From Bauhaus to Eretz Israel

A group of Jewish architects studied at the Bauhaus before emigrating permanently to Palestine. In this article I describe the heritage of the Bauhaus in Israeli architecture through the works of two former Jewish bauhauslers, Arieh Sharon, who has contributed to the construction of the myth of Tel Aviv as the city of the Bauhaus, and Munio Weinraub Gitai who spread Bauhaus lesson in Haifa. Modern Israeli architecture was influenced by Le Corbusier, by Mendelsohn and the Italian Rationalism, but it was the Bauhaus philosophy that took root quickly thanks to the specific cultural and social conditions that were being built in Israel in those years, as evidenced by the autobiography by Sharon Kibbutz + Bauhaus. The ideals of collectivism, the will to build a new modern aesthetic, that would stimulate a different approach to life, characterized the works of the Jewish bauhauslers, which were able to influence the architectural language of the city, in order to overcome the eclecticism in favor of modernity. Moreover the critical interpretation of the relationship between the place and the modernist rules allowed the architecture in Israel to go beyond the neutral character of the International Style. Thanks to this new way of conceiving the architectural project, the city of Tel Aviv grew rapidly to host the waves of new immigrants who continuously came from Europe. The lessons of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Hannes Meyer and the other masters of the Bauhaus are standing out in the collective residential units, in the architecture of the kibbutz, in the urban planning of the new cities in which the ideals of the Bauhaus are still alive and able, nowadays, to influence the architecture of Tel Aviv.