Today located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline, city of Tel Aviv was founded at the beginning of the 20th century on the outskirts of the ancient port city Jaffa.

The urban planner for the new city was Patrick Geddes, who did not have a particular style for the buildings in mind. However, by 1933 Jewish architects immigrated from Germany as the Nazi party grew, thus bringing the ideas of Bauhaus School of Arts, Design and Architecture to Tel Aviv.

Many of the residential and public buildings were designed by these architects, while locally born architects represented modern style of building.

As the city grew, it merged with Jaffa into a single municipality in 1950.

Today the White City of Tel Aviv is home of over 4,000 buildings built in the style of Bauhaus and International Style, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003.

History of Bauhaus

Established in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded a public school for architects, artists and designers, Bauhaus came to be from students’ experiments, who wanted to develop a style ideally accessible to everyone.

The school was active in Weimar (1919-1925), Dessau (1925-1932) and Berlin (1932-1933) and run by Walter Gropius (1919-1928), Hannes Meyer (1928-1930) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930-1933).

Bauhaus building in Dessau

The Bauhaus Manifesto, published by Gropius in 1919, summarizes the most important principles of the style.

Art was to be integrated into everyday life, which meant the product needed to be affordable, functional and easily accessible to the consumer. The principles of mass industrial production made that possible.

Function of the object became the priority, and only then came the shape.

This brought a sort of simplicity to the products and the style itself – ”less is more” became very popular.

The school was operational until 1933, due to the pressure of the Nazi regime.