White city. The White City of Tel Aviv. An ode to the Bauhaus?

Tel Aviv has the world's highest concentration of modernist buildings of the 1930s-1950s. According to UNESCO, there are more than 4000 of them. Almost half of these buildings are included as an object "The White City in Tel Aviv - Architecture of the Modern Movement" in the World Heritage List. And for ease of classification and identification, UNESCO experts have divided the city into three sectors: the Center (A), Rothschild Boulevard (B) and the Bialika Street area (C).

Israelis learned about the existence of an entire city in the Bauhaus style in their capital relatively recently - in 1984, thanks to the exhibition of the architect and architectural historian Michael Levin, where he tried to demonstrate a parallel between European modernism and the White City of Tel Aviv. The official version of this paradox was as follows: after the Nazis closed the school in 1933, its students scattered around the world, carrying with them the avant-garde principles of the Bauhaus and a specific vision of architecture.

About 1 objects of the White City have been restored, and about a thousand more are waiting for their turn

Many of them then settled in Palestine and built the White City. This idea was liked by Levin's colleague, a well-known defender of architectural heritage, architect Nika Smuk. In 1994, she was appointed to the position of chief architect-restorer at the Tel Aviv Municipality. She carried out an impressive research work: she identified the buildings of the 30s, made a list of those that should be preserved, and developed a plan for the restoration of the city.

Smuk published the fruit of her professional explorations in the book "Life in the Dunes". It was she who submitted an application to UNESCO for the inclusion of the objects of the White City in the World Heritage List and achieved its acceptance, which happened in 2003. With the light hand of Smuk, the myth of the "city in the Bauhaus style" unexpectedly became a reality, and it was well advertised. Festivals, art and architectural exhibitions with the participation of respected foreign architects dedicated to the "Tel Aviv Bauhaus" were organized, entire campaigns were developed in the press and even tourist routes were laid out, films were shot and shown to the general public, and newspapers and advertising posters were full of real estate ads in the style Bauhaus".

Tel Aviv is the first city in the world to be built almost entirely in the modern style

A colossal plus from the uproar that arose in those years is that "Bauhaus in Tel Aviv" became the largest investment project, thanks to which it was possible to accumulate solid funds for restoration. According to the latest data, about 1500 objects of the White City have already been restored, and about 1000 more are waiting for their turn. To understand how this happened, let's turn to history.

Tel Aviv. Founding Fathers

For the land of Israel, a witness of biblical events, Tel Aviv is quite young. It is the first city in the world, almost completely built in the modern style. It appeared in 1909 to the northeast of the ancient, then still Arab-Turkish, port of Jaffa (Jaffa).

Here it is worth reminding that at the beginning of the XX century. Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire for almost four centuries. During the First World War, it was captured by the British. By 1917, they had taken Beersheba, Gaza, Jaffa and, finally, Jerusalem. In 1922, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a mandate to administer Palestine, which lasted until 1948. After the end of the Second World War, the Arab-Jewish conflict sharply intensified. The British failed to solve it, and they hastened to abandon the mandate. Thus, on May 15, 1948, a new state - Israel - appeared on the political map of the world. The dream of all Zionists has come true.

Until 1909, Jewish settlements appeared around Jaffa. For example, the successful money changer and jeweler Aaron Cheloush, who immigrated from Algeria, founded a school and a synagogue in his house, and from the 1870s he began to buy up land around Jaffa, which, by the way, was not easy: the Turkish authorities forbade Jews to do this. Thanks to his connections with the Arabs, he managed to negotiate a large plot north of the old city. Thus, in 1887, the Neve Tzedek district appeared, and Chelusha's own house, which has survived to this day, became the first Jewish house built outside of Jaffa.

UNESCO specialists divided the city into three sectors: Center (A), Rothschild Boulevard (B) and Bialika Street area (C)

In 1890, Neve Shalom grew up. In general, by 1909, there were a dozen such quarters. They would have remained isolated areas if not for enterprising businessman and jewelry master Akiva Aryeh Weiss, a native of Grodno. From the moment he disembarked at the Jaffa port pier in the summer of 1906, Weiss quickly gained considerable weight in the local Jewish community and became the initiator of the voluntary society Ahuzayt-Bait ("House Builders"), which included 66 Jewish families. He managed to ignite his compatriots with the idea of ​​a new, bright, liberal Jewish city, built from scratch, where the Jewish way of life and culture could be revived.

