Talking Modernism

Episode 7 - Tel Aviv's White City, Part 2

• Michael Hauptman

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Second in a 2-part series on Tel Aviv's "White City", the world's largest collection of modernist-style architecture.   In this episode I discuss the growth, decline and rediscovery of the White City.  I also discuss the contrasting work of Expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn 

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Welcome! To the seventh 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 is the second and final discussing the districts of Tel Aviv known as the “White City”. In the previous episode I gave you a very brief overview of Zionism, the founding of Tel Aviv and the roots of functionist architecture. Lets continue by exploring why Tel Aviv was so receptive to this radical new style of architecture.

The creation of the White City

Functionist or international style archtecture as it is alsocalled, took root and flourished in 1930s Tel Aviv due to an alignment of a whole number of factors that were unique to that time and that place. 

The first factor was the spirit of progress at large amongst the Yishuv. Despite all the economic and political storms of the 1930s it was an altogether more optimistic, less cynical time than today, as people still had faith in progress, that modernism and the machine age would deliver a better tomorrow, as I discussed in episode 4. And the Jews in Palestine were more optimistic and receptive to change than most. Recall that I described them as borderline revolutionaries, very open to new ways of thinking and doing. And so the international style architecture was introduced to Palestine not by the recent immigrants from Germany in the fifth Aliyah after 1929, but rather by forward thinking architects who had arrived in earlier waves. Consider for instance the architects who in 1932 formed the Tel Aviv Chug, or circle, in order to popularise the international style to Tel Aviv. All immigrated to Palestine in the 1920s, trained as architects and then returned to Europe to practice where they learnt the International Style from the originators. Arieh Sharon trained at the Bauhaus school under Hannes Meyer, Joseph Neufeld, worked in Berlin for Erich Mendelsohn and also worked with Bruno Taut in Moscow. Ze’ev Rechter, worked with Le Corbusier. Tel Avivians saw themselves as creating not just a Jewish city but a city modern in every sense of the word, and the International style suited them perfectly. 

Another reason that International Style found popularity was that it was indeed international, or at least it didn’t match any national style. In fact, this lack of historicism or reference to the German architectural vernacular was the reason that the Nazis hated the international style. Given that Jewish Palestinians wanted to cast off their former nationalities – Russian, Romanian, German – and form a new common Zionist identity, it was precisely this lack of reference to a specific nationality in the International style that appealed. And the fact the Nazis hated it probably was icing on the cake.

And yet reason that the style was popular was that it was often cheap and quick to build though use of concrete, which was a vital consideration given the population explosion occurring in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. Large-scale use of concrete as a building material began before WW1, with buildings like the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Germany in particular had completed a number of large scale public housing developments in the late 1920s using concrete, such as the Neus Frankfurt program which built 12k apartments in the five years between 1925 and 1930 under the direction of architect Bruno Taut. 

The Neus Frankfurt program had used pre-cast concrete elements, which differed from Tel Aviv’s buildings were built of concrete blocks with limestone render. This method of construction did not require a large amount of skill, which was important as the continuing tensions with the Arabs in Jaffa meant that this traditional source of building labourers was cut off, with Arab boycotts of Jewish businesses. In response, Jewish Palestine adopted a policy of Hebrew labor (‘avoda ‘Ivrit) . A silicate brick production company was established in 1922 and a cement company the following year. Concrete block construction suited the unskilled labour available from the latest wave of immigrants – poetry of the time describes medical students and lawyers learning to mix cement. Furthermore, cement construction had favourable connotations of modern and up-to-date, in line with the Yishuv’s perception of themselves. The then high commissioner John Chancellor wrote in 1929:

 “By reason of their greater intelligence and manual skill the Jews are economically superior to the Arabs in some of the more modern forms of skilled and semi-skilled work, such as reinforced concrete, care of machinery and electrical work.” 

