(continued)

The current tenants are responsible for revitalizing these buildings, with the municipality offering technical and professional direction as well as small grants and four-year loans. So far, 200 buildings have been cleaned up and beautified.

The Beginnings

Between 1909-1912 Tel Aviv counted 100 inhabitants, and, altogether 60 residential buildings. These were of eclectic style, many of them with baroque and rococo elements. By 1921, this first Jewish city numbered 3,600 people.

The 1920s saw immigrants from Eastern Europe coming to the country; the architects among them opened offices and got to work in Tel Aviv, building a city on sand dunes.

Then, in the 1930s, came the architectural boom. It was a time of mass immigration to Palestine in the wake of the Nazi persecution. From 1933 to 1939, the population increased more than tenfold. During these boom building years, about 200 architects—from Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, and Lithuania—designed some 3000 buildings.

Among them were 17 former Bauhaus students. Others had worked in Le Corbusier's office while studying in Paris. Altogether, between 1931 and 1948, they built 4000 houses. Most of them, with few exceptions, continue to this day to be residences.

The scores of immigrant architects had the rare opportunity of constructing a new city. While this represented the advantage of not constraining them to an existing style or context, it also bore a disadvantage. The architects had no points of reference; at best, they found some primitive Arab/Turkish structures.

Creating a New Context

Many of the architects who fled Nazi Europe went to Chicago, where the decisive factors in their constructions were form and function. In Tel Aviv, by contrast, the chief concerns were the need to build quickly and at affordable prices. Accommodations were needed for the masses of arriving immigrants.

Consideration also had to be given to the city's hot, humid climate. It was vernacular modernism which these gifted men and women brought to Tel Aviv, and they knew how to adjust their creations to the subtropical climate.

Their buildings faced the west, where the winds come from, with windows and doors constructed to face one another to provide a maximum of ventilation. To accommodate the six to seven months of warm sunshine, they restricted window openings, designed many types of receded or protruding terraces, and used small roof coverings for shading over entrances and porches.

Clean horizontal lines, flat roofs, and rounded corners were the rule in these buildings, referred to by popular usage as "Bauhaus." Stilt-like pilotis, to keep the downstairs apartments from being close to the ground, were common. (The intended work area between them has since been enclosed, in many cases, to provide more living space.)

One aim was to get away from the Arab/Turkish style of Ottoman Jaffa—the walled town surrounded by citrus groves from which Tel Aviv sprang. But the architects mainly wanted to bring fresh breath to the parched land which had lain idle for so long and to respond to urgent human needs. It was an "architecture of hope," functional in approach, pioneering in spirit, steeped in social ideology.

Modernism Evolves

Thus, modernism—spurned in Europe, somewhat altered and somewhat developed—found a new home, like the immigrants themselves. The many familiar European features in these new buildings, which were planned, built, and occupied in the early stages mainly by immigrants from dozens of countries, made their new inhabitants feel at home in the midst of oriental surroundings.

"It was rather like a great mutual declaration of solidarity between the immigrants and modern architecture", says architectural historian Ita Heinze-Greenberg referring to the happy synthesis between European and Levantine elements which helped the immigrants assimilate in their new (and former) homeland.

The hope and the building ceased temporarily with the publication of the British White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration. Finding themselves with no work, many of the architects left the country for greener fields. The most productive laboratory of international functionalism came to an abrupt end.

Preservation Begins

Some of these elegant reminders of a bygone age have become shabby, damaged by the elements and neglect. But they continue to elicit the fascination of a massive living museum. A museum created by, among others, architects Dov Carmi, Zeev Rechter, Arie Sharon, Pinchas Hueth, Josef Neufeld, Genia Averbuch, and Richard Kaufmann.

"I was absolutely amazed to find a modern city in the Mediterranean area, a city shaped by the Neues Bauen and International Style architecture," says German photographer Irmel Kamp-Bandau. Intrigued by what she saw, she decided to document the buildings as they were in the 1930s.

The result of her two years of intensive research and photography is a historical documentation of modern architecture in Tel Aviv. She says her project was meant primarily to raise awareness about buildings threatened by disrepair and possible demolition.

Kamp-Bandau's project was conducted between 1987 and 1989 in cooperation with the Architectural Museum of the Technical University in Munich and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Society).

Her remarkable catalogue contains 650 photographs of these "white" buildings. One hundred twenty of them have been shown in 22 exhibitions in Europe and the United States. To this day, in the catalogue and on the ground, Tel Aviv remains the largest urban ensemble of Bauhaus architecture ever built.

According to architect Michael Turner, chairman of the Israel Chapter of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), plans are afoot to propose to have these buildings, because of their unique architectural qualities and craftsmanship, included on the list of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites.

Lili Eylon is a freelance writer based in Jerusalem and a frequent contributor to ArchitectureWeek. The biographical sketches and several photos are courtesy of Irmel Kamp-Bandau. The size and cropping of those photos have been altered for purposes of publication. Reproduction is by permission only.

A building in Zina Dizengoff Square in the center of Tel Aviv was designed by Russian-born architect Genia Averbuch. She later directed the town-planning section of Tel Aviv's building department. Photo: Irmel Kamp-Bandau, c/o Tel Aviv City Council Archive A view of Tel Aviv in 1910, before the arrival of Bauhaus architects, with Jaffa's Herzliya school (picture above) at the end of the street. Photo: Museum Eretz-Israel, Tel Aviv The House Preiskel, 1937-38, by Russians Josef Berlin and his son Wolf Berlin. Photo: Irmel Kamp-Bandau, c/o Tel Aviv City Council Archive The House Polishuk, 1934-36, by Salomon Liaskowski and Yakov Ornstein Liaskowski. Photo: Irmel Kamp-Bandau, c/o Tel Aviv City Council Archive The Habimah Theatre, by Oscar Kaufmann, built 1934-37. Photo: Photohouse Prior, Tel Aviv The House Shami,1935-36, by Yehuda Lulka , who was born in the Ukraine and educated in France and at the Technion in Haifa. Photo: Irmel Kamp-Bandau, c/o Tel Aviv City Council Archive The House Farbstein was designed in 1936 by Shlomo Gepstein, who was born in the Ukraine and trained at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art. Photo: Irmel Kamp-Bandau, c/o Tel Aviv City Council Archive Polish-born Josef Neufeld built the House Zaslavsky in 1938. He had studied at the Academy of Art in Vienna then in Rome. He later emigrated to the United States where he taught architecture at Yale. Photo: Irmel Kamp-Bandau   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.