A meeting of architects and engineers was told here last night that if Jerusalem grows to its anticipated population of one million residents, the city will either have to spread out into the surrounding Judean hills, thus ruining its surroundings, or its officials will have to accept erection of more high-rise buildings in the downtown area.
Mayor Teddy Kollek told the symposium on the theme of skyscrapers in Jerusalem that it was a very complicated problem to keep the city from expanding as long as people wanted to make it their home. Jerusalem now has about 330,000 residents. Mordecai Ben Horin, an architect, said that the only other solution was to limit the city to 500,000 residents. The meeting was sponsored by the Israeli Association of Architects and Engineers.
Other speakers argued that while the high-rise buildings in Jerusalem would hardly qualify as skyscrapers in other cities, the fact that such buildings were set against the Judean hills gave the structures the appearance of being more dominant than they in fact were. Jerusalem is currently involved in a sharp debate about the degree to which city planners should allow modern skyscrapers to become part of the downtown development program.
Yaacov Dash, chief architect of Israel’s Interior Ministry, said that while business offices and hotel businessmen are demanding high-rise structures, there was a danger of building “just blocks and blocks of high-rise structures.” He said also that it was impossible to decide just how a skyscraper would affect its surroundings until it was built. He offered the wry suggestion that urban planners could easily avoid that problem by not building such structures.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
