New White City
Renewed and restored, Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus core enjoys a comeback.
By Susan Davidson | From Preservation | May/June 2008
My most vivid memory of a childhood spent in England's dowdy Midlands is the arrival of a crate filled with Jaffa oranges. The sender was "Reik, 109 Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv." Reik meant my great uncle, Arthur Reik, his wife, Stella, and their two sons, Heinzi and Otto. Emigrants from Vienna, they moved in March 1939 to Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv's main residential street. They provided my introduction to a mysterious fruit and to a part of my family and a part of the world that were then completely unknown to me.
In the late 1930s Rothschild Boulevard was a grand thoroughfare of crisp new buildings with a ficus-and-grass-lined median that looked more northern European than Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. "It was called 'Nob Hill,'" Heinzi recalls, since notable residents, including the city's mayor, lived there. "As far as I can remember, he had the only chauffeur-driven car in the city. This was when most people didn't have much."
Now, after a checkered past of boom and bust, the neighborhood around the boulevard has again become a desirable address. And as a major force in that recovery, hundreds of buildings—pioneering examples of European modernism from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, the world's largest such concentration—have been restored.
The history of Tel Aviv begins at the 4,000-year-old Mediterranean seaport of Jaffa (also known as Yafo), the entry point for countless immigrants. By the 1900s, many of its residents had grown displeased with the rapid growth of Jaffa and its lack of space.
In response, 60 families purchased a parcel of land north of the city. They named the sandy tract Ahuzat Bayit, Hebrew for "housing association." And on April 11, 1909, with a communelike sense of fairness, the property was divided and the housing association became the nucleus for the new municipality of Tel Aviv: Tel means hill, either natural or man-made; aviv means spring, as in the renewal of life. This was the first Jewish city built in 2,000 years.
By 1914, Tel Aviv's population had grown to 1,500. After the First World War, the city expanded north, guided by a 1925 master plan, which promoted garden-city principles within an urban template: free-standing, low-rise structures set into small green spaces, blocks of buildings repeated within a hierarchical street grid, public gardens, and avenues (including Rothschild) with landscaped medians. Much of the architecture in the newer neighborhoods was strictly modern and designed by graduates of Germany's Bauhaus school. (The school, founded in 1919, combines the German words for "building" and "house.") While Bauhaus-trained architects would affect urban design around the world (see page 71), their ideas had a tremendous impact on Tel Aviv. Some immigrated to the bourgeoning city in the 1920s, but after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, many more arrived as part of a huge exodus of German Jews.
Influenced by their studies at the school, and by such modernist stars as Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn (himself an emigrant from Germany), they embraced simplified forms with clean lines and minimal ornamentation. Their buildings, cubic structures of reinforced concrete that rarely rose more than four stories, favored such modern features as pilotis (stilts) on the first floor that let air cool the building above, curved corners, deep balconies for outdoor living, and flat roofs where residents could socialize, cook, and hang their laundry to dry. The pilotis, rooftops, and other elements—relatively small windows, for example—show the influence of the warm local climate. "Think of a chest of drawers with the drawers pulled out," says Yona Wiseman, who leads walking tours of Tel Aviv, in describing the buildings. "White was the prevalent color, hence Tel Aviv's other name—the White City."
"The critical aspect of Bauhaus teachings was the lack of pretension," says Benjamin Forgey, former architecture critic of The Washington Post. "There was this fabulously idealistic notion that human beings could stand on their own legs and use their own minds to determine their own cultural futures, without all the inherited props of cultures past. This ideal had great influence around the world, but it got thoroughly tested with large groups of buildings only in a few places—Berlin, Vienna, and by historical circumstance, most thoroughly in Tel Aviv." Some 4,000 Bauhaus-inspired residential, commercial, and civic structures were ultimately built in the White City.
The remainder of this article will be online on June 1.
Travel writer Susan Davidson lives in Washington, D.C. The photos in this story appeared in "The White City of Tel Aviv," at the Az W museum in Vienna.
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