Daring the Shutter

Public School Editions

Or Aleksandrowiczand Israel Architecture Archive

Daring the ShutterThe Tel Aviv Idiom of Solar Protections

EditorsOr Aleksandrowicz and Zvi Elhyani

EssayOr Aleksandrowicz

DesignPublic School

Printed byHauser PrintingTel Aviv, 2015

Published byPublic School Editionswearepublicschool.com

In collaboration withIsrael Architecture Archive (IAA)Design Museum Holon

The essay was originally written for a research project on Brutalism in Tel Aviv, directed by Dr. Jeremie Hoffmann,Head of the Conservation Department at Tel Aviv Yafo Municipality

ISBN978-965-92270-1-3

DisclaimerThis publication is non-profit. We claim no rights to the contents of the handbook,and have done all efforts to refer to all the sources.

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Or Aleksandrowicz

Daring the Shutter:Solar Protection inthe Buildings ofTel Aviv during the 1950s and 1960s

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Acclimatization Difficulties

In the fall of 1909, the year in which Tel Aviv was founded, Jewish-German architect Alexander Baerwald came to Palestine. A few months earlier, the Aid Association of German Jews (Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden) invited Baerwald to design in Haifa the building of the Technikum – the first technological university in Eretz Israel, which later received the Hebrew name Technion. Baerwald, who resided in Berlin, wanted to use his first visit to the Holy Land to study the local building technologies in order to formalize a new, Zionist, architectural idiom suitable for the Technikum project. In October 1910, following his visit, he published a detailed report about his main findings, in Die Welt,2 the German-tongue mouthpiece of the

The first architects who worked in Eretz Israel believed that a Jewish apartment building in Eretz Israel needs to have an Oriental character. However, this task – to squeeze a 1925 floorplan into a building that would look like an Arabhouse – proved very difficult.1

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Zionist movement. The significance of the text he wrote on the heels of his visit stems not only from its content but also from its spirit. This is, almost beyond the shadow of a doubt, the first essay to consciously engage with the fundamental components of a Hebrew modern architecture in Eretz Israel.

Baerwald dedicated a central part of his article to the climatic challenges facing construction in Eretz Israel as well as to the solutions the local builders contrived for them. Baerwald saw a direct link between the local climate and the residential construction; as he stated: "while, as we saw, the question of water, the availability of construction materials, and the question of work are crucial for the construction of settlements, the climate of Eretz Israel has the greatest influence on the typical floor plan and the manner in which a building is constructed".3 Thus, he insisted on the importance of ventilation, the thermal insulation capacity of walls and protection from

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solar radiation. Baerwald was probably the first

Zionist architect who articulated what will later become a recurring motif in the writing on architecture in Eretz Israel: a belief in an alleged harmony between local vernacular construction (especially the more developed and complex one in the cities) and the climate conditions of the land, as well as a belief in the existence of a "builders' wisdom", which the Jewish architects, who came from a colder climate, were expected to adopt. Greater attention was naturally bestowed to the form and manner in which the windows that are set in the building's envelope regulate the effect of the external conditions. An early articulation of the problem can be found in an article by architect Józef Awin from 1927. According to Awin: "in the art of local construction in Eretz-Israel we may find the proper proportion between the number and size of windows and the general volume, following the common experience", hence, "the

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relation between the windows and the external wall of the building is completely different than in the countries we come from".4 The inevitable conclusion was not to blindly mimic the forms of existing buildings, but to understand the climatic principles and apply them to modern construction.5

At least in the manner in which the architects interpreted the state of affairs, heat constituted the main climatic challenge modern construction had to face in Eretz Israel. Local construction dealt with the challenge with a certain amount of success by combining the heat capacity and thermal insulation of the thick stone walls with the narrowing of the openings in the envelope, the diligent installation of wooden shutters, and the arrangement of interior spaces in a manner that ensured internal cross ventilation. In Tel Aviv, in which the use of stone was abandoned during the 1920s in favor of relatively thin silicate brick walls, the insulating capacity of the

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walls declined and natural ventilation was considered the main (if not the only) means of coping with the heat. In this spirit, architect Dov Karmi wrote in 1936: "the ideal arrangement of an apartment, in an apartment building, is obviously four free sides, which would enable maximum ventilation from all sides". However, since this was hard to achieve in the common apartment buildings, he advised other architects to position the living room at the western, wind-catching side of the apartment, the bedrooms at its eastern side, and to add a corridor between them that would make possible a free movement of air inside the apartment, from west to east, at all hours of the day.6 Architect Arieh Sharon offered similar ideas a year later.7

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When I came to Israel (then "Palestine") 50 years ago and inquired about the influence of the summer climate on construction and town-planning I received only one answer: the cool breeze comes from the west!8

The Concept of the Breeze

The demand for proper ventilation, which was supposed to prevent apartments from overheating, echoed the frequent modern interest in subjects of light and ventilation. By the end of the 19th century, the traditional European city was seen as a sick breeding ground for diseases, since its dense construction did not allow wind and natural light to enter its narrow streets. The early 20th century garden cities of Europe were meant to provide a direct solution to the problem by limiting the volume of construction in a given lot and by retracting the facades of the structure from the limits of the lot. The founders of the city of Tel Aviv followed a similar concept from its very birth. Nonetheless, in comparison with Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin from 1925,

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which could also be interpreted as an extreme project to ventilate historic Paris, Patrick Geddes' plan for Tel Aviv, which was prepared in exactly the same year, was so conservative and tightly dense it left almost no room for ventilation. This is also the reason that despite the conscious discourse on the virtues of the western wind, in most cases, the typical Tel Avivian lot parceling actually prevented the successful application of the simple ventilation principle described in Karmi's and Sharon's essays.

