Arieh Sharon And Modern Architecture In Israel

Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel: Building Social Pragmatism offers the first comprehensive survey of the work of Arieh Sharon and analyzes and discusses his designs and plans in relation to the emergence of the State of Israel. A graduate of the Bauhaus, Sharon worked for a few years at the office of Hannes Mayer before returning to Mandatory Palestine. There, he established his office which was occupied in its first years in planning kibbutzim and residential buildings in Tel Aviv. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Arieh Sharon became the director and chief architect of the National Planning Department, where he was asked to devise the young country’s first national masterplan. Known as the Sharon Plan, it was instrumental in shaping the development of the new nation. During the 1950s and 1960s, Sharon designed many of Israel’s institutions, including hospitals and buildings on university campuses. This book presents Sharon’s exceptionally wide range of work and examines his perception of architecture in both socialist and pragmatist terms. It also explores Sharon’s modernist approach to architecture and his subsequent shift to Brutalist architecture, when he partnered with Benjamin Idelson in the 1950s and when his son, Eldar Sharon, joined the office in 1964. Thus, the book contributes a missing chapter in the historiography of Israeli architecture in particular and of modern architecture overall. This book will be of interest to researchers in architecture, modern architecture, Israel studies, Middle Eastern studies and migration of knowledge.

The Object of Zionism is a critical study of Zionist spatial planning and the architectural fabrication of the State of Israel from the early 20th century to the 1960s and '70s. Zvi Efrat scrutinizes Israel as a singular modernist project, unprecedented in its political and ethical circumstances and its hyper-production of spatial and structural experiments. Efrat explores the construction of the State of Israel in a book that promises to become a standard reference on Israeli architectural history.

This comprehensive survey not only brings alive Tel Aviv of the 30s but also shows many of the possibilities of the Bauhaus movement brought to fruition.

After seizing Jerusalem’s eastern precincts from Jordan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel unilaterally unified the city and plunged into an ambitious building program, eager to transform the very meaning of one of the world’s most emotionally charged urban spaces. The goal was as simple as it was controversial: to both Judaize and modernize Jerusalem. Seizing Jerusalem chronicles how numerous disciplines, including architecture, landscape design, and urban planning, as well as everyone from municipal politicians to state bureaucrats, from Israeli-born architects to international luminaries such as Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, and Bruno Zevi, competed to create Jerusalem’s new image. This decade-long competition happened with the Palestinian residents still living in the city, even as the new image was inspired by the city’s Arab legacy. The politics of space in the Holy City, still contested today, were shaped in this post-1967 decade not only by the legacy of the war and the politics of dispossession, but curiously also by emerging trends in postwar architectural culture. Drawing on previously unexamined archival documents and in-depth interviews with architects, planners, and politicians, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan analyzes the cultural politics of the Israeli state and, in particular, of Jerusalem’s influential mayor, Teddy Kollek, whose efforts to legitimate Israeli rule over Jerusalem provided architects a unique, real-world laboratory to explore the possibilities and limits of modernist design—as built form as well as political and social action. Seizing Jerusalem reveals architecture as an active agent in the formation of urban and national identity, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about Zionism, and the crisis within the discipline of architecture over postwar modernism, affected Jerusalem’s built environment in ways that continue to resonate today.

While it is widely recognized that architects and their architecture play a key role in constructing a sense of place, the inherent nexus between an architectural ideology and the production of national space and place has so far been neglected. Focusing on the Zionist ideology, this book brings together practising architects and academics to critically examine the role of architects, architecture and spatial practices as mediators between national ideology and the politicization of space. The book first of all sets out the wider context of theoretical debates concerning the role of architecture in the process of constructing a sense of place then divides into six main sections. The book not only provides an innovative new perspective on how the Israeli state had developed, but also sheds light on how architecture shapes national identity in any post-colonial and settler state.

Written by one of the greatest experts of modern Israeli art and architecture, this book provides a chronological overview of Israel's most significant architectural phases, offering a critical appraisal and a detailed reading of some of the most important works: the colonial architecture of the early 20th century, the foundation of Tel Aviv in the 1920s, and the post-war Brutalist, international phase. This gave way in the late 1960s to a more autonomous period of development, in which urban architecture, restoration and territorial planning acquired greater importance under the influence of a new generation of Israeli designers.This complete survey covers a range of themes including: West meets East, laboratory of the Modern movement, shelter and expansion, contemporary architecture in Israel, and designing the public space.

Until now only partial studies and monographs have traced the history of Israeli architecture and no one has ever attempted a unitary interpretation of such a complex cultural and political phenomenon. The troubled history of this land has moved parallel with the evolution of autonomous creative experiences and, at the same time, strongly linked to the roots of the intellectuals and architects who immigrated there: a laboratory sensitive to the international debate and at the same time a window opened onto Middle Eastern culture and its stimuli. The unique feature of the Israeli "phenomenon" lies in the creative contribution offered by a wide variety of artists from faraway contexts, and the image of the cities reflects this conditions with design input ranging from Mendelsohn to Harrison, from Philip Johnson to Louis Kahn, Fredrick Kiesler, Oskar Niemeyer and Mario Botta. This volume, written by one of the greatest experts on modern Israeli art and architecture, chronologically follows the most significant phases, positioning them critically and offering a detailed interpretation of some of fine most significant works: from the colonial architecture of the early 1990's to the foundation of Tel Aviv in the 'twenties (and the experiment with "white cities" under the Bauhaus influence), to the postwar brutalist and international phase, that would decline in the late 'sixties, in a period of more autonomous elaboration in which city architecture, restoration and territorial design acquired greater importance under the influence of a new generation of Israeli designers (from Moshe Safdie to Zvi Ecker). The book is introduced by two essays by Teddy Kollek and Alexander Tzonis.