Speaker
Description
Extended Abstract
Introduction
Planning under uncertainty is often discussed through scenarios, forecasting, resilience, and the anticipation of future risks. This paper approaches uncertainty from a different direction: not as a temporary lack of knowledge to be overcome, but as a condition that can become normalized, institutionalized, and eventually embedded within ordinary architectural production. In Israel, recurrent conflict and emergency have produced a dense framework of safety, security, and civil-defense requirements. Their effects are visible not only in exceptional infrastructures, borders, or military spaces, but in the mundane buildings of everyday life.
Using the public kindergarten as a micro-historical case study, the paper traces a broader process through which sociopolitical anxiety is normalized, institutionalized through regulation, encoded within technical drawings, and eventually sedimented into ordinary architectural space. The kindergarten combines a basic and relatively stable educational program with an unusually dense regulatory environment. Play, exploration, and growth are made to coexist with shelters, restricted access, controlled thresholds, emergency routines, accessibility requirements, fire and safety provisions, police security procedures, and Home Front Command directives. Because the educational program changes less substantially than many of the regulatory systems surrounding it, the kindergarten provides a relatively stable architectural baseline against which regulatory change can be detected.
The study follows this process through three related stages: Narration, Notation, and Spatialization. Narration addresses the historical and institutional construction of risk; Notation examines its translation into regulation, technical requirements, and architectural drawings; and Spatialization traces the point at which these requirements become material conditions of everyday space. The central question is therefore how conditions of uncertainty and anticipated threat migrate from crisis into planning regulation, from regulation into architectural drawings, and from drawings into ordinary space. Rather than asking whether a building appears “secure,” the study asks how security and precaution become technically legible as wall thicknesses, distances, fences, gates, protected rooms, circulation routes, annotations, dimensions, and approval marks.
Conceptual framework
The paper forms part of a broader study of sociopolitical anxiety, governance, and technical representation in Israeli architecture. It builds on scholarship that understands security consciousness and militarism as durable social and institutional frameworks rather than only responses to discrete events, and on architectural and planning scholarship examining the translation of political and security rationales into territorial and spatial arrangements. Pasted text
The paper shifts this discussion to the scale of ordinary architectural production. It argues that recurrent crises are spatialized through two related temporal mechanisms. The first is the catalytic event: a discrete incident that exposes a perceived vulnerability and prompts a direct regulatory or architectural response. The second is a sedimentary process, in which no single event produces a decisive transformation. Instead, successive regulations, precautions, institutional practices, and professional interpretations accumulate around an existing spatial logic. One proceeds through rupture; the other through accumulation. Together they explain how temporary or event-specific responses can become routine conditions of planning. Pasted text
This framework also reframes uncertainty. Institutions do not necessarily eliminate uncertainty by predicting the threat correctly. They translate it into precautionary standards that make future contingencies administratively manageable. Uncertainty is therefore stabilized through regulation. Once translated into technical requirements, anticipated threats become measurable, reviewable, and enforceable, even when the event against which they protect remains indeterminate.
Methods
The research combines archival, regulatory, and architectural analysis through a micro-historical study of municipal public kindergartens from the late 1960s to the present. The primary material consists of building permits, construction drawings, statutory and municipal records, Ministry of Education guidelines, civil-defense and Home Front Command requirements, police security procedures, government decisions, and Knesset debates. These materials are cross-read to reconstruct how changes in institutional understandings of risk entered the planning and approval process. Pasted text
The study deliberately prioritizes ordinary standalone kindergartens rather than exceptional or iconic projects. Their repetition across municipalities allows comparison between buildings with similar programs but different dates, regulatory contexts, and architectural forms. Particular attention is given to drawings because they preserve requirements that may become difficult to distinguish once construction is complete. A fence line, a protected-space detail, a revised entrance, or an approval stamp can record a regulatory condition more clearly than the finished building. Pasted text
The analysis follows selected architectural elements across the three stages of Narration, Notation, and Spatialization, particularly the shelter or protected space and the controlled perimeter and threshold. Their regulatory histories are reconstructed through legislation, institutional directives, and historical events; their translation into architectural requirements is examined through permits and technical drawings; and their eventual spatial consequences are traced through dimensions, location, circulation, access, and subsequent modification.
