Zionist Architecture and Town Planning. Nathan Harpaz

and identity in the city turned neighborhood of Jaffa.”¹⁴ The essay concludes that the Zionist leadership encouraged separation between Tel Aviv and Jaffa through the use of modern architecture and town planning, which is similar to colonialism that generated modernity and progress, versus tradition and stagnation.¹⁵

The book A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space, continues discussing the concept of space versus place as it “examines how the creation of Tel Aviv has both shaped and reflected collective identity.”¹⁶ The establishment of Tel Aviv as “the first Hebrew city” was an attempt to transform the Jews from being the “people of space” to a people having a “place” in history.¹⁷

      The application of the concept of space versus place has become a fashionable method among geographers and historians in recent years, and in many cases used as a tool to promote political agendas. As the study in this book is a product of the field of art history, space and place are interpreted in different manner. While space is a physical entity that reflects the formality of architecture, place stands for its social, cultural, and historical meaning. Zionist architecture in the early twentieth century vigorously searched to find a correlation between formal manifestation and ideological self-identity.

       Notes

1.Aviah Hashimshoni, “Architecture,” in Israel Art, ed. Benjamin Tamuz (Tel Aviv: Massada, 1963), 199-284.

2.Ibid.

3.Ibid.

4.Mordechai Naor, ed., Tel Aviv at the Beginning 1909-1934 (Jerusalem: Idan, 1984), 42-61.

5.Ibid.

6.Ibid.

7.Haim Yacobi, Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, Design and the Built Environment Series (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2004), 4.

8.Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

9.E. C. Relph, Place and Placelessness. Research in Planning and Design (London: Pion, 1976).

10.Yacobi, Constructing a Sense, 5.

11.Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980).

12.Yacobi, Constructing a Sense, 5.

13.Ibid., 17-51.

14.Ibid., 192.

15.Ibid.

16.Barbara E. Mann, A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), xi.

17.Ibid.

Part 2

       Chapter 4

       The Origins of the Plan

      Alexander Levy’s Building and Housing in New Palestine is the most comprehensive proposal for inexpensive and rapid building construction in the early days of the Zionist movement. It meticulously and methodologically reviews the most advanced European theories and studies relevant to the topic and concludes with concrete and realistic recommendations for implementation. The plan covers such topics as the role of the company in initiating and executing building construction, the crucial availability of materials, the presentation of different types of accommodations, and the utilization and standardization of materials and labor techniques.

Architect Alexander Levy (1883–1942) expressed interest in Zionism after finishing his studies in architecture and starting work for a building company in Berlin in 1907. A year later he offered his services as an architect to Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), then the director of the Palestine office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa. In November of 1912, Levy prepared four different housing plans for new immigrants in Palestine, and a year later he proposed to organize an exhibition on housing to be displayed during the eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna. In the same year he also sent to the Zionist Organization several proposals for building projects, including the port of Jaffa, prototypes for residential units, housing for new Yemenite Jewish immigrants, a plan for a hotel, and a new approach to building materials. None of Levy’s proposals were accepted by the Zionist Organization.¹

In 1913, Levy applied for two positions in Palestine offered by the Zionist Organization, but he failed to obtain either of them. The position of building engineer in Palestine was given to Richard Michel and the position of the director of the technical department in Palestine was given to Wilhelm Hecker. Levy sent an angry letter to Ruppin, but he still proposed cooperation in planning working class housing. Ruppin, in his reply, explained to Levy that the difficult conditions in Palestine prevented his office from hiring architects, and he encouraged Levy to move to Palestine and practice as a private architect.²

In the spring of 1919, with the support of the Association of Jewish Architects and Engineers, Levy founded a new organization, the Association of the Builders of the Land of Israel. The goal of the association was to resolve the problems of building and housing in Palestine accompanying the anticipated mass immigration of Jews to the Land of Israel. In May of 1919, the association organized a conference on future building in Palestine, including an exhibition of plans and models of housing solutions.³ The ideas introduced in the exhibition were published with plans and photos by Alexander Levy in Davis Trietsch’s magazine Volk und Land. Levy’s essay in this magazine, titled “On Building and Housing,” spread over four issues between September and November 1919. Most of the text and portion of the illustrations of the future Levy’s book were already published in Trietsch’s Volk und Land.⁴