Yael Sofer, Tal Alon Mozes
In 1977, with the establishment of the Tel Aviv Foundation, a new era of building new gardens and restoring old ones started. Pastoral islands of nature and repose, along with modernist-style public spaces, were replaced with new parks that emphasize activity and visibility. Playgrounds and sports facilities, plazas, fountains and a variety of pavements took the place of the decorative shrubs and dusty kurkar paths. In addition, the municipality’s landscaping department, headed by Avraham Karavan, who designed the city’s gardens and landscapes until the early 1970s, gave way to a new generation of landscape architects who brought the spirit of the period to the city.
The lecture examines this turning point in the development of public parks and open spaces in Tel Aviv via several frameworks:
– The vision of Shlomo Lahat, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, to position the city as a center of commerce and industry, education and culture, arts and leisure, and the establishment of the Tel Aviv Foundation.
– The impact of neo-liberal trends as a multidimensional, abstract arena with no specific connection to place and population.
– New postmodern trends in landscape architecture liberated the field from modern rational design in favor of landscape architecture of spectacle and complexity based on new materials and contemporary aesthetics.
– The expression of these tendencies in Tel Aviv during the 1980s and 1990s in various open spaces such as urban boulevards, neighborhood parks, open public spaces, and more.
Between Gan Hatikva (Garden of Hope), which was inaugurated on the day of Herzl’s death, and Katherine Louis Park commemorating the name of the park’s donor, Tel Aviv’s culture of gardens and open spaces has changed. A change that reflects the spirit of the era and its economic, cultural, and stylistic aspects.
TAL ALON-MOZES is a landscape architect and Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. She holds a MLA degree from UC Berkeley and a PhD from the Technion. Her areas of interest include the landscapes of the past: histories of the designed landscapes of Israel; the landscapes of the present: green infrastructure for contemporary Israel; and landscapes for the future: landscape architecture pedagogy. Among her published works are two edited books on Israel’s modern landscape architects, and numerous articles representing her diverse areas of interest.
YAEL SOFER is a landscape architect, graduate of the landscape architecture program at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and has more than 20 years of experience. She also holds a Master’s degree in Management of Educational Systems from Gordon Academy. Among her projects that are considered groundbreaking in their field is the master plan for the urban nature area along Ha-Yarkon Park and planning for historical gardens, combining preservation and regenerations in Ramat Gan. Since 2016 Yael has been a landscape architecture lecturer at the Technion and studies for Ph.D., directed by Prof. Tal Alon Moses, on the historic urban landscape in urban regeneration.