The White City: Tel Aviv and the Bauhaus
Lecture by Volker M. Welter, Associate Professor of History of Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara

One of the best places to experience Bauhaus architecture on a large scale is the City of Tel Aviv in Israel. Established in 1909 as a small Jewish suburb outside of Jaffa, one of the oldest cities in the world, Tel Aviv is now a thriving metropolis. Tel Aviv has been called the White City for its almost 4,000 Bauhaus-style buildings. In the 1930s increasing numbers of refugees arrived who had managed to escape German persecution and the Holocaust. Among them were architects who had absorbed the lessons of European modernism as it was propagated by the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier. Together with Palestine-born Jewish architects who had trained in Europe, they set out to build modern Tel Aviv. Their efforts were acknowledged in 2003 when UNESCO declared Tel Aviv a World Heritage Site. The lecture will briefly look at the history of Tel Aviv and show examples of the great variety of modernist architecture that constitute the Bauhaus in Tel Aviv.

Volker M. Welter is an architectural historian who has studied and worked in Germany, Scotland, and England. He has received awards and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London/Yale University, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Among his publications are Biopolis-Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (MIT Press, 2002) and many articles in academic journals, including Israel Studies. His latest book, Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home, will be published in October 2011.