The architectural preoccupation with the virtues of the sea breeze was a far stretch away from a complete understanding of the main climatic elements and their different effects on the overheating of apartments in Tel Aviv. The field lacked a regulated scientific methodology for analyzing the thermal performance of buildings in different climatic conditions. Given this background, it is difficult not to be impressed with the independent and unique path architect Werner Joseph Wittkower was carving out for himself.

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Wittkower, who came to Palestine from Berlin in 1933, searched, since the early 1940s, for scientific answers to questions concerning the adaptation of local construction to the local climate, mainly in the country's Coastal Plain. Contrary to common beliefs among the architects of the time, which were based mainly on personal experience rather than scientific inquiry, Wittkower, who admitted that "we cannot deny the refreshing effect of the wind in our climate", explained that the wind's effect is actually miniscule and that "in the midst of summer, and in particular in the evening hours, the heat in our apartments rises to worrisome degrees".

Wittkower insisted that the problem of the common construction methods was their tendency to take into account "only the problem of the movement of air" without attempting to "influence the internal temperature of the buildings", and noted that the "draft", which architects work so hard to let into the apartments, mainly

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disturb their residents. A holistic analysis of the climatic elements led him to conclude that the best way to prevent apartments from overheating is to orient their main facades to the north and south (instead of east and west), since the amount of solar radiation received by northern and southern walls during summer is much lower than the radiation received by eastern and western walls.9 In 1946, Wittkower conducted a pioneering experiment with the personnel of the Mandate's Meteorological Service, in which indoor temperatures in a housing project were monitored. The experiment, which took place in the Yad Eliyahu neighborhood in Tel Aviv, confirmed Wittkower's hypothesis.10

Wittkower's criticism showed once again that although architects contended that the local climate is the basic ingredient in the formalization of a local Hebrew architectural idiom, the typical apartment buildings, especially in the hot and humid Tel Aviv, continually failed to deliver the goods. The apartments in Tel Aviv

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tended to overheat not only because of the ventilation problem created by the typical allocation of lots, but also because of stylistic whims: in the white Tel Aviv of the 1930s, architects followed the Zeitgeist and tended to design residential buildings as a formal expressive play that was utterly non-climatic. The protrusions, grooves and projecting balconies enlarged the external surface area of the building, thereby heating up the walls even more; the extremely popular long horizontal strip windows reduced the envelope's capacity to prevent the heat from entering the apartment; and the (mostly symbolic) shading ledges could not prevent the penetration of direct sunlight, usually since not enough thought was invested in the orientation of the structure, and they eventually absorbed the solar heat and conducted it into the envelope. Above all, the blind belief in the power of natural ventilation disregarded the fickleness of the wind and the objective difficulty to

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create a sufficient movement of air throughout the apartment, in a manner that would make it a permanent and controllable means of easing thermal discomfort. The local version of the International Style may have seemed to its local representatives as an "acclimatized" version of what was built at the same time in Europe,11 but this "acclimatization" remained a mere statement and miserably failed in its end result.

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Glazing and its Disillusionment

The International Style, at least in its original Corbusian version, was overtly anti-local. Nonetheless,while the architects in Tel Aviv attempted to bridge the contradiction between Le Corbusier's "one single building for all nations and climates"13 and the (at least declarative) desire to implement the climatic advantages of the local, traditional construction in new construction, Le Corbusier's climatic conception, which was just as pseudo-scientific as that of local architects, radically changed following its functional failure.The change brought with it a structural invention, which was to reach Israel only in the 1950s: the sun breaker, or in its French name, the Brise-Soleil.

There can be no doubt that, howeverdesperate its motivations, the brise-soleilis one of [Le Corbusier's] most masterly inventions, one of the few last structural innovations in the field of environmental management that we have seen.12

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The story behind the invention ofthe brise-soleil is intimately related, also in the way its inventor narrated it, to the innovative use of glass walls, which Le Corbusier and others promoted after the end of WWI to solve the lack of natural light in apartments, and mainly to the invention of the glazed curtain wall. After Le Corbusier implemented the radical solution of a completely transparent facade in a few projects, he discovered that the "the summer solstice and the dog days with their unbearable temperatures make the sun, our friend, a fierce enemy; during these hot hours, the need becomes imperative: the windows must be obstructed, the glass wall must be 'diaphragmized'".14 The glazed curtain wall failed the climatic test since the amounts of solar radiation that reached the depth of the building resulted in extreme and uncontrollable overheating of indoor spaces during the hot season. In a world in which air-conditioning had yet to become accepted (at least in Europe) as an ordinary element in

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a building's service package, the transparent glass walls made indoor conditions during the hot summer months intolerable.

The modern invention of the glazed curtain wall gave birth, then, to the need for another invention. This time, the facade needed protection from the direct penetration of sunrays, in order to regulate the exposure to natural light and minimize the sun's negative thermal influence on the building. This invention, which is (probably justly) attributed to Le Corbusier, was based on curtaining the curtain wall with an additional, vertical or horizontal, structural layer of "sun breaking" shading. Alongside their climatic function, these shadings dramatically changed the aesthetic impression left by the structure's facades. Instead of the transparent, unified and nonmaterial two-dimensionality of the glass wall, Le Corbusier offered a multi-dimensional, multi-organed and sculptural array of thin and repetitive surfaces.

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A first opportunity to test the invention under field conditions occurred in Brazil: in June 1936, Le Corbusier came to Rio de Janeiro to advise a group of local architects (headed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer) on designing a building for the Ministry of Education and Public Health. One of the results of the encounter manifested in the stark difference between the building's cool, southern facade, which was enveloped by a glazed curtain wall, and the northern facade, which was exposed to the impact of direct sunlight (in the southern hemisphere); here, beyond the column line, a prosthetic formation was added. The formation was cast in concrete and was made of vertical and horizontal surfaces that divided the facade into identical rectangular fields (a geometric division that will later receive the picturesque nickname "egg crate"). On the upper part of each field, blue, wide horizontal Eternit (asbestos-cement) louvers were installed, which could be adjusted in accordance with the sun's changing position.

