Zionist Architecture and Town Planning. Nathan Harpaz
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assistance of professor, M. Willson Williams, of Union Institute & University during my doctoral program. I would also like to thank my doctoral committee members for their significant contribution: Richard Courage, Westchester College; David M. Sokol, University of Illinois, Chicago; Sandra M. Sufian, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Volker Werner Welter, University of California in Santa Barbara. I would like also to acknowledge my colleagues and friends who accompanied me on my journey with support and enthusiasm, including Marian Staats of Oakton Community College and architect Georg Stahl of Chicago.
I would like to express special gratitude to my mentors and teachers from the Department of Art History at Tel Aviv University who planted the first seed of my intellectual interest during my early studies: Mordechai Omer, Gila Balas, Edina Meyer-Maril, and architect Abraham Erlik. I would also acknowledge the generous assistance of Tel Aviv advocates and researchers Micha Gross (Bauhaus Center, Tel Aviv), Shula Widrich, and Shay Farkash.
I would like to thank the following institutions and individuals for their permission to reprint images in this publication: Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Gutman Museum, Tel Aviv; Bauhaus Center, Tel Aviv (Ravid’s books on Joseph Berlin and Josef Tischler); Architect Gilead Duvshani (Yehuda Magidovitch); The State of Israel—National Photo Collection; The Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem; the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the University of Texas Libraries; the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries; and the Hebrew University, Department of Geography & the Jewish National & University Library.
Finally, I would like to thank my family who stood behind me throughout this exhilarating experience: my wife Miriam, my daughters Ally and Sharon, and my extended family in Israel. I dedicate this book to my mother, Yonah Kaplan-Fenster, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1925 when many parts of the city were still sand dunes, a playground for her as a young barefoot girl in the middle of a new, developing neighborhood, and to my father, Baruch Arthur Fenster, who left his home in Vienna as a young adult to escape the horror of World War II and rebuild his life in the city of Tel Aviv, which means “Old-New.”
This book examines advanced architectural plans motivated by Zionist ideas and the implementation of these plans driven by pragmatic needs. The balance between these forces shaped the architecture and town planning in the Land of Israel after World War I. In this work I concentrate on postwar Zionist building concepts as they are represented in architect Alexander Levy’s plan, Building and Housing in New Palestine, and the implementation of eclectic architecture and chaotic town planning in Tel Aviv in the 1920s. The city of Tel Aviv, as a new entity that served almost as a laboratory for modern experimentation during that time, is my main focus.
The ideology of the Zionist movement was based on utopian ideas that later were transformed into real applications. The time frame of this study starts in 1909, with the foundation of Tel Aviv north of the old city of Jaffa, but focuses on the dramatic growth of the city between 1919 and 1929. It ends with the implementation of the Geddes master plan in the northern part of Tel Aviv and the beginning of the utilization of the International Style. I depict the first decade (1909–1919) and the next decade (the 1930s) in less detail, yet as relevant to the focal point of the study.
While the theoretical plan for Jewish housing by architect Alexander Levy, written in Berlin in 1920, covers all of Palestine, my geographic focus is Tel Aviv as the first modern Jewish urban entity. Given that Alexander Levy arrived in Palestine during the early 1920s and erected most of his buildings in Tel Aviv, I aim in this comparative study to illuminate the gap between his theoretical plan and his realization of a pragmatic approach. My purpose is to examine and evaluate architectural and urban structures as they result from ideal or advanced formulas or pragmatic applications. I assess the Zionist movement’s promotion of ideal and advanced models in architecture and town planning, and point out the association between modernity and Zionist ideology. I examine the transformation of Tel Aviv into a central site for experimentation in modern architecture and urban planning in the early twentieth century, tracking the development of the city from ideal model to eclectic architecture and chaotic town planning, and also identify the European origins of Levy’s plan, its relationship to the Zionist organization, and the reason for its failure.
I argue that theoretical Zionist plans in architecture and town planning based on European concepts were difficult to implement, as they clashed with the desires for Jewish revival and self-identity. While modern values advocated universality, Zionist ideas struggled with the conflict between the concept of “New Order” and traditional and historical motifs.
My assumptions are based on the historiography of architecture. The significance of this book lies in its exploration of the dynamic between ideal concepts and pragmatic activities that can be applied to other studies in the history of architecture and town planning, as it addresses international developments such as the model of the garden city, standardization of the building industry, cooperative housing, Geddes’s concepts of modern town planning, and the massive application of the International Style in architecture. The city of Tel Aviv in the 1930s led the world in the execution of modernity in architecture.
Previous publications on this topic have dealt with the adoption of modern and advanced plans in architecture by the Zionist movement and provided historical data for the implementation of Zionist settlements. My research examines the relationship between specific theoretical plans and pragmatic implementations. The comprehensive plan of Alexander Levy for housing in Palestine is fully presented and analyzed here for the first time. I provide a glimpse into the fierce debate among Zionists in Berlin on how to manage Jewish settlement in Palestine after World War I. My analysis also uniquely reveals the gap between the theoretically advanced plans of the Zionist movement in regard to architecture and town planning and the actual chaos and regression that occurred throughout the development of Tel Aviv in the 1920s.
The history of architecture and town planning are commonly discussed by scholars such as art historians or architectural historians. Because the medium of architecture is based on an interaction between function and aesthetics, any exploration of the field must encompass knowledge of other disciplines. In addition to the history of art, architecture, and urban planning in modern time, I incorporate in my analysis other disciplines such as Jewish and Israeli history and the philosophy of modern social-political movements.
Some recent studies on the Zionist architecture and town planning in the early twentieth century emerged from other fields such as geography, urban studies, history, and political science. The advantage of applying the field of art history to this given topic is the interdisciplinary dimension that extends the lens of exploration. Philosophically, the research methods of the history of architecture are connected to those of art history and general history. The main idea of empiric methodology is to evaluate historical facts from an “objective” distance. This approach was used by Henry Russell Hitchcock in Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, in which the author avoids any interpretation at all; he describes the buildings and provides their locations, dates, and architects. This limited, purely empirical, approach raises questions about the scope and the objectivity of the research.
Various other methods in the history of architecture focused on specific aspects and were occasionally motivated by trends in the field. Some researchers emphasized social history and related their studies to those who inhabit various architectural structures. Others concentrated on political history, dealing, for instance, with ideology or gender. And some writers turned to operative history to promote a subjective reflection on architecture. While historians of architectural history who engaged in current architectural debates were often more objective, architectural history that was conducted by architects could have been motivated by an architect’s personal agenda or interest in current architecture. English architectural critic Reyner Banham, for example, advocated modern technology in his architectural writing because he was influenced by Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture. Juan Bonta, in Architecture and Its Interpretation, criticizes the subjective views of the major writers attempting to capture the development of modern architecture. Bonta demonstrates