S3 2: ALLEYS | NILI PORTUGALI Architect . Filmmaker . Author

A seventh generation descendent of family who lived in Sefad, Israel, the city where mystical scholars of the Kabbalah found refuge in the 16th Century; Nili Portugali is an architect, author and filmmaker. We discuss her film “And the Alley She Whitewashed in Light Blue”, a stunning, poetic, visual masterpiece of the seasonal rituals in her Grandmother Rivka’s hotel, at the end of an alley in that old city. The film is one of her many works which seek to find a universal answer to the question “What is the basis of all those places in which one feels at home, and wants to return to, again and again?”

NILI PORTUGALI BIO

Nili Portugal was a  senior lecturer in at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and on the faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion in Haifa. Her studies at the Architectural Association in London were followed by postgraduate studies in architecture and buddhism at University of California in Berkley, where she also conducted research with Christopher Alexander. She has written the book ‘The Act of Creation and the Spirit of a Place: A Holistic Phenomenological Approach to Architecture’. Her work seeks universal connections between scientific disciplines with the fundamentals of Bhuddist philosophy.

LINKS

The Link to the Film is provided in the book, “And the Alley She Whitewashed in Light Blue”.
Buy the Book/See the Film

Website: Nili Portugali

Facebook: Nili Portugali

Other Books by Nili Portugali:
The Act of Creation and the Spirit of a Place: A Holistic Phenomenological Approach to Architecture
A Holistic Approach to Architecture: The Felicja Blumental Music Center and Library, Tel-Aviv

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT

“…..that really brought her to enlightenment because she was so immersed. I mean, it's not like painting the wall, but really the way she did it, very slowly. She was almost inside the wall herself. And the light blue, it's one of the two colors of the Kaballah. They said that light blue is the color that actually brings you to heaven. But you can be aware of it in other cultures also. When you go to many places in the Mediterranean, you see the light blue…. for different reasons. So, in Sefad they really believed in this color and, of course, this was a very important issue in the film; the activity itself, the way she did it, very slowly.…..I think that today because of many reasons, there is no dialogue at all between the street, or the public domain, and the private domain. But at that time, yeah, there was really almost no distinction, and the feeling you had in the alleys were really feeling at home. If this would be our motivation, for people to feel at home in the public domain, I think we can do it in other ways maybe, but I don't think that the past has really a monopoly on beauty.”

FOR FULL TRANSCRIPT READ HERE

Photos extracted from the film “And the Alley She Whitewashed in Light Blue” by Nili Portugali