Tel Aviv’s citizens like to think of their hometown as a smaller version of New York or Paris – a full-scale Mediterranean metropolis, complete with world-class culture, cuisine and commerce. Yet at barely 51 sq miles in size and with just 400,000 locals, Tel Aviv is far too small to be compared with its better-known cosmopolitan counterparts – despite its impressive urban amenities.
But in their attempt to align themselves with the west, Tel Avivis often miss out on the beauty in their own backyards. Not that it’s hard to blame them. Founded in 1909 as the world’s first modern Jewish city, Tel Aviv passed through its architectural adolescence from the 1940s to 1960s, the period immediately following Israel’s 1948 independence, which ushered in a wave of mass immigration. Thousands of boxy, concrete buildings were hastily erected to house the newcomers – a functional, though hardly elegant, solution to the nation’s pressing needs for shelter.
The resulting urban landscape can be jarring at best, downright ugly at worst – with none of the flourishes that give Haussmann Paris that sense of grace or grandeur. In their place, however, Tel Aviv exudes its own kind of charm. It reveals itself far more slowly but is everywhere nonetheless. And perhaps nowhere more so than in Bialik Square, perched on one of the rare hills dotting Tel Aviv – Hebrew for “Hill of Spring” – and the historic home of early Israel’s art-world elite.
Named after the country’s national poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, the square contains one of Tel Aviv’s best-preserved clutches of Bauhaus-styled buildings, the now-iconic 20th century architectural genre for which Tel Aviv has become increasingly renowned. For the moment, Bialik Square – anchored by Tel Aviv’s first city hall – is a maze of scaffolding as workers proceed on an infrastructure overhaul in preparation for the city’s centenary next year.
But in between the bulldozers, Bialik Square, much like Tel Aviv itself, is already beginning to shine anew. For the moment, the square’s most compelling newcomer is unquestionably the Bauhaus Museum, which opened on 21 Bialik Street this year. A decade in the making, the museum is itself housed in a meticulously renovated Bauhaus gem completed in the 1920s and 1930s by Shlomo Gepstein, a Russian-born architect who trained at the St Petersburg Academy of Art before migrating to pre-state Palestine.
The building today is owned by cosmetics mogul and art collector/philanthropist Ronald Lauder, who famously spent an estimated $135m in 2006 on Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” – now hanging in Manhattan’s Neue Galerie, a museum focused on German and Austrian art set up by the collector. At a mere 1,300 sq ft, the Bauhaus Museum is far more modest, though no less resonant. Established and curated by London-based gallerist Daniella Luxembourg, the museum honours the Bauhaus both in Israel and its European origins.
Still developing its own permanent collection, Luxembourg’s debut exhibition – titled simply Bauhaus Tel Aviv – presents pieces from designers and architects including Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Otto Lindig and even Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School in Weimar in 1919. Closed by the Nazis 14 years later, the school’s most tangible legacy can be found, ironically, in Jewish Tel Aviv, whose collection of 4,000 Bauhaus buildings is the largest and best preserved in the world.
Most of these are clustered in the city centre close to Bialik Square, a district commonly known as the White City. Declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2003, Tel Aviv is only the second modern city after the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, to receive such an honour. Five years after this historic decree, the Bauhaus Museum now provides Tel Aviv with a formal repository for period relics along with a permanent base for the scholarly pursuit of this important artistic movement.
Tel Aviv’s unlikely architectural heritage is clearly its most concrete calling card. And Lauder is just one of many locals and foreigners investing millions of dollars to refurbish Bauhaus buildings and transform them into posh primary residences and pedigreed pieds-à-terre. Yet between their functionalist facades, Tel Aviv’s additional unexpected treasures give the city a true sense of soul that would be the envy of Manhattan or the Marais in Paris.
In the city’s south, for instance, the warehouse-filled Florentine district heaves with African and Asian foreign workers who reside alongside Hebrew-speaking spice-mongers originally from the Caucuses and central Asia. Come December, Christmas trees illuminate an urban sphere whose founding Jewish fathers would marvel – in horror? in delight? – at its unlikely integration into the global migrant economy.
Further north, Tel Aviv’s seafront quarters have also experienced their own newcomer influx, filling today with French Jews rapidly acquiring a foothold in Israel as a shield against rising anti-Semitism back home. Mostly North African in origin and far more pious than Tel Aviv’s secular majority, they are injecting a dose of traditional Jewishness into a city that has aggressively resisted religious orthodoxy. As unused synagogues return to life and men with skull-caps become increasingly common, a soul-searching of sorts is slowly under way as the world’s largest Jewish city grapples with its own unresolved Jewish identity.
But as the city prepares for its centenary, Tel Avivis are beginning to wonder aloud what the next 100 years will bring. True, the secular elite continues to cosset itself in yoga sessions, spirituality workshops and other western indulgences in the hope perhaps that they will finally rescue them from the realities of the Middle East. But with Iran an ever-present threat and Israel’s booming economy a potential casualty of the global economic slowdown, Tel Avivis will need more diversions.
As the rising appreciation of its architecture suggests, Tel Aviv’s most compelling urban bona fides are as homegrown as lazy afternoons at the beach. And although hardly undiscovered, Tel Aviv tourism remains low by global standards – especially in its still warm winter months. So as it aggressively aspires to “world city” status, it might have to grudgingly concede that it may never actually get there. Instead, Tel Aviv might console itself as a small town of big surprises – where waves of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East come together like the Mediterranean surf.
