Curvilinear Propagation;


A Collection of Buildings


         The Tel Aviv Bauhaus Project preserves through documentation. This survey offers an exhaustive photographic collection, the largest ever of its kind, that showcases the Bauhaus and International style architecture of Tel Aviv. Ranging from the late 1920s to current day restorations and new constructions, one hundred buildings are meticulously catalogued. Yet the practice of cataloging inherently brings with it a scientific or sociological dimension, one that decidedly informs its subject. Michel Foucault describes this practice best in his seminal Discipline and Punish as the breaking down, ordering, and characterizing of information into a database that is overwritten by dominant social interests.

      The New Objectivist work of August Sander and later, Bernd and Hilla Becher, for example, offered photographs, collected fragments of German society, attempting to produce an objective catalogue; every genera of persons for Sander, and industrial structures for the Bechers, were mechanically reproduced and documented for future study.

          The extensive photographic collection of Tel Aviv's Bauhaus and International Style architecture serves a similar purpose, offering multiple fields of study to the viewer. The presentation of these images in both catalogue and gallery setting facilitates a quick stylistic comparison of these structures. A variety of aesthetic, conceptual, and ideological issues emerge such as the conflict between form and function, and the value of stylistic flourishes versus orthodox utilitarianism. While such concerns characterized the Bauhaus, and were integral to the New Objectivist movement, they, likewise, conceptually inform this project. The modernist style and sheer volume of these buildings depict the urgency and planned nature of Tel Aviv; and thus the utopian project of the Zionist state's building efforts, and its first Hebrew-speaking city. The hand of the state, the ideological role afforded to culture is omnipresent. The Zionists welcoming students to British Mandate Palestine after the National Socialists shut down the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany in 1933, was instrumental in this regard. The fundamental European Modernist character evinced in the photographs, their architectural evolution of Bauhaus to International Style and finally to the post-modern indicates the benefits that Tel Aviv was afforded through the mobility of Diaspora.

          Cataloguing Tel Aviv's Bauhaus architecture also gives rise to how a city communicates to itself. The deterioration and subsequent restoration of these buildings, as evidenced in the photographs, show the shifting prioritization of state values: while the white walls of the public sphere serve as a blank canvas upon which the populace scribbles graffiti, communicating its discontents. Thus the photographs collected here serve as a time capsule of the now. Contemporary Israeli society is offered in all its varieties: stylish hipsters, teenage military conscripts, orthodox Jews, and something so "everyday" as a collection of parked vehicles, chronicle the metropolitan urban contours of Tel Aviv, approximating the manner in which Stephen Shore and William Eggleston utilized banal streetscapes to subtly evoke 1970s American society. The multiple perspectives that this exhaustive architectural survey offers, procured through a database-like aesthetic, affords a portable simulacrum, a Borgesian map of Tel Aviv that documents and analyzes through the photographic medium. In my view the database nature form of this project recalls the objectivist architectural form of Bauhaus, while the use of wide angle lenses both reflect and enhance the ornamental curves native to Tel Aviv Bauhaus.