A gift of gratitude

• Source: Global Times
• [09:38 July 21 2010]
• Comments

Haim Dotan  Photo: Courtesy of Haim Dotan

If you want to understand the design of a pavilion at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, you first have to understand the culture of the country it represents. But if you want to understand the Israel Pavilion, you need to learn about two cultures.

Israeli architect Haim Dotan drew on his family's experience and his own lifelong exposure to Chinese culture to design the pavilion, an effort he sees as a way of giving Shanghai something for providing a refuge for his family almost a century ago.

"The Shanghainese gave my family a second chance," Dotan told the Global Times.

The China connection

Starting in the second half of the 19th century, thousands of Jews fled to Shanghai to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe and Asia. The number continued to grow in bursts until the end of World War II. Dotan's family was one.

As international traders, Dotan's grandparents fled from Russia to Shanghai to escape the persecution of Jews that took place during the Russian Revolution. Settling in a Jewish community along the Suzhou Creek in Hongkou district, they stayed in Shanghai for three years, during which Dotan's mother, Victoria Saidoff, was born.

During their stay, they adopted some of the habits of local residents. "Every summer, my family often slept on the balcony in the open like other Shanghai residents," Dotan said.

After they returned to what is now Israel, Chinese culture remained imprinted on their every day life. "In our Israeli home, there are a lot of Chinese paintings and ceramics like teapots. China is very much an unstated part of my background," Dotan said. "I was fortunate to be exposed to Chinese culture at an early age."

According to the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, the city sheltered more than 30,000 Jewish refugees prior to 1942, a fact that Dotan is well aware of.

"I want to express my gratitude through the design of the pavilion," said Dotan.

Eastern influence

Exposed at an early age to what for him was a familiar yet mysterious country, Dotan, who is now in his mid-50s, had a chance to visit China in 1984, before the two countries formally established diplomatic relations in 1992.

During the three-month visit to scenic cities and regions such as Guilin, Chengdu, Huangshan, and Tibet, Dotan drew thousands of sketches that combined his own ideas about design with traditional cultural ideals.

"See the palm trees growing between the giant rocks in Huangshan?" he asked, pointing at a photograph that showed a palm tree growing between two boulders in Anhui Province. "Even though the palm tree is growing in such a narrow space, there is still a balance."

Dotan said his work is influenced by the ideas of Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher who wrote about balance and the relationship between positive and negative that exists in all things. "Everything in nature should have a balance, just like yin and yang," he said.

As an example, he pointed out the skyscrapers that crowd the skylines of most of the world's metropolises. These buildings block the sun, the wind, and the view. Maybe each building looks beautiful by itself, but together, there's no balance, he said.

Dotan tries to design buildings with balance. "What I do now is design buildings that bear some resemblance to nature, and all of these are very influenced by Chinese culture."