Talking Modernism

Episode 6 - Tel Aviv's White City, Part 1

• Michael Hauptman • Season 1 • Episode 6

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"From the froth of a wave and a cloud I built myself a white city"

Second in a 2-part series on Tel Aviv's "White City", the world's largest collection of modernist-style architecture.   I discuss how in the 1930s a radical architecture style largely developed in Northern Europe took hold in a new city on the shores of the Mediterranean.

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Photo credit:  Bialik House, 1925 The Times of Tel Aviv

Welcome! To the sixth episode in the series, “Talking Modernism”, the podcast about the 1920s and 30s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed the world. I am your host, Michael Hauptman. 

In this episode I’ll be discussing the districts of Tel Aviv known as the “White City”. If you’re listening to this series I’m guesssing you already know a bit about modernist architecture. But what you might not know is that the world’s biggest collection of modernist style architechture is to be found not in Germany, Britain or the US, but rather in  Tel Aviv. The fascinating story, of how  a radical building style that started in northern Europe took hold in a new city on the shores of the Mediterranean,is not widely known, and I’m pleased to have the opportunity to share it with you now.

To understand the White City, lets start by outlining the history of Tel Aviv. In the early 1900s, the port town of Jaffa in what was then Ottoman Palestine, had a number of outlying settlements. In 1909 a few of these small settlements that were predominantly Jewish decided to incorporate and form a new town, centered around the settlement of 'Ahuzat Bayit' , meaning homestead, about 6 kilometres north of Jaffa. In 1912 it was renamed ‘Tel Aviv’ (hill of spring), Taking the name from a book called ‘Alteneuland’ (Old new land) by Theodore Hertzl, the man who was the driving force behind the idea of a Jewish homeland, who I’ll talk more about shortly. 

So why did the Jews want to move outside of Jaffa? Jaffa was crowded and dirty. An extremely ancient town, mentioned by the Egyptians 3,800 years ago, its limits were prescribed by ancient city walls. Theodore Hertzl visited Jaffa in the late 1890s and hated it so much he spent much of his time there trying to book passage out. The population of Jaffa boomed after WW1 so many new settlements were established close by, not just by Jews. But Jews abandoned Jaffa for Tel Aviv due to rising tensions with the Arabs, especially after a week-long riot in 1921 which killed about 50 Jews and 50 Arabs. 

Why were there tensions between Arabs and Jews in Jaffa? The Arabs had no special fondness for the Jews, but a Jewish community had lived in Jaffa for literally centuries. Some of the tensions dated to Napoleon’s conquest of Jaffa from the Ottomans in 1799, where his troops massacred the Muslim inhabitants before declaring the emancipation of the Jewish inhabitants. More recently during WW1 the Turks had expelled all the Jews from Jaffa as they doubted their loyalty – many were originally from Russia, who with the Turks were now at war, and they were concerned about a fifth column. These tensions had been exacerbated by a significant increase in Jewish immigration after WW1 to what was by then British Mandate Palestine. There was a series of waves of Jewish of emigration known Aliyahs – which means “ascent” in Hebrew. 

If you know your biblical history, you will know that the Jewish nation was destroyed by the Romans with the destruction of the second temple in the year 70 AD, and after a subsequent revolt in 150 AD, the Jewish community in Palestine was killed, enslaved, or dispersed. 

There did remain though , down through the centuries, a small population of Jews in Palestine. By the mid-1800s, Palestine was part of the Ottoman empire, with a population of about 600k, of which approximately 80% were Muslim, 10% Christian Arabs and 5-7%, about 36k, Jewish. 

Then, the Jewish population in Palestine began to change.

Theodore Hertzl, the Dreyfus affair and the rise of zionism

Rising antisemitism and expanding international communications then drove a wave of emigration of jews from Eastern Europe. A small but significant portion went to Palestine. The first wave occurred in the late 1880s to 1903 of approximately 30k mainly Russian jews escaping the pogroms triggered by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881– these pograms featured in the movie “Fiddler of the Roof”. This first aliyah, this first wave of jewish emigrantswas badly prepared and poorly funded, and most returned home after a few months. But it was the harbinger of the much bigger, better prepared aliyahs that were to follow.

The first Aliyah was sponsored by a number of small groups in the European Jewish community that were encouraging brave pioneering Jews to emigrate, to return, to Palestine. But this was a fringe view at the time. In the late 1800s, the focus of most European jews was to assimilate into mainstream Christian society, to be French Jews or German Jews or Austro-Hungarian Jews. For most of their existence, Jews were not granted full citizenship in any country in Europe. – Even enlightened England didn’t grant full equality until 1858, though it did grant limited rights from the late 1700s. But Revolutionary France granted full citizenship to its Jews in 1791, and by the mid 1800s most European nations – with the singular exception of Russia – had followed suit. 

