Elad Horn, Or Aleksandrowicz
Architecture is a form of spatial expression that depends on considerable financial resources. Therefore, it is expected that changing economic conditions and fluctuations in the economy of real estate development would affect how architectural ideas evolve and materialize. Architectural historiography, however, with its recurring tendency to focus on the creative forces of protagonists that allegedly push forward new architectural “styles”, undermines the role of real estate within these developments and in the shaping of new “artistic” expressions. This paper attempts to question the seemingly indifference of architectural discourse to real estate development by examining a historical case of “stylistic” transformation in Israeli architecture.
The 1980s are usually portrayed as a turning point in Israeli architecture, with the introduction of imported postmodernism by a young and rebellious generation of architects. However, this stylistic transformation coincided with an acute economic crisis that dominated construction during that decade and specifically affected building activities in Israel’s economic and cultural center of Tel Aviv-Yafo. We, therefore, examined how, if at all, was the economic crisis reflected in architectural professional discourse, while attempting to quantify the effect of the crisis on the local real estate realm. For the latter purpose, we developed a systematic method for quantifying trends based on raw construction data at the building scale received from the municipality.
The findings of the quantitative analysis showed that the construction field in Tel Aviv-Yafo experienced a drastic reduction in volume in the mid-1980s. This resulted in a deep recession in architectural commissions, which hit harder on the more established architectural firms. In a way, the economic crisis “cleared the way” for younger and inexperienced architects that were pushed to adapt to the constraints of the economic crisis. Real estate thus played a crucial role in disrupting professional conventions and introducing new types of architectural expression.
Elad Horn: Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion in the Big Data in Architectural Research Lab (BDAR), supervised by Dr. Or Aleksandrowicz. Elad’s research in the fields of History of Architecture and Digital Humanities examines the ways economic and spatial transformations in Tel Aviv-Yafo in the 1980s and 1990s generated new architectural idioms. Elad’s latest book, PoMo – Architecture of Privatization (2021), with Dr. Jeremie Hoffmann, documents the evolution of Tel Aviv-Yafo’s architectural landscape in the wake of Israel’s transition towards neoliberalism at the end of the 20th century.
Dr. Or Aleksandrowicz: Architect, researcher, editor, and translator. Aleksandrowicz graduated from the Azrieli School of Architecture at Tel Aviv University in 2002. He has a master’s degree in Building Science and Technology from TU Wien (2012) and a doctorate in Technical Sciences from TU Wien (2015). His doctoral study focused on the history of building climatology in Israel and its complex relationship with Israeli architecture by combining quantitative evaluation methods of building performance and historical writing.
Since 2006, Aleksandrowicz is the editor-in-chief of Architectures series at Babel Publishers, the leading Hebrew book series on architecture and town planning. Aleksandrowicz translated and edited the Hebrew editions of seminal works like Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, and Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment.
His latest research involves indoor monitoring of diverse performance indicators of advanced building envelopes, empirical monitoring of outdoor climatic indicators, big data analysis of spatial and climatic factors using geographic information systems, and the history of building technologies in Israel. His book Daring the Shutter: The Tel Aviv Idiom of Solar Protections (with Israel Architecture Archive, 2015) recounts the technological history of shading devices in Tel Aviv.