It was not the idea of ​​a traditional kibbutz commune, but a place without trade, a garden city, where a new urban Jewish elite is cultivated. Weiss even enlisted the support of the executive branch of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish National Fund ("Keren Kayemet le-Israel").

With the help of a Dutch banker of Jewish origin, Jacobus Kann, the members of Ahuzayt Bait managed to buy a plot of sand dunes totaling 11 hectares on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, north of Jaffa and south of two isolated Jewish quarters: Neve Tzedek and Yemenskyi. To make allotment of plots fair and transparent, Weiss arranged a "shell lottery." He collected 66 white and 66 black shells on the shore, wrote the names of sharecroppers on some and plot numbers on others, and a ten-year-old boy from the community took turns choosing one shell from each pile. April 11 marked the 110th anniversary of this memorable event.

Geddes plan

Rather quickly, Tel Aviv turned from a suburb into an independent city and even got its first mayor. He became Meir Dizengoff, who conceived the idea of ​​making his city a modern, progressive metropolis. In 1919, he invited urban planner Patrick Geddes to develop a master plan for Tel Aviv. A Scotsman by birth, he proposed an idea based on the traditional British concept of a "garden city".

Geddes began work on the master plan in 1925. His 62-page proposal linked the Ahuzayt-Bait settlement with other Jewish neighborhoods and covered the area inside Mapu, Bugrashov, and Ibn Gvirol streets, as well as the Yarkon River and the coast. The "Geddes Plan", which provided for four types of streets, including two main roads parallel to the coastline, was adopted in 1929. He planned to make the cross streets commercial, and to turn the longitudinal ones into green boulevards or residential streets, while all of them combined the urban structure with the sea Between the grid of these streets, Geddes placed urban blocks similar in typology. In the ideal version, they were a square with sides of 200 m, sandwiched between four main streets, but their modification varied slightly depending on the terrain and other conditions.

Geddes did not define the architectural style of the buildings, but the core of Tel Aviv was completely built according to his design. It is to him that the city owes the fact that the houses here are oriented so that they are always blown by a fresh sea breeze.

Geddes planned 60 public gardens and parks (half of which were realized), woven into the urban fabric, and scattered green spaces along streets and boulevards. The main recreation area is a beach promenade the length of the entire city stretched along the sea. Geddes imagined the city as a complex of interacting components structured into hierarchical systems. He compared its growth to the systems of water movement in a leaf. During the growth of the city, its fabric should not be torn: for this, it was necessary to apply the poles of gravity around which the streets will develop like blood vessels in the human body.

Yakov Ben-Sira, who held the position of city engineer, helped implement Geddes' plan. Together with the Jewish architects from Europe who returned in the 1930s or, as it is customary to say, made aliyah, Bauhaus graduate Arie Sharon, Erich Mendelssohn's former collaborator Joseph Neufeld, Le Corbusier's student Zeev Rechter, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's follower Richard Kaufman and others - he immediately took a course towards the international style as the most progressive architectural trend, consistently defended and implemented it in Tel Aviv. Until that moment, the city was the epitome of eclecticism.

Ben-Sir is considered the initiator and executor of many large projects that later shaped modern Tel Aviv, and the "creator" of the White City. "In the 20s and 30s, six thousand buildings were built here," noted architectural historian Michael Levin in one of his interviews. - This city is a message of modernists and optimists who believed that architecture can improve society.

With Smuk's light hand, the myth of the "city in the Bauhaus style" unexpectedly became a reality

People from different countries with their traditions were building a new country, a better world, any utopias were within their power. Yes, Tel Aviv was built with a belief in the industrial revolution and progress, but at the heart of its plan is an antidote to machines: the British idea of ​​a garden city. There are many gardens in Tel Aviv, and the houses are built in such a way as to let in the Mediterranean breeze...".

Rothbard and the war with the Bauhaus

When UNESCO included the White City in the World Heritage List in 2003, the culmination of a nearly two-decade-long PR campaign under the name Bauhaus in Tel Aviv, a series of celebrations swept through the city, including at the state level. At first, the architect, professor, well-known publicist and writer Sharon Rothbard was puzzled by all this noise, and then it started to annoy him completely. And he tried to understand this strange phenomenon. Rothbard even specifically moved from the Jewish part of the city to the Shapira district, one of the poorest and most dangerous in Arab Jaffa. The result of his research was the book "White City, Black City". Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa", published in 2005, where he quite emotionally debunks the myth of the "Bauhaus-style city".

