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research into the history of kibbutz planning and construction from its inception in

1910 when "for the first time ever, someone sketched plans for a kibbutz on paper,"
until the closing of the kibbutz movement's planning department in 1990.
Kahana's choice of a date to frame the end of his book is not coincidental. The
planning department was a central institution in the history of kibbutz planning and
to a large extent for many years oversaw the translation of the ideology into
concrete and cement. The department was established in order to enable kibbutz
members who were professionals to take part in the planning of their communities.
Kahana, a member of Kibbutz Beit Haemek, worked there in senior positions from the
1950s until its closure and transformation into a private planning firm in 1990, when
he left for ideological reasons. He sees the privatization of the department as the

end of kibbutz planning.
Kahana was born in 1927 in Czechoslovakia and as a teenager, upon the outbreak of
World War II, fled to England. He is a graduate of the architecture department at
London's Technical School, where he researched the history of communal planning in
religious and secular communes around the world. In 1954, Kahana arrived in Israel,
not because of religious or Zionist motivations, as he once said in an interview, but
out of a desire "to take part in the building of a fair and just society."
During his years working at the technical department and at an office on his kibbutz,
Kahana designed dozens of kibbutzim and kibbutz buildings. For the last 15 years, he
has worked on setting up the Kibbutz Planning Archive, a computerized collection of
over 10,000 documents that tell the story of kibbutz planning. The archive will soon
be uploaded to the Internet in its entirety by Yad Tabenkin.

In his book, Kahana repeats what is known to many, that the kibbutz is a unique
phenomenon in the world, but places it within a historical context of similar, and no
less controversial, attempts motivated by the urge to create "a genuine alternative
to the capitalistic city." The essence of the "genuine" alternative is rejecting the
capitalist city's right to exist and replacing it with egalitarian, communal, socialist
values that are relevant ambitions today. This is in contrast to the ideal cities in the
tradition of the Baroque and the Renaissance where a change in the historical
context transformed them into experiments in structure alone.
The concern over the disappearance of the kibbutz moment and the destruction of
architectural icons that were emptied of content following the privatization

increased awareness of their importance and the urgent need to preserve them, as
historic and architectural assets.
"The buildings themselves are not important, as interesting as they may be," he
writes, "but the essence of the kibbutz as an alternative to the historical city and
village." Instead of the physical preservation option, he suggests perpetuating the
kibbutz via a documentary study and instilling its legacy in future generations. On a
practical level, his response to preserving historic kibbutz buildings is the continued
existence of the kibbutz as a relevant alternative and not as a museum piece.
Recently, the kibbutz movement's documentary and research center at Yad Tabenkin
formed a multidisciplinary planning team to reinvigorate kibbutz planning with the
goal of finding ways to ensure the continuation of its spatial uniqueness and to
extricate it from a peripheral suburban existence.