Zionist German Architecture

Israel was perhaps one of the greatest social experiments of modern history, and in a certainly limited sense is one of its greatest successes. The creation of a modern nation state out of nothing more than an ethnic and religious group was certainly a stunningly bold, humanist undertaking. It’s fitting, then that after a location was chosen and a language refined, when the time came to build a city, its architects looked to that most modern of styles for their inspiration: the Bauhaus.

A brief-lived movement that grew out of the troubled and ultimately misplaced optimism of Weimar Germany, the Bauhaus was a state-sponsored architecture and design collective. I’m no expert, but the Bauhaus output of the 1920’s and beyond stands in start contrast to the modernism of fin-de-siecle Europe, which manifested itself in the warm Art Nouveau styles of eras before the wars. The Bauhaus rejected ornamentation in favour of simplicity, and details in favour of efficiency. Perhaps most of all, they rejected the elitism and expense of all forms of high design at the time in favour of something which could be reliably and effectively reproduced – they were, perhaps, the inventors of Pop Art.

Ideologically, this was all very much in line with what the inter-war Zionists had in mind for Israel; a egalitarian utopia which turned its back on a more complicated European past and had both feet firmly in an elegant, simple future. The fact that architectural style also promised to be cheap to manufacture certainly didn’t hurt. So when a great number of the Jewish members of the Bauhaus school were chased out of Germany in the early 1930’s, the new city of Tel Aviv, rapidly rising out of the sand dunes to the north of the old port of Jaffa welcomed them with both arms… and quickly put them to work, drawing their own plans and training the new crop of Zionist builders.

I have made a good number of trips to Tel Aviv over the years, and I never really recalled the city has having particularly notable architecture. I mostly thought of the dusty streets of low-rise concrete buildings as being more or less undistinguishable from the countless other cities built after the Second World War around the globe. But as you move closer in to the heart of Tel Aviv, if you gaze up through the leafy trees that line the streets, and can peer behind the sheets of peeling plaster, it becomes not hard to make out a gentle curve of a buildings corner, or the stark cropped edge of a long balcony: the trademarks of the Bauhaus.

As you move down such a street, it becomes almost breathtaking – building after building repeats the same motifs, artfully simplified construction of apartment blocks stripped down to their essence. One can imagine sea-air ventilated rooms full of happy young Zionist architects, men and women side by side in khaki shirt-sleeves, slumped over drafting tables sketching away under a portrait of Walter Gropius with a banner that reads “form follows function!” After work they might have gathered in the still-fresh city square of the “White City” they were about to create until one or another of them produced a clarinet and then they would dance the hora until the small hours.

I suppose in the uncertain, war torn years that followed independence, as the idealism gave way to modernism of a different sort and middle class moved out of Tel Aviv and into the many suburbs filled with driveways, washing machines and the like which now fill the coastal plain. Tel Aviv remained a commercial center, a home for the banks, the ministries, and whoever else could not easily move. The apartment blocks, built in a fit of communal optimism, passed into the tied hands of landlords bound by rent-control laws who had little choice but to let the buildings pass into disrepair. Plaster peeled, gardens were paved over, and the airy iconic balconies were closed in with all manners of slatted blinds and iron railings and worse to protect against the Mediterranean sun, the salt air, and the sceptre of crime that haunts every city of the sort Tel Aviv was becoming. It’s that Tel Aviv that I remember as a boy; a place with pleasant weather but awful construction. A part of Israel fun for an outing, but giving no reason to linger more.

Today, it appears things have changed. In the early part of this decade, the center of the city was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Simultaneously, Tel Aviv began to succumb to the wave of urban renewals which was, and still is, sweeping the world. Our generation is rushing back into the cities our parents and grandparents abandoned, seeking the very sort of human contact and unpredictability they sought to avoid. So among the old septuagenarians taking the air, one can see in Tel Aviv many a yuppie walking their (miniature) dog or raising a pair of designer sunglasses to asses a particularly attractive view. The restaurant and café scene in the very core of the heritage architecture districts (Avenue Rothschild, and Dizengoff) is truly world class, and shows signs of getting better (see my forthcoming blog post on the dining scene). I think it’s exactly what our smiling, singing architects had in mind.