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At least in the way the Corbusian historiography unfolds the story, the brise-soleil seed Le Corbusier planted in 1936 sprouted almost overnight into a creative burst of varied and original shading solutions, which were implemented by Niemeyer and his local peers in a wide gamut of projects. Niemeyer himself included brise-soleil arrays in a few projects, which were completed even before the inauguration of the Ministry of Education and Public Health Building in 1943. Among these projects were: a children's day care center (Obra do Berço) that was built in Rio in 1937, the Brazilian pavilion in New York's World's Fair in 1939 (designed with Lúcio Costa), and a yacht club in Pampulha, which was completed in 1942. The extraverted employment of structural shading components endowed the young Brazilian Modernist movement with a stark formal fingerprint, which began to attract international attention. In January 1943, while Europe, North Africa and Asia were in the grips of

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the horrors of WWII, the Museum of Modern Art in New York showcased the exhibition Brazil Builds, curated by architect Philip Goodwin. In the exhibition's catalogue Goodwin did not hesitate to claim that:

Four years later, the influential French journal, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, dedicated the main part of its 1947 September issue to Brazil's modern architecture. The review opened with a representative double-page spread, which focused on Brazil's unique contribution to international architecture: on the left, a text by Le

[Brazil's] great original contribution to modern architecture is the control of heat and glare on glass surfaces by means of external blinds. North America has blandly ignored the entire question. Faced with summer's fierce western sun, the average office building is like a hot-house, its double-hung windows half closed and unprotected. The miserable office workers either roast or hide behind airless awnings or depend on the feeble protection of Venetian blinds, - feeble because they do nothing to keep the sun from heating the glass. It was curiosity to see how the Brazilians had handled this very important problem that really instigated our expedition.15

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Corbusier describing "a little history of the brise-soleil" accompanied by a drawn genealogy of non-Brazilian Corbusian projects; and on the right, a stunning photograph of the northern facade of the Ministry of Education and Public Health Building. In August 1952, the journal dedicated another issue to Brazil and placed on its cover a schematic drawing of sunrays breaking against shutter slats. Modern Brazil has turned, almost overnight, to the Mecca of shading.

Yet, Le Corbusier was unhappy with at least one aspect of the way in which he was interpreted in Brazil. As he later wrote:

The Ministry of Education and Public Health at Rio de Janeiro […] offers the first example of the use of brise-soleil in modern architecture. But a mistake was made. The horizontal panels of the brise-soleil are movable. The real principle is this. It is the sun which does the moving, never occupying the same place in the sky for 365 days. A scheme can therefore be devised based on precise data: a) a course of the sun on every day of the year; b) problems of the latitude of the place under consideration.16

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Le Corbusier's insistence on a non-movable shading solution stemmed, as far as we can judge, from a verbal trap he set for himself, and perhaps also from a lust for control that swirled out of control. In contrast to Le Corbusier's argument, with the exception of the solstices (December 21 and June 21), the sun moves in an identical daily path on two separate days in the course of a single year. Thus, the fixed brise-soleil, which breaks the sunrays during the hot months of August and September (in the Israeli weather), will also break the sunrays that fall on the building in the same exact angle during the less hot months of March and April.17 This was certainly not a desired result, at least not from the purely climatic point of view. As the Israeli case later proved, although architects enthusiastically adopted the Corbusian dogma, it failed to conform to the natural inclination and common sense of the actual users, who eventually preferred flexible, adjustable solutions to the unchanging brise-soleil.

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December 1953In a series of lectures we were introduced to the problems of climate and building. The major points were, that in different seasons some sides of the house have advantages over the others. We were told to design an exercise sketch.

My conclusions were that I had to:1. Minimize the climatically worst walls, east and west,2. Get the morning sun from the northeast side,3. Get the winter sun from the south (maximum),4. Get the summer breeze from the northwest.If you follow these instructions you cannot miss the trapezoid-shaped plan of the house.I was very proud of my ability to solve the climatic problems merely by shaping the house.I got back my sketch marked with a big red question mark.18

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During the early 1950s, alongside waves of Jewish immigrants, Brazil's architecture also landed on the shores of the young state of Israel.19 Actual Brazilian architects did not work in Israel (perhaps with the exception of David Reznik who emigrated from Brazil in 1949), but a constant flow of professional literature and (even more so) professional magazines, which continued to bestow a considerable amount of attention on the Brazilian shading mechanisms, eased the absorption of the Brazilian architectural idiom among Israeli architects. The brise-soleil of Le Corbusier and his Brazilian disciples joined this wave of immigration; and its quick Israelization was made possible through the use of a myriad of climatic arguments.

Dov Karmi testified in 1953 that "the ray breakers (the Brazilian shutters or 'Brizes' as construction people call them) made their appearance in Israel a few years ago, and have become more and more popular", adding that he believed that they "will be able to

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make it possible to adjust our building to our nation's climate and the designs of the planners".20 In 1956, Arieh Sharon reported that "during the recent years [Israeli] architects have been experimenting with climatic problems, not without the influence of Brazilian architecture", and added that "in several multi-storey public buildings climatic protection has been provided through vertical or horizontal brissoleil [sic.] shutters movable according to the direction of the sunrays and prevailing breeze".21 A few years later, architect and critic Aba Elhanani was able to look back on "the Brazilian fashion" and state that "the influence of Niemeyer and his comrades on our architects was quite superficial, since they only barrowed its external markings. Still, this fashion carried quite a blessing, as it was imported from a sun-soaked land with a subtropical climate, not unlike our own".22

The Brazilian shading fashion of the early 1950s repositioned the Israeli sun, although with some delay,

