In the devastation of the present war, the home itself has become a target. Revisiting her book Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime, 1860–2011, architecture historian Yael Allweil introduces the concept of homecide—the deliberate destruction of homes as a central objective of war. This keynote explores how architecture, historiography, and social theory might help us understand both the making of homes and their deliberate unmaking. Building on historical and architectural evidence, the lecture examines how the very idea of home, at once vital and vulnerable, stands at the heart of Israel-Palestine’s history and present. It reflects on what it means to study “home” when the very possibility of home is under assault, and when histories remain unresolved and painfully open.
Yael Allweil is an architect and associate professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Haifa, where she heads HousingLab: History and Future of Living research group. She is a member of the Israel Young Academy, with a leadership position on the Steering Committee. Allweil completed her PhD in architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime, 1860–2011 (2017) explores the history of Israel-Palestine as a history of the gain and loss of citizen housing. Her work explores housing as a multi-actor oeuvre, studying housing as a cultural production of quantity, involving developing digital humanities research methods in architectural history. Her design research focuses on dwellers’ active production of dwellings as a measure of active citizenship, and on the social role of design professions to invent new design solutions that transform the housing crisis deadlock.
Veranstaltungsort: Campus Westend (Hörsaalzentrum HZ 10), Frankfurt am Main
digitale Teilnahme: BigBlueButton (Zugangscode: 98kbz7) https://meeting.uni-weimar.de/b/rooms/f2l-jnf-ajn-mfo/join