Zionist Architecture and Town Planning. Nathan Harpaz

80.

32.Ibid., 150.

33.Ibid., 51.

       Chapter 3

       Zionist Architecture and Town Planning in the Early Twentieth Century

The lack of previous traditions in Zionist architecture for the new-old homeland forced architects to borrow principles and techniques from contemporary architecture. These imported principles and methods were adjusted to local factors and adapted to the architects’ styles. Planning ideals in the early days of Zionist projects were conflicted by the need for physical expression of the new social structures and the demand for mass housing for new immigrants, as well as the shortage of funds. Major influences on early Zionist architecture and town planning were utopians such as Patrick Geddes and Tony Garnier. Other inspirations were architects such as Le Corbusier and Alexander Klein, who, like other utopians, promoted the restoration of harmony to the living environment of a contemporary society. This ideal of planning can be tracked in the concepts of Herzl and other Zionist Utopians, like the writer, Elhanan Leib Levinsky, and the head of the Bezalel School of Art, Boris Schatz, who inspired the first generation of architects. The second generation of architects focused on the idea of popular housing as a socialist ideal.¹

Early Israeli architecture is divided into four phases: up to 1920, the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s. The first three phases are relevant to the study in this book. The first phase includes attempts by Jews to settle in the Holy Land from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of World War I. Inspiration during this phase emerged from European models (England, France, and the German Templars), except for the style of several public buildings that was an “eclectic combination of Eastern, Moslem and Assyrian elements.” The second phase during the 1920s is characterized by eclectic architecture in the cities and new types of rural settlements, such as the kibbutz (collective community) and the moshav (cooperative farming community). The third phase, the 1930s, is marked by continuing development of “functional” building after the models of Central European architectural trends, including the insertion of garden city values into the urban environment.²

The implementation of the garden city model by the Zionist movement failed because it could not meet the demands for economical and rapid mass housing generated by mass immigration. The functionalist architecture applied since the 1930s was a better solution for this need.³

      Tel Aviv was the center of experimentation in architecture and town planning. It was the first urban Jewish settlement established in modern times and a challenge for the realization of the Zionists’ planning ideals. Tel Aviv was founded as a garden city in 1909, grew rapidly crowded during the 1920s, and became one of the most modern cities in the world during the 1930s.

In its first two decades Tel Aviv grew rapidly from a small settlement of 3,000 people to the largest city in the country, with a population of over 100,000, and turned into the center of the Jewish community in Palestine. This extensive development of Tel Aviv was supported by private funds and accelerated during the British Mandate in Palestine from 1918 until 1934, when Tel Aviv was declared an independent municipality.⁴

The establishment of Tel Aviv outside the city of Jaffa was part of a trend that had started already in the 1880s, when eleven Jewish subdivisions were founded outside of the old city. The early neighborhoods and the settlement of Tel Aviv differed in that the foundation of Tel Aviv was accompanied by comprehensive planning that included the processes of purchasing land, dividing lots according to the initial design, and considering the needs of a residential type of town.⁵

The motivation for the founding of Tel Aviv outside the city of Jaffa in the attempt to create an autonomic urban unit that would not only improve living standards, as in the new European neighborhoods (like the garden cities), but would also serve as a new model for a Jewish urban entity in Ottoman Palestine. There were several reasons for the disappearance of the small garden city of Tel Aviv and its rapid growth into a metropolitan area. The mass Jewish immigration to Palestine from the beginning of the British Mandate after the war was directed mostly to urban settlements rather than rural ones. Tel Aviv was attractive for the new immigrants because of its central location and its proximity to the main port of Jaffa. The year 1921 became a milestone in the development of Tel Aviv, as the city was then granted township status and legally separated from Jaffa. In the same year, a wave of violence against Jews in Jaffa drove many of them to Tel Aviv and started a trend of development and growth.⁶

      While traditional theories, mentioned above, focused on relatively objective examination, recent studies of Zionist architecture in the early twentieth century are postmodern in nature and discuss the issue through a narrow scope. Some examine the topic through a philosophical lens and some through a political lens, focusing on the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.

Haim Yacobi’s Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse aims “to examine critically the inherent nexus between ideology and the construction of a sense of place and to explore the role of architecture and planning as efficient yet polemic practices that serve the hegemonic agenda.”⁷ Many contemporary studies utilize the terms “space” and “place”; the difference between the two is explicated in the 1970s studies of Yi-fu Tuan (Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience)⁸ and E. C. Relph (Place and Placelessness: Research in Planning and Design).⁹ Space is the container, the physical location, whereas place involves social activities and collective identities.¹⁰ These concepts emerged from the field of geography and shifted into social and cultural geography. Christian Norberg-Schulz’s 1979 book, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, similarly distinguishes between space and place.¹¹ Some critics viewed this book as a direct attack on the modernist movement in architecture that was seen to produce spaces but not places.¹²

Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse also identifies an ideological tension in the 1930s between the architecture of the Chug, which followed the modern trends of the International Style, and the architecture of Erich Mendelsohn in Palestine. The Chug applied architecture that was motivated by socialist leadership and inspired by Herzl’s “political Zionism”; Mendelsohn, on the contrary, followed the ideologies of other Zionist leaders such as Martin Buber and Ahad Ha’am, who promoted “cultural Zionism.” The result was the utilization of a new modern architecture by members of the Chug versus the development of a local modernism with oriental accents in the architecture of Mendelsohn.¹³

The essay “Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1948” (2005) explores “the role of architecture