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at the center of the local architects' climatic preoccupation. After about two decades of blindly relying on the local wind regime, it seemed that the focus shifted back to the intelligent protection from sunrays. This change was also justified by a practical argument, which contained an implicit admission in the failure of the previous concept: Karmi, of the few architects who wrote their thoughts on climate, confessed in 1953 that "we have always known how far we were from a proper climatic solution and that our buildings, including their external walls, ceilings, openings etc., do not provide a satisfactory protection against the inflictions of our climate".23

The absorption of the Brazilian shading devices was smooth, perhaps too smooth. The local architects' natural inclination to take part in "international" fashions managed to murk their clarity of thought and led to erroneous and unfounded conclusions, as if Israel's Mediterranean and desert climate resembled Brazil's tropical and subtropical climate, as if the

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Tel Avivian sun of the 32nd parallel north is the identical twin of Rio's sun of the 23rd parallel south. This is not surprising, since all versions of the brise-soleil enjoyed the aura of Israeli architecture's holy trinity of the 1950s: Le Corbusier, Niemeyer and Functionalism. Local architects complemented the expedited Israelization of the brise-soleil by adding the vernacular alibi, since the "source of the ray-breaker is the Near East, and we may find proof of this in the shutters and pergolas of the Old City of Jerusalem, which are built of thin wooden slats in a wrap and weft pattern, while the steep walls and parapets are built from pieces of ceramic pipes", as Karmi wrote.24 However, while Le Corbusier's functional brise-soleil was (at least apparently) meant to offer a climatic solution to a problem that was formed when the glazed curtain wall replaced the masonry wall, in Israel the brise-soleil preceded any extensive use of glazing, and in many cases, mainly in apartment buildings, the wall behind it

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was usually opaque, a fact that should have generated doubts regarding its climatic necessity.

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February 1954After the first term vacation, we are assigned our year's project: a forest-keeper's cabin. Pretty soon I could not find most of the students in the drafting rooms – everybody was in the library. It was here, on the shelves, that one was literally suffused by the terrific abundance of the latest information; the newest criteria of beauty; the most recent achievements. Les Magazines!By the time I found out that we were living and creating in the "Brazilian Period" (according to the magazines) – it was already too late.

The "variations on the Brazilian Theme" overshadowed any individual searchings.25

Brazil of the Middle East

The Tel Avivian arena was quick to adopt the Brazilian shading devices not only since it searched for successful climatic solutions, but also because it wanted to imitate the seductive international images that were printed in the foreign magazines

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through relatively cheap and local technological means. In Israel during the 1950s, concrete was regarded as the most prominent local building material, and the more it was used the more the working methods with it improved, both in on-site casting and in prefabrication of building elements (precast concrete). The new shading idiom could not have developed into its later sophisticated form without the support of skilled factories, who knew how to cast hollow bricks, concrete panels or asbestos-cement louvers thin and precise enough to create the desired "lattice effect".26 In a certain sense, we may describe the renewed architectural interest in the concept of shading as part of a more elaborate journey to exhaust the gamut of precast concrete products for detailing the building envelope.

The buildings of the Histadrut Headquarters, which Dov Karmi and Hever Architects designed (Arlosoroff 93, 1949-1955), constitute the first prominent buildings in Tel Aviv (and Israel), in which a designated system

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of precast concrete shadings was implemented. Karmi designed the perfect prototype for a "proper" climatic construction, which adjusted itself to the local sun: an array of rectangular slab structures, whose long facades turn to the north and south, with a prosthetic layer of shading devices, which change in accordance with the types of space and solar orientation. An external layer of deep brise-soleil was added to the southern facades of two of the structures; in others, a deep corridor turned to the southern facade, making the need for the extra layer of shading redundant; and in the northern facades projecting concrete strips were installed to help protect the buildings from the low northeastern and northwestern summer sun.

Around the same period, Arieh Sharon and Benjamin Idelson designed several public projects throughout Israel with a similar approach (long slab structures oriented to the north and south, with

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brise-soleil on the southern facade). In Tel Aviv, they designed Ichilov Hospital (Weizmann 6, 1954-1960) and the Jewish Agency Building (Kaplan 15-17, 1961-1965) following a similar principle. The brise-soleil on both buildings looked like a direct quotation of the northern facade of the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio. Architect Heinz Fenchel implemented a similar solution even earlier in his design of the Dan Hotel (HaYarkon 99, 1950-1953, another wing was built in a similar format in 1959-1961), yet unlike Sharon and Idelson's slab buildings, the hotel's two main bodies were oriented to east and west, and the shading solution, which would have been efficient had it been installed on a southern facade, was much less capable of regulating the low summer sun coming from the east or west.

An interesting example of the way in which the imported shading devices were used to cope with a problematic solar orientation may be found in the Faculty of Humanities Building at Tel Aviv University (Gilman

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Building, 1963-1965), designed by Werner Joseph Wittkower and Erich Baumann (architect in-charge: Israel Stein). Wittkower, who since the 1940s advocated the orientation of the longer facades of buildings to the north and south, received a rectangular plot, whose longer sides faced east and west. The structural solution to the climatic challenge was based on the division of the building mass into two separate wings that would each surround internal courtyards; situating most of the lecture halls and classrooms in the north and south facing parts of the wings; and using enveloping layers of dense precast concrete elements to protect the facades facing east and west. The sun breakers on the eastern and western facades were installed as an additional external wall that was placed beyond the structure's internal wall, while the air gap between them was used to cool the walls of the rooms. This complete veiling not only contributed to the building's climatic performance, but was also exploited as an aesthetic

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solution for concealing an almost accidental array of the different sized windows in the offices, seminar rooms and toilets, which faced east and west.

