A Walk to the Architectural Treasures of the “White City”.
“We are masters at bending everything so that it fits,” explains Karl Walter, a tour guide in Tel Aviv. This pragmatic approach also applies to the city’s richest heritage, the approximately 4,000 buildings in the Bauhaus and international style, to which Tel Aviv owes the nickname “White City.” Some of the architects of the buildings constructed between 1928 and 1945 were students of the legendary Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau before their expulsion by the Nazis, including Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Miestechkin, Shlomo Bernstein, and Zeev Rechter. They followed the idea of affordable, unadorned living space for all and the artistic principle of “form follows function.” However, they also faced the challenge of considering Tel Aviv’s climatic peculiarities. The result was modern buildings with flat roofs, vertical light strips above the staircases, and large balconies with horizontal slits in the balustrades.