Results
The study examines whether the architecture of the kindergarten can be read as a cumulative record of changing approaches to risk. Earlier buildings reveal a more visible negotiation between architectural form and civil-defense requirements. Experimental geometries, including standardized domed “Domecrete” kindergarten types from the 1970s, sit beside shelter volumes whose construction, dimensions, and circulation requirements remain graphically distinct. In later permits, the regulatory apparatus becomes increasingly explicit. Protected-space plans and sections, perimeter details, approval procedures, and technical specifications occupy increasing portions of the drawing set, while the building itself becomes progressively standardized. Pasted text
A second genealogy can be traced around the controlled threshold. Following the 1974 Ma’alot attack, emergency regulations established an expandable framework for the security of educational institutions. Over subsequent decades, guarding, inspection, fencing, access control, police responsibility, and institutional security procedures were extended and reorganized through recurring legislation, government decisions, and professional guidance. What began as an emergency response was gradually transformed into an ordinary administrative field. The entrance to the educational institution became not simply a doorway but a controlled threshold composed of fencing, gates, inspection routines, and managed access. Pasted text
These genealogies do not produce a single linear history. They overlap, expand, and are periodically reinterpreted. The shelter shifts from a discrete civil-defense requirement toward an increasingly integrated component of ordinary educational architecture. The threshold similarly expands from the presence of a guard toward the wider organization of fencing, circulation, adjacency, visibility, and access. The resulting kindergarten is not designed around one known threat, but around a field of possible future events. It becomes an architecture of permanent preparedness.
Discussion and conclusion
The kindergarten demonstrates how planning for uncertainty can become durable precisely because the future remains uncertain. Regulation does not need to predict the exact event that will occur. Rather, it translates anticipated risk into measurable and enforceable spatial conditions. Through repetition, these requirements accumulate until precautions once associated with exceptional circumstances become ordinary components of architectural production. Pasted text
The broader argument of the research is therefore not that conflict directly determines architectural form. Between event and building lies an institutional and representational apparatus through which perceived risk is normalized, translated into regulation, mediated through professional practice, and encoded within technical drawings before finally materializing in space. Narration, Notation, and Spatialization describe successive moments within this process: the construction of risk as a historical and institutional concern; its conversion into technical and graphic requirements; and its eventual materialization within architecture.
Architectural drawings occupy a particularly important position within this sequence. They preserve the intermediate moment at which abstract concerns become dimensions, lines, symbols, specifications, and approval requirements. They can consequently be read as historical records of changing institutional perceptions of risk, situated between the narratives that justify regulation and the spaces that regulation eventually produces.
The Israeli kindergarten makes this process unusually legible. Its architecture brings together two seemingly contradictory imperatives: development and anticipated threat. Play, exploration, and growth coexist with shelters, controlled thresholds, fences, emergency circulation, and other precautionary requirements. Yet the significance of these elements lies less in their individual presence than in their accumulation over time. What begins as a response to crisis can persist through regulation long after the initiating event has passed, becoming embedded within professional conventions and ordinary architectural expectations.
The study ultimately argues that sociopolitical anxiety acquires spatial permanence through this cumulative process. Temporary crises enter Narration as events and institutional concerns, then accumulated and codified through Notation as regulations and architectural requirements, and acquire durability through Spatialization in the built environment. The resulting architecture is not defined by a singular defensive form, but by anticipation itself: the incorporation of uncertain future threats into present architectural decisions until preparedness becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from architecture as usual.
Keywords: Planning under uncertainty; Risk governance; Architectural regulation; Technical drawings; Educational infrastructure.
Note: This text was revised using AI.
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