Читать книгу Zionist Architecture and Town Planning - Nathan Harpaz - Страница 7

Born in Tel Aviv, I have been fascinated by the history of the city and its unique architecture from an early age. Two individuals in particular inspired me and influenced not only the direction of my career, but also the themes to which I was attracted. My maternal grandfather was a designer who studied art and design in Berlin, Germany, at the turn of the twentieth century. He emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1920, but, since the small settlement offered no work for a designer, he traveled on to Alexandria, Egypt, to seek work in his field. Several years later, he returned to Tel Aviv to find the small village developing rapidly and dramatically into a busy city. My father’s cousin, Hersh Fenster, was a writer who lived in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, and was associated with Marc Chagall and other artists of the “School of Paris.” In 1951, he published the first book about artists who perished during the Holocaust, which later became the primary source for an exhibition on that topic.

I found in the intriguing life of architect Alexander Levy, who is one of the central figures in this book, several connections to my family’s history. Levy and my maternal grandfather acquired their artistic education in Berlin, both got involved with Zionism and arrived in Tel Aviv during the same year (1920), and both struggled financially trying to pursue their professions. My grandfather stayed in Tel Aviv in spite of the difficulties, while Levy returned to Europe and, like my paternal grandparents and my uncle from Vienna, perished in Auschwitz.

In the early 1970s, as a young undergraduate student at Tel Aviv University, I began photographing old buildings in the historic sections of Tel Aviv. At the time, I could not predict that this hobby would figure prominently in my field of academic expertise. Over the years, my collection of images has expanded and gained greater significance, as many of the documented buildings were demolished or altered. A complete set of these photos is in the collection of the Tel Aviv Historical Museum, and many of them illustrate this book.

During graduate school, the topic of 1920s architecture in Tel Aviv became the core of my MA dissertation. This pioneer research resulted in “Art and Architecture in Tel Aviv: 1920–1930.” This publication earned the Tel Aviv University Kaplan Award for the most original academic study, and it remains an essential resource for any research of this period and location. Over the years, I have published many other articles on this topic in professional magazines in Israel.

In 1985, Graham Jahn, research editor of the London-based International Architect magazine, invited me to assist him with an issue dedicated to Israeli modernism. My contributions to this publication included biographies of architects, a history of 1920s architecture, and research on the urban development of Tel Aviv since its establishment. During the 1980s, I became an advocate for the preservation of historic buildings in Tel Aviv and actively served on several relevant committees. This work resulted in the granting of landmark status to many historic buildings and the creation of various restoration programs.

In 2003, UNESCO declared Tel Aviv a World Heritage Site because the city is home to the world’s largest collection of Bauhaus and International Style buildings. Tel Aviv, which started as a small garden city north of the ancient city of Jaffa, turned rapidly into a bustling metropolis, and in 2009 the city celebrated its centennial. In recent years the awareness of the significance of Tel Aviv’s architecture has increased; more buildings have been granted status as protected landmarks, many of them have been renovated, and new literature on the history of the city’s architecture and monographs on its architects have been published. The study in this book, based on over thirty year of research, will hopefully contribute another source of insight into architecture and town planning during the early years of the first Hebraic city in modern times.

As this book is a product of my doctoral research, I would like to acknowledge the dedicated 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.”