In 1934 Tel Aviv hosted the Levant Fair, an international expo to showcase the industries of Jewish Palestine to the world. This fair was a huge success, 600k visitors and pavilions from 30 countries as well. A permanent exhibition complex covering 10 hectare was built on the seaside, with pavilions designed by local architects, all in the White box international style. Tel Avivians were very proud of the Fair, designed and built in Palestine on time, and it no doubt help position the International Style as Tel Aviv’s own.

So, after that rather long preamble, let’s examine some of the White City buildings. 


Buildings of the White City



In the centre of Tel Aviv today the international style still dominates. There is a Bauhaus museum and visitors centre, and a one-hour tour, available of some key buildings. 

There are a huge number of modernist building in the White City – 1,200 of an original 4,000 I am led to believe – so I’ve selected a few that illustrate some of the principle aspects of the prevailing style. 

Engel House, one of the most prominent examples of White City architecture. It is a low rise apartment block, by far the most common building type in the White City. In Hebrew an apartment block like this is call ‘Beit Meshutaf’ , or “cmmunal house” Built by speculative builders these buildings were made from reinforced concrete skeleton of columns and slabs, with walls hollow concrete blocks (20 cm exterior and 5 or7 cm interior). Exterior walls were rendered in limestone plaster. Floors were finished in terrazzo tiles. Windows were wood or steel. Each floor had 3-4 units arranged around a central stairwell, with access to the roof. Units typically had 2 or 3 multi-purpose rooms as well as a small kitchen and bathroom. And always a balcony. These provided an essential escape as the uninsulated apartments became unbearably hot in that age before air conditioning.

Emgel House was built in 1933 by Ze’ev Richter, one of the Chug circle. It was the first building in Tel Aviv to be built on pilotis, one of Corbusier’s 5 principles. It also had a roof terrace, another of Corbusier’s principles. These 2 features allow a gradual transition between the public pace of the Street and the private space of the apartment. They didn’t have fancy entrances, the covered space under the pilotis was the transition from the street, and the roof terrace a semi-private shared space for the residents. Functional architecture placed a great emphasis on social and communal use, which the Chug circle had to adapt to the realities of the Geddes plan with its 500 square metre blocks. Which the city planners refused to change, despite representations like this illustration here.

Engel House is unusual in having long ribbon windows, another of Corbusier’s 5 points, but impractical given the strength of Tel Aviv’s sun and also the cost of windows in Palestine – they were all imported. Finally, part of the attraction of a ribbon window is to admire the view, and the views from these apartment blocks check-by-jowl on Geddes grid wasn’t great, as the Chug Circle architects pointed out in one of their journals.

Rubinsky House is perhaps more typical of the majority of White City apartment blocks. It sits on the ground rather than on pilotis. And rather than having ribbon window it achieves the ribbon effect via a recessed balcony on the south aspect. The thin concrete skin is essentially a double wall around the balcony, which serves again as a gradual transition space between the private apartment and the street. 

The urban centre of the White City and indeed Tel Aviv is Dizengoff Square. There were a few prominent women architects in the Palestine at the time and this was designed by Genia Averbuch. She also designed the Esther Cinema, one of a harmonius row of buildings curiving around circular Dizengoff Square, united by the long horizontals of the recessed balconies. The scale of the White City was unique and constructions like Dizengoff square realised modernist concepts that otherwise were only paper sketches, as seen by Mies can de Rohe’s 1927 proposal for remodelling Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, a circular island very similar to Dizengoff.

Averbuch had an interesting career. She was prominent in the Levant Fair, helping design the Cafe. She then helped design the diorama at the famous Futurama exhibition at NY 1939 World Fair.

Most of White City’s accommodation was small scale apartment blocks, but there was a handful of larger scale cooperative workers estates sponsored by the Histadrut trade union movement, in particular one in Frishmann St designed by Arieh Sharon . Here the common space is in the form of a central yard accessed by a section on raised pilotis.

Rediscovery and conservation

The White City buildings fell into disrepair in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Tel Aviv’s population moved to more modern and spacious accommodation in the suburbs. The white city apartments were often rent controlled, so there was no incentive to renovate. And the white boxes did not age well. White render stained, balconies and void spaced filled in, air conditioners stuck on. Even lovely Dizengoff Square was butchered to allow an underpass. 

