The immigration to Eretz-Israel during the 1930s and 1940s, with the backdrop of the political events and upheavals in Europe, and the massive construction required in its wake, as well as the Zionist ideal underlying the building of the first Hebrew city, Tel Aviv, prompted young architects to seek immediate solutions to the urgent demand for housing. The need for private homes and housing projects, as well as the accompanying need for town planning, furnished architects with a golden opportunity to build and realize, on the Mediterranean sands, utopian concepts and dreams which had germinated in another land, that of Central Europe.

In 1924 Tel Aviv’s population stood at 35,000. By 1939, the city had grown to 160,000. Tel Aviv became a full-fledged city, and the young immigrant architects who had trained with the Bauhaus and other modernist movements, were given the rare opportunity to realize these new concepts in matter.

Over 1,000 Bauhaus buildings were constructed in Tel Aviv in the 1930s; amongst them the building at 21 Bialik Street, designed by Shlomo Gepstein in 1934. The Bauhaus Foundation has made Bialik 21 its home, founding an exhibition space intended to present different aspects of that movement to the public. The space was inaugurated with an exposition of a unique private collection of utilitarian designs created by the renowned Bauhaus teachers and students in the 1920s and 1930s.

Daniella Luxembourg