An earlier project, in which similar constraints led the architects to develop a rich language of shadings, is Sharon and Idelson's Lessin House-Hamlin House complex (Weizmann 30-32, built in two phases between 1952-1956). The building deserves special attention, not only because its design involved three recipients of the Israel Prize for Architecture (Sharon, Idelson and Avraham Yasky, who was the architect in charge of the project in their office), but mainly because of the way in which the shading devices expressed an intimate affinity between the orientation of the structure's facades, the need for solar protection and the planned functioning of indoor spaces. Sharon and Idelson described in detail the central role of the sun in their design for the building facades within the pages of the Journal of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Israel:

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In accordance with the zoning plan, the building's main volumes are turned to the street in different orientations: the main part is turned to the east and west, the hall and the part that has yet to be built [Hamlin House] to the north and south. This all-sided orientation called for an individual solution for each facade, in accordance with the directions of the sun and the wind, and the function of indoor spaces that are protected by the different facades. The main facade constitutes the central difficulty since it faces west and overheats during the afternoon and the evening hours, when the central cultural event begins. Following many considerations and after taking into account the daily and annual exposure to [solar] radiation, this facade was articulated using a double module: on the top part fixed concrete louvers turned northwest (fixed upper ventilation), and movable louvers on the lower, main part of the equally-dimensioned structural fields. These louvers guarantee, by proper adjustment to the desired direction, the penetration of western or northwestern wind while protecting from the hot sunrays during the afternoon and from rain and winds during winter. Some of the rooms required a different solution because of their functions, and in each case they received a different form of protection: in the book storerooms the lower field was closed by concrete plates; in the exhibition hall several fields were opened to the street view with the partial protection of venetian blinds; and the cafeteria received special protection using hollow blocks, which opened to the northwest and absorbed the wind from this direction.

[…] The third volume of the building [Hamlin

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House] is oriented to the south and north. Horizontal louvers, which simultaneously protect the building from the rays of the high summer sun and enable their desired penetration in winter, will be installed in the southern openings of this part. The northern side, which does not require special protection, will receive large glazed openings that will function as a link between this part and the building's garden. In the solution of the various facades, which of course express only the content and functions of the spaces behind them, we tried to find the best way to make it possible for us in the future to more effectively protect our home and adjust it to the climatic conditions in Israel.27

The impressive climatic analysis, as well as the structural detailing which was based on its conclusions, constituted a rare pinnacle point that was ahead of its time.28 This was most definitely an exception that proved the rule: in most cases, there was no thought of functionality behind the shading schemes; they were merely echoes (and often faint ones at that) of the images printed in the foreign magazines.

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See, therein lies the greatness of our age, that it is incapable of producing a new ornament. We have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way through the freedom from ornament. See, the time in nigh, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then fulfilment will be come.29

Repressed Ornamentation

Interestingly, in Tel Aviv, the Brazilian fashion exuded its most extensive influence on the typical Tel Avivian apartment building, and especially on its street-facing facade. Following two decades of a strict modernist prohibition on architectural ornaments, a rich and new local ornamental idiom developed, which used the climatic justification as a flimsily excuse for its existence. The street facade, which in the 1930s and 1940s was designed as "the skillful, accurate, and magnificent play of volumes seen in light" (in Le Corbusier's poetic language), was flattened and confined in a rectangular frame. This frame contained deep and wide loggias, which replaced

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the previous generation's projecting balconies. The apartment design no longer proceeded from within to without; the new external plane, the facade line of the loggias, served to blur the contents of the plan. The openings in the apartment walls, which were supposed to express the building's functional truth, disappeared from view in the depth of the loggias.

The shading devices (mainly hollow precast concrete elements, and sometimes also concrete blocks or bricks that were arranged in lattice-like patterns), now functioned mainly as screens that filtered the human gaze. The facade was divided into two types of orthogonal fields: empty fields free of construction and fields filled with punctured veiling screens. The facade screens made it possible for the architects to take more liberty when they set the openings that led from the apartment to the loggia, and helped them conceal not only accidental facade compositions that stemmed from the truth of the plan,

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but also wooden shutters that could be dragged behind them. The result was a facade that was designed as a two-dimensional framed picture of playful abstract geometric patterns. The sun breakers turned into routine breakers.

The extensive use of precast concrete elements did not necessarily reflect a firm climatic understanding. The precast screens were set with complete confidence in northern facades, where the excess shading proved useless; dense precast blocks, which were more compatible with breaking the eastern and western sunrays, screened the southern facades, thereby causing unnecessary darkness, especially in winter; and the more aerated compositions, which were well-adjusted to southern facades, were used for screening eastern and western facades. In corner buildings, like the building designed by Avraham Yasky and Amnon Alexandroni on Maharal 15 (1958), identical precast concrete elements were often used on the two street facing facades, although the

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sun hit them in different angles. Israel was not the first to be carried away by lattice-like orthogonal ornamentation: the apartment buildings Lúcio Costa designed around Parque Eduardo Guinle in Rio (1948-1954) offered a quintessential example of the method. Costa's project, whose influence is strikingly evident in Tel Aviv, also used identical precast screens for different orientations, thereby undermining the technical truth of shading.

On the backdrop of the period's sanctified functionalism, the local inclination for ornamentation was sweepingly condemned. Local critics did not sufficiently appreciate the (visual) achievements of the local architectural idiom that was developing in Tel Aviv and the creative use of the local means of production, despite its dubious climatic contribution. In 1955, architect and scholar Avraham Erlik wrote that the "'Brazilian shutter' makes its appearance here, in most cases, as a purely decorative motif, with no relation at all to actual function".30

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A year later, Arieh Sharon expressed his regret that in the climatic context "there are many treatments that are purely formal, using a decorative texture of elevation by means of hollow bricks, multi-form concrete blocks, and various, occasionally rich, colour schemes".31 In 1957, Aba Elhanani remarked that "this simple and effective element [the precast screen] has regretfully become a zone for competition and for a fruitless search after ornamentation; while many architects aspire, for some reason, to emphasize their own personality by inventing different and complex forms of precast elements in a myriad of pale colors".32 Five years later, Elhanani reiterated his opinion on the new local style and claimed that under the Brazilian influence "an excessive use of sometimes needless shading elements was carried out, either for shading or pure decoration".33 In a world in which ornamentation was still considered a subversion of the "truth" of architecture, the writers found it difficult to comprehend (or admit to)

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the aesthetic advantages of the sun-breakers, or at the very least their vast potential for developing a local and original architectural idiom - whose very absence has been preoccupying Hebrew architecture in Eretz Israel from the days of Baerwald.

