The Clal Center’s Skin as Jerusalem’s Future Typewriter
Jerusalem is not written in masterplans, but in mythologies.
Amidst the constant tumult, the Clal Center calls for our attention:
folded, spiraled, organic. Failing, at first glance. Alive, immense.
Kaleidoscopic, beating, always avant-garde.

The Clal Center always speaks in more than one tongue:
a contemporary Tower of Babel in the heart of modern Jerusalem,
rooted on the watershed line, the very point where pilgrims first glimpsed the Old City and paused for their final stop – a mingling of generations and territories, of beliefs and desires – for a single shared night.
This possible memory, of a communitas ever-emerging, of alliances across boundaries and brotherhoods of the road, is inscribed in the forever-folding skin of the building. The ancient technology of unfolding and refolding, of multiplying surfaces, is a machine of encounters and interactions; a typewriter of a possible Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem installation at the Cities Exhibition of the 5th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism clings to the Clal Center’s unique skin, to the vision of architect Dan Eytan, and to the wondrous movements that have been unfolding in the building over the last decade. Through historical gaze and shared imagination, we seek to reveal five chapters from the contemporary mythology being written across its surfaces – a mythology that does not distinguish inside from outside, building from city, person from person, living from living. Through them, we seek to listen for the possibility of another renewal – human, circular – in the hope that the city will hear it with us.

Curators: Ytav Bouhsira, Matan Israeli
Drawings by Ytav Bouhsira, Gil David, Idan Dery, Shelly Kauschansky, Reut Kokia, Uri Yahalom, Omer Zeltcer
Model by Gil David, Reut Kokia, Uri Yahalom, Omer Zeltcer, Yuval Zin, Gal Zwilling
Archive by Ytav Bouhsira, Gil David, Idan Dery, Matan Israeli, Shelly Kauschansky, Reut Kokia, Adi Shubi, Uri Yahalom, Omer Zeltcer, Yuval Zin, Gal Zwilling
Production: Dana Gazy, Roni Shohat