He begins with the fact that the city is not white at all, but rather gray, and quotes his mentor Jean Nouvel, who visited Tel Aviv in November 1995. "I was told that this city is white. do you see white I don't," said the Frenchman, looking at the panorama of Tel Aviv from the roof. He is said to have even suggested that shades of white be included in local DBNs to truly "turn the city into a symphony in white tones." Because of the low-rise buildings, there is little shade here, and the sun is blinding: because of this, all colors are lost and the city really seems white. Rothbard believes that the whiteness myth is supported for the political conjuncture.

Only four Bauhaus school graduates returned to Israel, and they did not build many buildings

As for the legend of Tel Aviv as a "Bauhaus-style city", it is far from the truth. First, only four graduates of the Bauhaus school returned to Israel, and during their career they did not build many buildings, and not all of them were in the capital.

"The first of them is the architect Shlomo Bernstein; he studied there for two semesters and then returned to Tel Aviv, where he worked for most of his professional life in the municipality's engineering department. The second, Munio Weinraub-Gitay, worked in Haifa and other places in northern Israel after returning from the Bauhaus. There he built a number of unique structures in the spirit of Mies van der Rohe - they differed sharply from the then-accepted examples of architectural design that flooded the country, and their main feature was increased attention to details and construction techniques. The third Bauhaus student was Shmuel Mestechkin, according to whose projects several apartment buildings were built in Tel Aviv during that period (Smuk writes about only one of them), but mainly he was involved in various activities in the underground organization "Haganah" and was associated with the popular at that time by the kibbutznik movement.

The only local architect who studied at the Bauhaus and clearly left his mark on Tel Aviv (and probably on Israeli architecture in general) was Aryeh Sharon. But it was also not quite suitable for substantiating the Tel Aviv urban planning legend. The main problem was that he remained faithful to the ideas of the Bauhaus until the very end, and all his rectangular, pragmatic constructions were not at all like the stylized boxes that came to be associated with the Tel Aviv Bauhaus style,” writes Rothbard in his book.

Tel Aviv modernism really differs from European modernism primarily in form: instead of the usual Corbusian cubes, there are rounded corners, and the soft lines of rounded concrete balconies have become the main attribute of local buildings.

Second, after returning from Germany, Bernstein, Weinraub-Gitay, Mestechkin and Sharon never worked together, never talked about themselves as a team. Each of them contributed to the architecture of Israel. In addition, the representatives of the Bauhaus themselves were categorically against the idea of ​​putting a sign of identity between the architecture of the White City and the Bauhaus. Sharon even insisted that Bauhaus - and he used it exclusively as a general name - is not a style at all. And that's why it's pointless to call them the architecture of Tel Aviv. "The wording needs to be changed. Why? Because the Bauhaus is not a concept or even a single institution," he said in an interview with artist Ihal Tumarkin for Kav magazine.

Sharon also points out that the Bauhaus era ended in the 30s, while most of the White City was built in the 50s. Mainly commercial housing was built. This fact alone contradicted the Bauhaus philosophy of total happiness, which promoted affordable housing and high-quality aesthetic design for everyone. The first social houses were designed by Aryeh Sharon closer to the 1950s. It was the first cooperative dormitory for workers: he convinced the owners of several plots to unite and build cooperative houses instead of private ones. Household facilities were also planned there: a dining room, a laundry room, and a kindergarten. He was inspired by the Bauhaus school in Dessau for this building. It is one of the few buildings in Tel Aviv that conforms to Bauhaus principles.

According to Sharon Rothbard, the White City as a legacy of the Bauhaus is an architectural myth

According to Rothbard, the White City as a legacy of the Bauhaus is an architectural myth that was formed for many reasons, including political ones, it is beneficial to everyone, except for that part of the city that does not participate in this holy life - old Jaffa, the memory of which practically erased, and the separation - both physical and socio-cultural - is increasingly noticeable.

 

 

/Published in #11 volume Pragmatika, May 2019/