Project:  B-House Tel Aviv

Architect:  Architekturbüro Sven Röttger

Location:  Tel Aviv, Israel

The failure and subsequent suppression of modernism in the USSR under Stalin in the mid-1930s and the rising threat of continental war sent (mostly Jewish) architects, especially the avant-garde, to Britain, the United States, and Israel, where modernist architecture flourished in the newly planned seaside city of Tel Aviv. The so-called Bauhaus villas of the “White City” were modeled on precedents from the 20s, though adapted to the climate. This collection of buildings—numbering upwards 4,000—are today protected by UNESCO and continue to influence Tel Aviv’s contemporay architecture, as can be seen in the Architekturbüro Sven Röttger’s B-House Tel Aviv. The project appropriates the beveled edges and striking curves of the city’s storied modernist, or “Internationalist,” cityscape, yet reinterprets their white-plastered walls in smooth concrete. What could easily have been pastiche is here instead a sensitive and thoughtful take on an architecture of the past that still has much to give.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database!

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged B-House, bauhaus, internationalist architecture, modernism, Modernist architecture, tel aviv, USSR, White City

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