the very meaning of the state in the lives of its citizens, the unified public space of the welfare state seems like a fossilized relic of a world that no longer exists.

Against this background, Asaf Lerman's revisionist architectural project is not a quotation, nor a homage in the conventional sense, since its source is not one existing building or another but a body of constructional and social values. Lerman proposes to draw on the founding moments of Israeli architecture and to set down an updated version of the old in the heart of the new darkness.

In the book's design, the project chapters follow the order familiar from architecture monographs, while the personal texts are interleaved between them on different paper, in different colour and size, and at times in a different page orientation—setting the two registers of the book apart: the voice of homage and the voice of resistance.

The book was written over nearly two years, during which Handel visited the buildings it presents, selected the texts from Lerman's writings, and held an ongoing conversation with him about architecture, public life and privatization.

Dan Handel is a writer and curator. He holds a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a doctorate from the Technion, has served as a curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal and as curator of architecture and design at the Israel Museum, and has developed exhibitions for the Venice Biennale and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.

The book is published in Hebrew and is available from Asia Publishers, from selected bookshops, and as an e-book.