This week's designation of Tel Aviv as a World Heritage Site should help ensure the preservation of the city's abundance of buildings in the Bauhaus style, writes Nuala Haughey.
The Israeli port city of Tel Aviv was this week declared a World Heritage Site for its abundance of buildings in the Bauhaus style that developed in pre-Nazi Germany. The United Nations designation recognises what is the largest collection worldwide of buildings in the early 20th-century international style, all designed by immigrant architects who had trained in Europe.
The site includes 4,000 mostly detached cubic residential buildings largely clustered in north and central Tel Aviv which were built between 1931 (prior to the creation of the Jewish state) and 1956. The buildings are collectively referred to as Tel Aviv's "White City" after their uniformly painted white or beige exteriors, and include 700 listed structures scheduled for preservation.
UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation - says it selected Tel Aviv's White City as a World Heritage Site because it represents "a synthesis of outstanding significance of the various trends of the Modern Movement in architecture and town planning in the early part of the 20th century.
"Such influences were adapted to the cultural and climatic conditions of the place, as well as being integrated with local traditions." The city hopes the World Heritage Site designation will attract tourists who have been put off by the violence of the past three and a half years of the current Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Tel Aviv's mayor, Ron Huldai, says the receipt of the UNESCO honour "in these challenging times . . . not only helps preserve our rich architectural heritage, but also reaffirms Tel Aviv's place on the map as a choice cultural destination". The deputy director of the planning department at Tel Aviv municipality, Zofia Santo, says the UNESCO-designated buildings share a functional design style typical of the early 20th-century Modern Movement, also known as the International Style.
"You see what's going on inside the houses. They are very three-dimensional, not just two-dimensional facades where you don't see the box. What is typical of the International Style in general is the plasticity of the buildings. You see the volume," she says.
Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 by Russian Jewish immigrants and developed as a metropolitan city under the British Mandate in Palestine. The city experienced a building boom in the inter-war years, fuelled largely by the increasing number of Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe.
Bauhaus architecture flourished in the 1930s in Tel Aviv, which did not have any prior entrenched architectural style. The Bauhaus school of design was founded in pre-Nazi Germany, but came to an abrupt end in 1933 with Hitler's rise to power. Seventeen former students of the Bauhaus school worked in Tel Aviv as architects during the 1930s. A number of the city's immigrant architects had also worked in the Paris office of the Swiss-born architect, Le Corbusier, and were greatly influenced by his functionalist style.
"The architects who came here carried some seeds of the West European trends and had them translated into the local ambience," says Santo. Local adaptations to suit Tel Aviv's hot Mediterranean climate included smaller windows and long narrow balconies.
Tel Aviv's ageing architectural treasure is not universally valued by its residents. A municipality plan in the early 1990s to preserve some 1,000 White City buildings was met with hundreds of objections, with many claiming that the plan would cause financial losses.
Nevertheless, the city is celebrating its UNESCO status with festive events including street exhibitions, educational programmes and conferences, a regatta and a 1930s-style party.