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During those years they invented the brise-soleil in Brazil. It could be rotated, but it could not be folded. I had a friend who graduated with me from the Technion, an engineer by the name of Ram Blatt [Ram Ben-Tal]. He would visit my office, which was then located on Bloch Street in Tel Aviv, almost every day. He would sit with me and say, "what am I going to do? Am I going to be just another run-of-the-mill engineer? Help me. You built houses from asbestos in Narharyia for the Isasbest manager, maybe you can help me find something in asbestos". I told him, Ram, that precast element they make in Brazil, if you find a way to fold it, you have a job, you have a livelihood, you have a factory.34

The Vanishing Brise-Soleil

Despite Le Corbusier's explicit criticism of the movable brise-soleil, the fixed "egg crates" and the rotating asbestos-cement shutters shared a quality that made them, at least for architects, extremely attractive: nothing could make them vanish. The dynamics of the asbestos-cement shutters was limited from the beginning to a very narrow range, which did not allow the users any actual freedom. The visual presence of the shutters, like the fixed brise-

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soleil, was almost completely identical in every possible angle they were tilted. The disadvantage was clear: an opening that was closed with asbestos-cement shutters, even the ones that rotated on their axis, could not really be opened.

On December 19 1957, Israeli patent number 10575, "improvements in or relating to shutters of the sunbreaker type", was registered under Ram Ben-Tal's name. Ben-Tal's innovation related to the fittings and the sliding mechanism of vertical asbestos-cement plates and made it possible to collect them all into a single cluster. Thus, it was possible to "clean" the opening from the presence of the shutters and maximize the penetration of light and air. The purpose of the patent resembled an earlier patent, which was registered by the architect Moshe Kubowitzki from Tel Aviv (patent 7795 from October 27 1954). However, unlike Kubowitzki's patent, Ben-Tal found a way to smooth the collection process of high and heavy shutters like those produced from

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asbestos-cement. Ben-Tal's original invention, which

received the brand name Trisol, put an end to the inherent defect in the operation of the rotating asbestos-cement shutters, thus creating a shading device that was simultaneously flexible and rigid. The innovation was extremely unusual, especially when compared to another architectural solution developed at the same time for similar purposes. In his Bar Shira House (Ben-Gurion 33, 1958-1959), Dov Karmi installed large square asbestos-cement plates, which rotated on a fixed horizontal axis, on the street-facing facade (the southern facade). When set on their horizontal position, the panels operated as shading shelves that projected from beyond the building facade and left a clean and undisturbed clear span in the central part of the facade. When in their vertical position, the plates closed the upper part of the loggia, above rail level. Rotating vertical asbestos-cement shutters, which were installed within the loggia rails,

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guaranteed ventilation even when the main panels were kept closed. Nevertheless, despite their impressive appearance, the large asbestos-cement plates offered a clumsy solution to the transition between completely shut and completely open. They were a far stretch from the Trisol's simple elegance, and it is no wonder that they were not duplicated again in any other project, be it Karmi's or other architects.

Unlike Karmi's plates, Ben-Tal's invention was an instant success, and was even adopted by a few architects. At first, architects saw the Trisol not as a cheap and available solution for closing balconies, but rather as a way to open them, an architectural device that would overcome the fixed impenetrability of the lattice-like precast concrete elements. Architect Nahum Zolotov did not hesitate to use this new invention when designing the first residential high rise in Tel Aviv (Ben-Yehuda 79, 1958). This multi-storey building was innovative in many ways and contained an entire

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collection of brilliant enveloping solutions made purely from prefabricated concrete elements. The opaque walls of the envelope were made from precast granolith; lattice-like precast elements were installed in the building's eastern facade to hide the service balconies; and perforated precast elements closed the west-facing staircase. The Trisols were added as a shading solution to the western loggias; like in Karmi's Bar Shira House, sliding glass partitions separated the living rooms from the loggias, and thus, the new possibility to collect the Trisols seemed even more appealing since it created an unprecedented variety in the possible combinations of opening and closing the living room. Yasky and Alexandroni chose to use Trisols as an infill element for the exposed concrete skeleton in the multi-storey building at Lipsky 24 (1961-1962); this choice enabled them to unify the appearance of the building's long western facade. Nevertheless, had the Trisol been dependent on the

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preferences of the architects, it would probably never have become such an overnight commercial success. The Trisol gained most of its reputation as a device which enabled users to fix what the architects had missed, as a way to expand the use value of the open balconies so common in Tel Aviv.

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Take for instance thisexceptional invention Like the sliding shutter,running shutter,flying shutter, shutter blastIt is big, it is vastIt opens when we turnthe handle backIt drives on a wheeland drives on a trackThis shutter gives threetypes of shadesThis shutter breaksultraviolet rays.35

The Revenge of the Vernacular

Extremely effective shading devices (especially the different types of wooden shutters) were common in Palestine long before the invention of the brise-soleil; local architects, however, saw them as standard technical additions to the building, and not as an architectural element worthy of their attention. The brise-soleil offered the first incentive to turn the concept of shading into a common visual raw material, while its climatic reputation provided an excuse to indulge in forbidden

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ornamentation. The Trisol attempted to reconcile these two contradictory trends: to function both as a shutter and as an architectural product that will be read as part of the building's structural detailing. Eventually, the Trisol pointed towards the brise-soleil's failure to become a sufficiently effective and flexible product in the local climatic conditions.

