July 25, 2009, Another Thought on the Knesset

My few recent visits to the Knesset have awakened in me an unwilling desire for architectural design. I don’t want to think about it, but it comes back to me in unexpected moments – the fact that a building can inspire honesty and straightforwardness or deviousness and cunning. After endless twistings and turnings of the corridors we arrived at our destination in which we found a young man smoking. Isn’t smoking forbidden, we asked. Well, he responded, it is forbidden in the knesset, but this room may be considered the offices of a member of parliament which therefore are private and not public. So if I stepped outside my office, I would get a fine, but in here it is a grey area. His response keeps ringing in my ears. And I keep thinking I’d build a building in which there were no labyrinths and no grey areas. A square building with two floors of 15 offices in each corridor and open meeting places in the middle. The ministries could have offices on another floor, but with the same principle of open access.