The drive towards assimilation in Europe was severely tested though in 1894, with the Dreyfus affair in France. A Jewish officer in the French army, Captain Alfred Dreyfuss was accused of spying for Germany. A large factor in his eventual conviction was the fact that he was Jewish and in the eyes of many this meant that his loyalties were suspect. Eventually, after trial and retrial that stretched on for ten years, he was finally declared innocent in 1904. The long drawn-out affair dividing and destabilising French society in the meantime. This highly publicised case of institutional antisemitism shocked Jews across Europe. It made them doubt that their efforts to assimilate would ever be totally successful, and many decided instead that they should establish themselves as Jewish nation in Palestine, and this movement was known as Zionism. Theodore Hertzl, a passionate and dynamic young Jewish journalist who had covered the Dreyfuss affair, became the driving force behind the new Zionist movement, organising the first international conference in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. A politically savvy operator, he put Zionism on the agenda of many governments, and negotiated an agreement with the Ottoman government to allow limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. A new wave of Aliyahs would commence, and unlike the first Aliyah, the Jeish immigrants would be there to stay. 

The second Aliyah between 1904-1914 saw 35k primarily Russian Jews fleeing continued pogroms. The third Aliyah between 1919-1923 saw a further 40k mainly Russian and Polish Jews fleeing the disruptions of the end of WW1. A fourth Aliyah between 1924 and 1928 brought 80k; half from Poland, rest from USSR, Romania and Lithuania, a combination of fallout from the Russian revolution and growing institutional anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. 

These immigrants came from rural not city backgrounds. And their attitude and outlook was not that of the bourgousie mainstream. 160k Jews immigrated to Palestine between 1904 and 1929, which sounds like a lot, until you realise that 1.5m immigrated to the US in the same period. Zionism might have increased in popularity after the Dreyfus affair, but it remained a movement of fringe zealots and enthusiasts – in 1914 Zionist Association for Germany had only 10k members, a small fraction of the Jewish population there. The early Jewish immigrants to Palestinewere borderline revolutionaries, infused with pioneering zeal. It was this generation who adopted and adapted hebrew as the official language of their nation-in-being. In politics they were strogly strong leftist and socialist: this was the generation who founded the kibbutz movement and the trade union organisation ‘Histadrut’, plus they adopted equal rights for women. In their iconoclastic outlook they shared many similarities with the modernist avant-garde that I described in episode 3 about the ballet “The Rite of Spring”.

British Mandate Palestine and the Geddes Plan

This infusion of Jews to Palestine, 160k in 20 years, significantly altered the balance between the religious communities in Jaffa and fed the tensions that drove the Jews from Jaffa to the fledgling city of Tel Aviv. And a major factor in the increase of Jewish immgration after WW1 was the 1917 Balfour Declaration. 1917 the British has issued the Balfour Declaration that supported the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, and this accelerated the Zionist sentiment and aspirations. A large part of the motivation for the Balfour declaration was that the British hoped to sow discord amongst the Jewish community in their wartime enemy Turkey. The British, together with support from Commonwealth nations including Australia conquered Palestine from the Turks in WW1. After the war Palestine was one of a number of territories that Britain administed under a mandate from the League of Nations, in this case as a transition towards the establishment of a national home for the Jews and also a national home for the Arabs, to, quote: 

‘provide administrative advice and assistance ... until such time as they are able to stand alone". 

All of this had been decided with full support of the Zionist movemetn, but with essentially no consultation with the Arabs, who were understandably suspicious of and hostile to these changes. The British ignored objections from organisations like the Palestine Arab congress, who rejected not only the Balfour Declaration, but the very formation of a Palestine separate from the rest of Syria. Trust was further strained in 1920 when the British authorities appointed Herbert Samuel, a Zionist Jew, as Palestine’s inaugural high commissioner. 

Now, the British attitude towards Jewish Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was called, changed in the late 1930s when they tightened up on Jewish immigration in the face of rising Arab resistance which erupted into a full scale revolt in 1936, but prior to that they were keen supporters and facilitators of the growth of Tel Aviv. In 1920 the population of Tel Aviv was 2,084, and Jaffa was 48k. By 1930 Tel Aviv had grown 20 fold to 42,000.

So the British administration were keen supporters and facilitators of Tel Aviv. Part of that support was the city plan developed in 1927 by the Scot Sir Patrick Geddes, a polymath and very prominent town planner. Geddes indeed was a pioneer of town planning; he developed many of its terms and concepts,. Geddes designed Tel Aviv as a ‘garden city’, with an emphasis on suburbs and less emphasis on its commercial centre. A garden city sound lovely and tourists are told that Tel Aviv was designed as a garden city according to the Geddes plan, but the reality is that only a few features of the Geddes plan were adopted. Geddes designed a city of freestanding single or and semi-detached dwellings on 570 square metre plots of land. The dwellings were arranged around a series of central blocks, typically containing a park, schools, meeting centres and shops. A biologist, Geddes put a lot of thought into the parks and gardens and green spaces between buildings and even recommended that a horticultural society be formed. Major roads were oriented north-south, with east-west cross streets to capture sea breezes. Minor streets – Geddes called them homeways - penetrated into the blocks. Two key aspects of the Geddes plan were not implemented. One was the emphasis on single and semi-detached houses. Geddes really didn’t like apartment blocks – he called them ‘warehouse type dwellings - but with pressure of twentyfold growth in a single decade, apartment blocks were the predominant building in the White City. The lovely parks at the centre of the blocks similarly were often omitted in the pressure to build. Some do exist and are indeed lovely but are not common. The block layout and the network of homeways did though encourage heavy pedestrian use and street life, the foundation of Tel Aviv’s character that persists today as a city that never sleeps.