The trigger for the white city’s rebirth was basically a wave of nostalgia amongst the Israeli Jews with a European background for the good old days, and this was triggered by the election in 1977 of Menachim Begin’s Likud government. This marked the end of power for the leftist Labour government that had governed Israel since 1948, and in Israeli is referred to as ‘the revolution’. Now its not too much of a simplification to say that Labour was the party favoured by the Israeli Jews of European background who had built the White City, and Likud was the party of Middle Eastern Jews who had arrived in Israel after 1948. Tastes altered with the change in government, with Likud’s Build Your Own Home program resulting in a rash of aesthetically challenged McMansions.

So in the 1980s the grungy inner-city Tel Avivians began to look upon the White City architecture with new appreciation, and gradually an enthusiasm for conservation and restoration took hold. In 1984 there was a very influential exhibition at Tel Aviv’s Museum of Art then in 1994 a symposium Bauhaus in Tel Aviv was hold – even though Bauhaus didn’t have much to do with the White City. Finally the council appointed Nitza Szmuk who conducted first a survey of remaining 1930s buildings then led a conservation plan, designating over 1,000 buildings against much opposition. 

Finally in 2003 Tel Aviv’s White City achieved UNESCO status as a world heritage.

Extensive funding was given for the renovation of buildings. Also the council allowed owners to add an extra half-story to their buildings, with setbacks to minimise visual impact, so long as they restored the rest of the building. This scheme was not without its critics, but when you see the many renovate buildings it does seem to me to have achieved a reasonable compromise.


Behind the narrative – the Black City of Jaffa



Now everything I have told you so far I believe is factual and true. And it is the narrative you will hear when you visit the White City visitors centre today. But if you feel the story sounds too good to be the whole truth – ‘From the froth of a wave and a cloud I built myself a white city, Stormy, fluid, beautiful’, in the words of 1960 poem by Naomi Shemer - there are indeed further facts and perspectives. I can recommend Sharon Rotbard’s book Black City White City, where he largely convincing and certainly passionate challenging of the White City narrative. Here are a couple of his points. 

The first is that Tel Aviv has created in the White City its ‘old city centre’. But that ignores or at least minimises the infinitely older Jaffa just to the south. 

And whilst the White City has been maintained and restored, a large part of Jaffa has been destroyed and remodelled as part of efforts to suppress rebellion by the arab inhabitants, first by the British Army in 1936, and later by the Israelis. 

Rotbard notes that the boundaries of the White City are somewhat arbitrary, and ignores some the many modernist buildings that were built in Arab townships of Jaffa like Manshieh sometimes by Arab architects. Jaffa itself followed a more decorative Art Deco tradition, as seen by the lovely Alhambra Cinema​ which is still standing but sadly most of these buildings have been lost.

And Rotbard notes that the White City mirrors the large International Style projects that were built by colonial powers for colonists – Algeria, Dakar, or the art deco buildings of Eritrea, bult by the colonising Fascist Italian government. The style with attractive to colonists not only because it was new and exciting, but because it lacked any stylistic reference to the country that they were in. Similarly, the Tel Aviv White City ignored any reference to anything local or Arabic: they claimed to be international, but they were essentially Western. 

Erich Mendelsohn’s Alternative modernism



Also working in Palestine in the 1930s there was one very prominent architect who pursued a style of modern architecture very different from the functionalism of Tel Aviv’s White City, Erich Mendelsohn. Although his works are limited, elitist works for much more affluent clients than White City, his buildings do suggest an intriguing ‘what if’ alternative to the architecture and polics of the Tel Aviv’s Chug. And if you’re interested in finding out more I can recommend Seizing Jerusalem - The Architectures of Unilateral Unification, published in 2017 by Alana Nitzan-Shiftan, professor of architecture at Haifa’s Technion University.