Shutters in Palestine in general and in Jaffa in particular have a much older and richer history than could have been implied by the rapid adoption of the Brazilian shading idiom in the early 1950s. Opaque wooden wing shutters were immortalized in the first photographs of Old Jaffa from the 1860s. A decade and a half later, Jaffa already possessed wing shutters with wooden louvers; some were installed with an internal moving rod that made it possible to adjust the angle of their slats. This invention was probably imported from Germany by the first Templer settlers in Palestine, and was later given the name "Haifa Shutter". The wing shutters were installed in

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almost every home.In 1925, the first workshop in

Palestine to manufacture wooden roller shutters ("folded shutters", as they were called then) began to operate in Tel Aviv; this shutter type became especially popular among the International Style architects in Tel Aviv, also because it fit the horizontal proportions of the windows in the buildings of the White City. Nevertheless, as Dov Karmi later explained, "the folding shutter that became so common in our country does not function properly […] its main disadvantage […] is that one cannot use it to prevent, on the one hand, the penetration of sunrays into the room during summer [because the light penetrated through the cracks between the slats], and on the other hand, to fully open the window for ventilation, even in cases in which the shutter is equipped with a frame that opens it outwards". 36 In an attempt to overcome these problems, in 1954 Haifa architect Shmuel Rosoff developed a patent which was given

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the brand name Brisol. Rosoff's wooden shutter was basically a roller shutter, yet its slats were connected by small chains. This connection method made it possible to rotate the slats by a quarter of a circle after rolling the shutter to its lower end. This solution, perhaps because of its over-sophistication, did not catch on.

Karmi pointed towards a much better solution already in 1946: a shutter with rotating slats (like the Haifa Shutter), which can be dragged into a wall cavity. This shutter type also worked as a shading device for loggias; in certain cases the sliding panels were collected behind the perforated precast wall. Karmi tried a different solution in Orenstein House (Rosenbaum 3, 1955): the street facing facade was divided into top and bottom parts that were closed with panels with fixed wooden louvers. The panels on the top fields could be dragged and thus open clear parts of the loggia. A few years later, in Elgazig House (Zlocisti 5, 1959), Karmi used big wooden panels with rotating

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slats that could be tilted horizontally, similar to the solution implemented with the asbestos-cement plates in Bar Shira House.

Karmi's willingness to dare the shutter over and over again points to the unrealized potential of the shutter as an important element of the local architectural idiom. It is especially surprising then that many architects preferred the imitative adoption of the Brazilian shading idiom, when Israel enjoyed such an impressive variety of standard shutters, which offered a near perfect solution to the climatic challenge posed by the sun. Because of their functional superiority, contractors continued to install roller or sliding shutters in the opening that led from the rooms of the apartment to the loggia, concealing them behind the ornamental precast screens of the apartment buildings in Tel Aviv and thus effectively undermining the climatic logic behind the application of the precast elements.

The wooden shutters had two main disadvantages: they were made

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from a vulnerable material, and their manufacturing required the work of expert carpenters. A solution was found in the early 1960s, following the revolution of the Trisol. Ben-Tal's factory, like many other competing factories that quickly opened, began manufacturing industrialized solutions that were based on aluminium frames and PVC and aluminium slats. These were more flexible and even easier to maintain than the asbestos-cement Trisol shutter, which gradually disappeared from the market. At the same time, plastic slats also began to replace the wooden slats of the roller shutters.

The Trisols and their derivatives gained their largest success in fixing the functional failures in the loggias of the 1950s and 1960s. Long before the Trisol made its appearance, Tel Avivians would install canvas awnings above the exposed balconies; when the loggias appeared, they were joined by less sophisticated contraptions, such as tarpaulins that would hang from the loggia's ceiling. The Trisol

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and the industrialized sliding shutters made it possible for the first time not only to close the exposed balconies in a nearly hermetic fashion, but also to maneuver between an entire gamut of intermediate states, oscillating between completely open and completely closed. The users believed these solutions were efficacious, not only because they made it possible for them to appropriate more space for their apartments, but also because they made the space usable in changing climatic conditions and provided the residents with a good deal of control over their apartment's indoor climate.

The unexpected abundance of shading products that were developed by local manufacturers during the first half of the 1960s did not penetrate the public architecture of the period with such ease. This stemmed not only from the flimsiness of the new shutters and the maintenance problems they brought with them, but also from the rapid (yet temporary) disappearance

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of the glazed curtain walls from the local arena. Their short glory days were symbolically sealed when one of their most salient representatives, ZIM House (Rothschild Boulevard 22, 1956-1957), designed by Dov Karmi, Zvi Meltzer and Ram Karmi, was burnt to the ground on February 1966. The devastating effects of the fire (including one fatality) did not directly result from the application of curtain wall or the extensive use of vertical asbestos-cement brise-soleils for veiling the facades. However, the combination of this shock, the early curtain walls' defective acoustic and thermal performance, and the growing effect of (the mainly European branch of) the Brutalism on local design preferences, led local architects to adopt a new architectural idiom, in which the polished appearance of the exposed glass walls (with or without light shading devices) no longer had a place. In its stead, they adopted a style in which the relatively small window strips were pushed to the rear of the facade, and were swallowed by

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the shadow of high, solid and opaque concrete strips, like eyes submerged under heavy brows. The massive and lumpy facades of the new office buildings no longer left any room for the combination of thin and delicate shading devices, whether fixed, adjustable or collectable (with the exception of internal venetian blinds, which do not protect internal spaces from overheating). The Brutalist idiom of deep window recesses could not offer an elegant, successful, efficient and precise solution to the problem of shading and protection from sunrays, yet this type of solution became less and less necessary with the growing application of central systems of air conditioning.