The architecture of Tel Aviv in the 1920s could best be described as Oriental Eclectic. It was based on the Arts-andCraft style of British edwardian era architecture, but incorproating oriental influences, such as ornamented and colored facades, symmetrical divisions, domes, arches, and hanged balconies. Some described it as ‘an Englishman dressed for the local climate’

Then began the biggest wave of immigration – the fifth Aliyah. Between 1929 and 1939 more than 225k Jews immigrated to Palestine, including many Germans and Austrians fleeing the Nazis, and also Hungarians and other Central Europeans fleeing anti-Semitism in those countries. This new wave of immigrants was very different in character to the previous waves in that it was much more urban than rural, and drawn more from the middle and professional classes. They were sophisticated urban bougousie from Berlin. Vienna and Budapest rather than starry-eyed zionist fanatics from Anatevka.

Tel Aviv doubled in size in the 11 years between 1925 and 1936. All this building required money, partly funded by surely one of the most bizarre incidents in history, the Haavara Agreement between Nazi Germany and the Jewish Anglo-Palestine Bank. The Haavara Agreement allowed German Jewish immigrants to export a portion of their savings in the form of a credit in German goods, typically building materials. This could be redeemed when the emmigrant reached Palestine, and the goods sold or used in building The Nazis were keen on this as widespread boycotts after they came to power were restricting German exports. Plus whilst they were keen to expel the Jews, they wanted to keep their money. The Haavara Agreement was a stone that killed both these birds. This meant that much of the White City was built with construction materials and fittings from Nazi Germany, surely one of history’s greatest ironies.

One element still remained to create Tel Aviv’s White City – functionist style architecture. 

Functionalist architecture and the White City

The first quarter of the twentieth century was a ferment of radical experiments in thinking, living and art including architecture. One key strand of this architectural experimentation that led to the White City largely started in pre-WW1 Germany and Austria, where avant-garde architects there sought a new style of architecture for the new twentieth century. Radically different from the past, it tried to ignore all the rules and conventions that had defined Western architecture for the past 300 odd years. They created buuildings like the radical Steiner House built by Adolf Loos in Vienna in 1910, Plain rather than decorated, with new shapes and curves that overturned the notion of what a building should look like. 

In 1923 the very influential Bauhaus design school, which was formed in the aftermath of WW1, held an exhibition promoting the ideas of Neues Bauen (New Building). Bauhaus was a design philosophy rather than an architectural style. It was very leftist and socialist at its base and espoused a socially orientated functional language suitable for limited technology and local materials. A quote by one of its directors Hannes Meyer sums it up as ‘architecture= function x economies’. Indeed this style of architecture was so focused on efficiently satisifying human housing needs that it is often called functionalism.

Whilst it certainly had a role in promoting this new architecture, the Bauhaus was perhaps more involved in industrial design than in architecture, and the more influential contribution to the functional style was made by the prolific Swiss architect and writer known as Le Corbusier. In 1923 Le Corbusier published his a book that has been described as “the most influential acheitecture text of the 20th century “ Towards a new architecture”, and in this book laid out a code of rational building in his 5 points:

  1. Pilotis then columns, raising the first story off the ground
  2. Open plan living spaces, enabled by a stuctural frame rather than interior structural walls.
  3. The free design of the façade that was also a consequence of the structural frame rather than external load bearing walls
  4. Longhorizontal window, which cuts the façade along its entire length, lights rooms equally.
  5. Roof gardens on a flat roof to provide space for sunbathing

Aesthetically, both Bauhaus and Corbusier buildings emphasised human scale, honesty in materials – no veneers – and no decoration. They also adopted the Golden Ratio or Section as the basis for layout of the façade. We humans find the proportions of the Golden Ratio pleasing, and this I think contributes to the enduring appeal of this architecture.

Asw well as being called functionalism, the architecture of Bauhaus and Le Corbusier is known as the International style, named for a 1932 exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The International style persisted and evolved at least until the late 1960s, finding its apogee in the glass skyscrapers that filled post-war cities around the world. But in the 1930s it wasn’t hugely popular even in its countries of origin. A wonderful 1936 cartoon from Punch magazine has a proud owner showing off her new modernist house to her shocked neighbours, saying: 

“Do tell me you loathe it”! 

The style was too “out-there” for general tastes; it was only when the style was softened and melded with more mainstream decorative traditions in the form of Art Deco or Streamline Moderne that it achieved widespread appeal. So why then did it find such fertile ground in 1930s Tel Aviv?

With that question, let’s leave our podcast there for now. Join me next time when I’ll conclude the discussion of Tel Aviv’s White City, and also discuss a very different strand of modernist architecture in 1930’s Palestine buit by a pioneer of expressionist archiecture, the brilliant but difficult Erich Mendelsohn

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Michael Hauptman

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