The world’s largest collection of Bauhaus architecture makes up the White City of Tel Aviv. Planning students will remember that Sir Patrick Geddes, the eccentric godfather of 20th century regional planning, was retained by a forerunner to the Jewish Agency to plan the new city’s physical layout during its first period of rapid growth, in the mid-1920s. Between that time and Israeli independence in 1948, Bauhaus became the architectural style that filled out much of Geddes’s plan. Recently, I came across an Israeli website, Artlog, that catalogs some of the city’s most significant structures with photographs, architectural drawings, and descriptions. There really is a striking aesthetic to the clean geometry and smooth curves of these buildings, set against the bright skies and sun-starched land of the Middle East. Artlog seems to be a work in progress, but its work on Tel Aviv is already quite thorough, and worth a look.
I found versions of both these photos on multiple websites, without apparent attributions or copyrights. But if they’re really yours, just let me know, and I’ll either provide appropriate credit, or take them down.
Meanwhile, here’s a schematic map, reproduced in Dwelling on the Dunes: Tel Aviv, by the architect Nitza Metzger-Szmuk (2004), from the cover of Geddes’s 1925 report; and a Google satellite pinpoint map, for comparison: