The White City

Housing the world’s single largest cache of Bauhaus style buildings, Tel Aviv puts on a spectacular show for the architectural philistines amongst us!

By Raul Dias

If looks could kill, then Itamar Gavriel seems to be doing his darned best to slay the gum-chewing, fanny pack-toting American tourist with his icy, steel grey stare. “Looks just like Art Deco!” says aforementioned tourist for the nth time that morning, the drawing out of vowels doing very little to obfuscate traces of a New Jersey accent. Ignoring the susurrations of protest escaping her husband’s mouth, she continues making her own — highly inaccurate, as we’d soon learn —analogies.
But Itamar is used to such violent acts of desecration. As someone who has dedicated the better part of his life as a tour guide, taking architectural philistines like our motely group of 10 out-of-towners on a walkabout around Tel Aviv’s treasure trove of Bauhaus style buildings, he’s reassuringly immunized.
“To the contrary, there couldn’t be two more distinct architectural styles,” he says calmly. “While Art Deco places a hefty premium on ostentatious embellishments and chunky geometric shapes, the Bauhaus style — with its predilection for all things white — is all about primary forms and volumes that are characterised by asymmetry, which you can see in the rounded, ribbon-like balconies and thermometer windows of the building in front of you.”
He is, of course, referring to a shining white beacon of Tel Aviv’s cache of over 4,000 Bauhaus style buildings, the 1930-built Hotel Cinema. Overlooking the once-decaying, now-gleaming Dizengoff Circle and its frisky water fountains, the newly-restored building that was once the Esther Cinema, designed by architect Yehuda Magidowitz revels in all its Bauhausian minimalism from the outside. The mish-mash of styles that forms its chic interior is a sore point Itamar resolutely refuses to touch upon!
But creating something chic was probably the last thing on the minds of the early proponents of the Germanic Bauhaus school in Israel. Architects like Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Mestechkin, Munio Gitai-Weinraub and Shlomo Bernstein, who were ardent devotees of the ahead-of-its-time kind of art, design and architecture style that embraced utilitarianism and rationality, while vehemently condemning ornamentation of any kind. Thus, perfectly melding the post WWI need for austerity and the slowly growing socialist-Zionist movement in Israel after WWII. One that strove to create a new world for displaced Jews returning home to the Motherland, so to speak. In the process, making Tel Aviv Ground Zero to the largest collection of buildings built in the Bauhaus style, anywhere in the world.
Our continuing tour de Tel Aviv à pied takes us on a saunter along the arterial Rothschild Boulevard where same sex couples walk their poodles as freely as young hipsters-in-training wearing socks on their head attempt to smash Evel Knievel-esque records, riding their battered skate boards along the ridges of the undulating concrete platforms and benches at breakneck (God forbid!) speeds. It was here in the Ahuzat Bayit district, we are told, that Tel Aviv adopted its racially-benign moniker ‘The White City’. This, it borrowed from a housing estate in Stuttgart, Germany called Weissenhofsiedlung built in 1927 for a Bauhaus style exhibition. And one that was literally considered a blueprint for Utopia of sorts, thanks to its generosity of space and lightness of spirit that the early Bauhaus architects saw reflected here in this arboreal nabe of Tel Aviv.  
In a surprising departure from the almost antiseptic Bauhausian obsession with monotones, the ombre effect created by the hues of the plaster that vary at each of its stories, oxymoronically emphasises the  characteristic Bauhuasian horizontal lines of  the Rubinsky House that flow toward the window of the perpendicular stairwell. Sitting stoic on a lane off the main boulevard, this 1935-built modernist structure, designed by architects L. Kranowski and E. Marcusfeld for Eliezer Rubinsky, is also unique for its dual façades that are dotted with an array of ribbon balconies and windows.
“Due to the climatic variations between Germany and a warm Mediterranean city like Tel Aviv, many Bauhuasian architects significantly enlarged windows and placed wide awnings above them, at the same time using the wind directions to plan naturally aired buildings,” says Itamar. The great emphasis on the socio-communal underpinnings of the minimalist style is also the reason why many of Tel Aviv’s Bauhuas style cooperative workers’ apartment buildings sport erected pergolas on top of their roofs to create places for people to commune with each other and even to sleep under during the hot summer nights. Thus, making voluminous balconies a sort of de facto social statement symbol, signaling the openness of the community and the symbiosis between its members.
Seeming to hug the corner of Rothschild Boulevard and Bar-Ilan Street with all its might, the once decrepit Aharonovitch House is a shining example of what a little hope and a few licks of paint can do. It’s hard to believe that it’s the same miserable, forlorn looking building staring up at us from the dog-eared photo album that Itamar thrusts in front our eager noses. Designed in 1933 by Yizhak Rapoport, it typifies the Bauhaus-style with its glass windows, staircase and balconies that front its cubical block apartments. Built on a hill that once housed horse stables, snagging an apartment here today can earn the punter some serious bragging rights, we’re told!
Often regarded as a contemporary and dare-I-say ersatz take on the traditional Bauhaus style, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Herta and Paul Amir Building was our last stop on the tour. Basking in all its Bauhaus renewal glory, this wing of the museum sits at the top end of the Sha’ul HaMelech Boulevard that lays slap bang in the center of the city’s cultural complex. Designed by American Modernist architect Preston Scott Cohen in 2011 who paid obeisance to his Bauhausian predecessors by letting ‘form follow function’, the building’s bright white countenance, small square windows and flat roof are nouvelle iterations of what we’ve been seeing all day.
But then, that exactly what the hyper-modern Bauhaus school has always stood for: buildings that grow from the sands without a past, towards a future…

(A shorter, edited version of this article appeared in the 6th August 2016 issue of the Mint Lounge newspaper, India http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/DQaUOlB7AeixJ82L4ybCYK/White-City-of-Tel-Aviv.html)