Bevy of Bauhaus

Tel Aviv, a UNESCO World Heritage Site also known as 'The White City,' glistens with almost 4,000 International Style buildings.

— Yes, there's an I.M. Pei office building, a Richard Meier glass residential tower and Philippe Starck-designed apartments in Tel Aviv. But the city's architectural sleepers are the thousands of Bauhaus-style buildings dating to the 1930s and '40s. The austere style, which originated and flourished in northern Germany for a scant 14 years, has improbably left Tel Aviv, a Middle Eastern Mediterranean city of Arab origins, with the world's largest collection of International Style buildings.

How did a small, sandy suburb of the ancient Arab port of Jaffa come to have thousands of Modern Movement buildings?

The story begins in 1909 when 60 Jewish families from Jaffa buy 12 acres of nearby sand dunes for a new Jewish city, the first since biblical times. By 1921 they were 3,600, and needed more space; the British, who ruled what was then Palestine from 1920 until Israeli independence in 1948, asked Patrick Geddes, an enthusiastic Zionist and imaginative urban planner, to draw up a master plan for fast-growing Tel Aviv. His vision: a city of low-lying buildings, tree-lined boulevards, with Dizengoff Square (actually a circle) its communal heart.

In the 1930s, immigrants, many of them driven out of Germany and Eastern Europe by the Nazis, poured into Palestine, swelling the population from 50,000 to 150,000 (todayit is 390,000). They needed housing, and they needed it fast.

Among the newcomers were a group of German architects who had studied at the Bauhaus, a school of arts and design in Weimar and Dessau that flourished from 1919 to 1933, when the Nazis closed it. Imbued with Bauhaus teachings of function over aesthetics, simplicity over ornamentation, and socially progressive ideas of design and housing for the workers, these disciples of Bauhaus teachers Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and of the Swiss/ French architect Le Corbusier, arrived inTel Aviv, a city without existing architectural conventions, and singularly receptive to innovative urban planning; it was a city waiting to be built.

The timing couldn't have been better. Just when the need for housing was most critical, the Bauhaus presented the perfect solution. Its favored mode of construction - reinforced concrete - was cheap, quick and easy to use, and didn't require skilled labor. It was the very converse of building in Jerusalem, where using the local stone was compulsory.

The Bauhaus architects adapted the design features that worked in northern Germany to the hot, Mediterranean climate and gregarious lifestyle and culture of Tel Aviv. They kept the geometric forms, especially cubes and cylinders, and the smooth plaster painted white or a light color, which reflected the heat. They replaced the large windows of the north with smallones to reduce the heat and glare of the Mediterranean sun. The slanted and shingled roofs of northern Europe became flat and functional rooftops where people hung their laundry by day and socialized at night. Long, narrow balconies, stacked one on top of another, which Israelis often describe as "drawers pulled out of a chest," shaded residents.

A signal feature borrowed from Le Corbusier, for whom some of the architects had worked in Paris, were ground floor, stiltlike columns, called "pilotis," that underpinned the buildings, creating space for cooling air to circulate and gardens to grow. To the characteristically functional, spare Bauhaus style, these transplanted architects occasionally added decorative pieces of glittering quartz embedded in the concrete, textured and pastel-colored plaster, even nautical-looking, portholelike windows and curved balconies.

Thousands of International Style buildings sprung up in central Tel Aviv, a sea of harmonious white and light-colored facades that gave Tel Aviv its descriptive name, "The White City." Today there are perhaps 4,000 of them in various states of repair - faded classics interspersed among derelict near-ruins.

By the turn of the 21st century the Israelis were paying more attention to this architectural heritage, and a preservation movement sprang up. It got a boost in 2004 when UNESCO designated The White City a World Heritage Site, citing "... an outstanding architectural ensemble of the Modern Movement in a new cultural context."

The irony is inescapable: This UNESCO World Heritage Site owes its existence to the Nazis, who shut down the Bauhaus for its progressive ideas.

Today some 1,500 to 2,000 White City buildings are designated as "protected," and hundreds of them have been, and will be, renovated.

Tel Avivians often use the hipper term, "Bauhaus," which strict constructionists save for the Bauhaus years, 1919 to 1933. In Israel, it loosely covers International and Modern styles, Le Corbusier influences, in fact, just about everything that was built from the early 1930s to the 1950s. As one American visitor said, "In Miami, we call all this Art Deco."

Whatever you call them, don't get waylaid by semantics. Take to the streets and look for the classics among sadly neglected cracked and stained concrete ruins. You'll find some gems.

Start at the Cinema Hotel on Dizengoff Square, which was built in classic Bauhaus style in 1930 as a movie theater. It was recently restored as a delightful boutique hotel, and among the camera equipment and movie posters that recall its beginnings are the original exterior, staircase and chandeliers. A new, spacious roof terrace overlooks a panorama of the White City's Modern buildings and Dizengoff Square with its circular metallic fountain by Israeli sculptor Yaacov Agam.

The streets leading off Dizengoff - notably Beilinson, Ben Ami, Hovevei Zion - are lined with Bauhaus beauties, many with playful design features: palm-lined plazas with fish ponds, trees on small, rockfilled islands framed by water. Peer into lobbies for unexpected marble niches and decorative stair rails.

Rothschild Boulevard, the city's wide, tree-sheltered pedestrian promenade, is lined with a rich diversity of Bauhaus: clean, angular buildings with ornamental studs, circular corner balconies, pale yellow and pink facades. What was the city's poshest address, and such neighboring streets as Sheinkin and Balfour, document how Tel Aviv's gentry chose to live in the1930s and '40s.

The place to end a Bauhaus tour is Bialik Street, a block-long outdoor museum of Tel Aviv's best architecture: Bauhaus, International and the 1920s mix of Oriental-plus-classic that Israelis call Eclectic, once the homes of artists and writers, and all in a splendid state of restoration. The holy grail is No. 21, the newly opened Bauhaus Museum, founded by art dealer Daniella Luxembourg. The 1930s Bauhaus building itself was bought and meticulously restored by art collector Ronald Lauder, founder of New York's Neue Galerie of 20th-century Austrian and German art.

"Museum" is a grand description for what is more like a oneroom gallery, but, as curator Estee Cohen said, a bit defensively, "What is here is a group of superb original Bauhaus."

The chairs, tables, lamps and other objects currently on display were designed by the Bauhaus stars - among them Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, the founder and first director of the Bauhaus school in Germany. Nothing illustrates the Bauhaus vision of good design better than the industrial products on display - Breuer's tubular steel chairs, Mies' glass table, a Gropius door handle and all manner of lamps, glassware and ceramics - still coveted by International Style devotees today.

Travel, Pages 50, 51 on 08/23/2009

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