Unlike Arieh Sharon and other members of the Chug, Erich Mendelsohn was a citizen of Germany rather than Palestine. Furthermore, he had already achieved internation renown as one of the leading architects of the expressionist architecture movement.

Expressionism was an avant-garde art movement the was popular in Germany up until the late1920s. A romantic movement, in many ways expressinism was the polar opposite to functionalism that inspired the White City, though in truth functionalism develped from expressionism, and the two movements shared many stylistic similarities. Appealing to the heart rather than the head, expressionism conceived of architecture was as a work of art rather than a rational design exercise. Expressionist architecture was part of the avant-garde artistic movement that spurred the 1913 ballet the Rite of Spring that I discussed in episode 3 – indeed the radical Theatre des Champs-Elysee where the ballet premiered was designed by a leading expressionist architect Henry van de Velde.

In 1924 Erich Mendelsohn leapt to prominence when he built the hallucenagenic Einetein’s Tower in Berlin, both futuristic and organic, one of the key buildings of the expressionist archietcture movement. Luckily it is still standing, and I’ve included a link on the podcast website. Seeking to express the speed and motion of the moden city, he then developed a style of commercial building emphasising long horizontal bands of windows evolved into the wonderful 1930s style known as “streamline moderne”, a wonderfully evocative style I’d like to explore future in a future epsiode. 

Mendelson, Jewish, had to abandon his thriving German practice with the Nazi takeover in 1933 and spent his time between Britain and Palestine. In Palestine he built a number of very significant buildings, in particular major hospitals in Haifa and Jerusalem, and most notably a grand estate at Rehovot for Chaim Weitzman, who would be the first president of the new state of Israel. 

Like the architect’s of Tel Aviv’s Chug, Mendelsohn was both Zionist in conviction and modernist in style, but philosophically Mendelsohn and the Chug were polar opposites. Whereas the Zionist’s aspirations of the chug was to form a Jewish state, Mendelsohn represented a strand of Zionism that imagined a a future Semitic commonwealth encompassing both arabs and Jews. In a rathe rill-timed pamphlet called “Palestine and the World of Tomorrow” that a disillusioned Mendelsohn wrote in 1940 shortly before he left Palestine forever he says:

“(The Balfour declaration) is a gift that can only be seen as two-edged/ two-edged because it induced the Jewish people to think of a state of their own, the lesser goal given by the grace of Versailles, and deviated from the major goal, to become an equal member of the Semitic commonwealth of nations”

And in architecture, Mendlesohn sought to achive a new architecture specifically suited to this new semitic commonwealth, combining inspirations from local vernacular architecture with the experssionist base that looked to the future. He resisted the “international” claims of functional architecture of the White City. As early as 1923, he had lecutured on the new style of the Bauhaus:

To call this new conformity simply “International” is more verbal indolence than an expression of conviction. On the other hand, it in such politically tense times it appears to be almost frivolous to impute any kind of congenial relationships between individual countries. Ironic that the term “internationality” appears in the history of nations only when their structural bonds are destroyed … and indicates the urgent need for a new, original way of thinking.”

Appealing as it may sound to post-colonial ears, at its core though, Mendelsohn’s congenial Exoticism was just another aspect of colonialism. ​ Whereas the Zionists of Tel Aviv’s white city declared the European Jews separate from neighbouring Arabs with the “international” architecture of the white city, Mendelsohn and his vision of a semitic commonwealth claimed a kinship with the neighbouring Arabs that simply did not exist. After the declaration of Israeli Independence in 1948, ​most Arab states immediately was to expelled all of their Jewish citizens regardless of their sympathies or otherwise for the new Zionist nation. It is only today that some Arab nations are beginning to encourage the return of Jewish communities

And so we come to the end of the episode. I hope you found it interesting, and perhaps even inspire you to visit Tel Aviv for yourself. It’s one of the world’s great cities, and the White City is only part of its charm.

Join me next time when I’ll talk about the Paris exposition of 1925, which sparked the explosion of the georgious style known as Art Deco. I look forward to speaking with you then.

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