The adjustable, aluminium-framed sliding shutter was and remains the most brilliant climatic invention Israeli architecture failed to invent. The architects, who reveled in the Middle Eastern vernacular shading solutions, found it difficult to digest an architectural vernacular that developed before their flabbergasted

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eyes. Those who sought to learn from the "wisdom of the builders" of traditional Palestine found it difficult to learn from the local "wisdom of the residents". Furthermore, the architects failed to direct the path of change, underestimated the aesthetic qualities of the new products, and eventually found themselves using them in common residential building with a blatant display of dissatisfaction. The empty space the architects left for chance, like the facades of the deep loggias which were rapidly closing because of the climate, was filled, without a hand to guide it, with what perhaps should have been designed there from the very beginning.

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1. Julius Posner, 'Batim Bney Dira Aḥat BeEretz-Israel (One-family houses in Palestine)', Habinyan 1, 2 (1937): 1.

2. Yossi Ben Artzi, '"Masa' HaLimud" Shel Alexander Baerwald (Alexander Baerwald's "Learning Journey")', Zmanim, 96 (2006): 14-21; Ita Heinze-Greenberg, Europa in Palästina: Die Architekten des zionistischen Projekts 1902-1923 (Zürich: Gta-Verlag, 2011), 133-143.

3. Alexander Baerwald, 'Bauliche Probleme in Palästina', Die Welt 14, 41 (1910): 1048.

4. Józef Awin, ''al Omanut HaBniya Be'eretz Israel (On the Art of Building in Eretz Israel)', Binyan VeḤaroshet (Construction and Industry) 6, 3-4 (1927): 12.

5. Alexander Baerwald, 'Omanut HaMoledet (The Art of Homeland)', Misḥar VeTa'asiya (Commerce and Industry) 3, 3-4 (1925): 95-96.

6. Dov Karmi, 'HaOrientatzya Shel HaDira BeTel-Aviv (Apartment orientation in Tel Aviv)', HaBinyan BaMizraḥ HaQarov 1, 9-10 (1936): 5.

7. Arieh Sharon, 'Tikun Batim Meshutafim (Planning of

Cooperative Houses)', Habinyan 1, 1 (1937): 2-3.

8. Werner Joseph Wittkower, 'Climate-adapted Building in Israel. How far has our Knowledge influenced Building Practice?', Energy and Buildings 7, 3 (1984): 269.

9. Werner Joseph Wittkower, 'LeTaqanato Shel Tikun He'arim VeHaBatim BeEretz-Israel (Towards Reform of Town and House Planning in Palestine)', Journal of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Palestine 4, 6 (1943): 1-4.

10. Rudolf Feige, Walter Koch, Jehuda Neumann, and Werner Joseph Wittkower, Report on the Indoor Climate of Two Apartments, (Jerusalem: Israel Meteorological Service, 1952).

11. Posner (1937), 1-2.

12. Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, 2 ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 158.

13. Ibid., 159.

14. Le Corbusier and Willy Boesiger, Oeuvre complète 1938-1946 (Zurich: Les Editions

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d'Architecture Erlenbach, 1946), 104.

15. Philip L. Goodwin, Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old 1652-1942 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 81, 84.

16. Le Corbusier, My Work (translated by James Palmes) (London: Architectural Press, 1960), 111.

17. Christopher Mackenzie, 'Le Corbusier in the sun', The Architectural Review 192/193, 1152 (1993): 72.

18. Israel M. Goodovitch, Architecturology: An Interim Report (Tel Aviv: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), 10.

19. Zvi Elhyani, "Oscar Niemeyer VeReshit HaUrbanism HaSpequlativi BeIsrael Aḥarey 1960 (Oscar Niemeyer and the Outset of Speculative Urbanism in Israel after 1960)" (Master Thesis, Technion, 2002), 40-43.

20. Dov Karmi, 'Shovrey Qarney-HaShemesh (The Sun Breakers)', Journal of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Israel 10, 3 (1953): 14.

21. Arieh Sharon, 'Architecture and Planning', Lantern 6, 1 (1956): 55. I am indebted to Zvi Elhyani for referring me to Sharon's unknown article.

22. Aba Elhanani, 'Megamot BaAdrikhalut HaIsraelit (Goals in Israel Architecture)', Handasa VeAdrikhalut (Engineering and Architecture) 20 (1962): 313.

23. Karmi (1953), 14.

24. Ibid.

25. Goodovitch (1967), 10.

26. Zvi Efrat, HaProyeqt HaIsraeli: Bniya VeAdrikhalut, 1948-1973 (The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture, 1948-1973) (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2004), 863-870.

27. Arieh Sharon and Benjamin Idelson, 'Beit Lessin (Lessin House)', Journal of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Israel 13, 3 (1955): 3.

28. Hamlin House, as well as parts of Lessin House, are about to be demolished in order to make way for a residential tower.

29. Adolf Loos, 'Ornament and Crime (1908, translated by Michael Bullock)', in Programs and Manifestos on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).

30. Avraham Erlik, 'Al Formalism BeArkhitektura / Mashehu Be-Inyan HaḤalonot (On Formalism in Architecture / Something about the Windows)', Journal of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Israel 13, 1 (1955): 6.

31. Sharon (1956), 55.

32. Aba Elhanani, 'HaMahapecha 'al HaMirpeset: Shitot Hatzlala Ḥadashot Meshanot HaNof (The Revolution on the Balcony: New Shading Methods Change the Landscape)', Haaretz, 7.8.1957, 4. I would like to thank Zvi Elhyani

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33. Elhanani (1962), 313.

34. Architect Nahum Zolotov in an interview with the author (22.8.2013).

35. Haim Hefer, The Patents Song (1961).

36. Dov Karmi, 'MiB'ayot Tikun HaDirot BeTel-Aviv (Problems of Apartments Design in Tel-Aviv)', Journal of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Palestine 7, 3-4 (1946): 11.