Category: workshop II – Public Agencies

Dana Silverstein Duani

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In the 1980s, Israel experienced a turning point in its economic policy, changing from a socialist policy to a more liberal and capitalist policy and later on to neoliberalism.Reducing governmental intervention and shifting national developmentto the free market, resulting in the privatization of architectural planning. These changes were also reflected in the Tel Aviv’s architecture of the 1980s and 1990s and in the gradual creation of a new local architectural language, Tel Aviv Postmodernism.
This architecture is expressed on the façade designof Tel Aviv’s buildings, andis identified oniconic buildingsand onthousands of residential buildings that were built in those decades andare assimilated into the urban fabric. These consist of new buildings, hybrid buildingswith additions and new neighborhoodsthat reflect dramatic changes that took place in the design, planning mechanism, and architectural culture, following the creationof a professional institutional planning division in the 1980s.
The Planning Divisionimplemented its vision for the cityvia statute, igniting conceptual planning, master planningand regulating on what is supposed to be a market-led development, and also promoting non-statutory planning. They establishedpolicies and design guidelines for private buildings, with a direct effect on the architectural culture and thegradual creation of a new local architectural languagein the city.
This case study challenges the premise and contemporary researchthat neoliberalismincreased privatization of planning. Tel Aviv of the 1980s and 1990s demonstratesthat the cityunderwent a process of growing institutional involvement in planning, rather than afree-market domination and privatization of planning.In this paper I will present the changes that occurred in Tel Aviv’s Planning Division in the 1980s and 1990s and theimpact on the local architectural language by examiningthe processes that occurred, the new plans that were createdand the architectural language that developed.

 

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Dana Silverstein-Duani: Architect and a doctoral student in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel. She is a part of Prof. Yael Allweil’s HousingLab: History and Future of Living research group. Her research examines Tel Aviv’s postmodern residential architectural language and urban design process from the 1980s and 1990s.

Daphna Levine 

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At this lecture, I would like to present the city of Bat-Yam and the background to the accelerated process of urban regeneration it is currently undergoing. My research touches on three interrelated fields of knowledge influencing each other: economy, society, and planning. I will point to significant changes that co-occurred in these three fields in Israel during the 1980s: the welfare state was succeeded by Neo-Liberalism, a society of immigrants has evolved into a middle-class one, and modernism was followed by postmodernism. Since the 1980s, Bat Yam was forced to base its budget on self-income. It became increasingly involved in initiating significant building and privatization projects and grew into one of Israel’s most densely populated working-class cities. However, despite the development efforts, its inability to function – stemming from a lack of funding due to housing density and the absence of profit-earning land brought the city to a state of spatial and social neglect.  

Nowadays, Bat Yam is ranked last in the Quality of Urban Life index among Israeli cities and has the highest population density. My research shows how in this state of affairs, the municipal management of the past decade has viewed entrepreneurial urban regeneration as the only outlet for improving the built environment, attracting a more substantial population, and generating income for the municipal treasury. As a result, Bat Yam is advancing hundreds of urban regeneration projects. Collapsing buildings are replaced, improved living conditions, and the apartment value increases. On the level of individual profit, apartment owners who take part in regeneration projects enjoy a new or renovated reinforced building with an elevator, as well as a roomier apartment. However, the municipality, one might say, sacrificed itself for private profits without being compensated by the central government and sometimes without being able to bear the burden of the required investments in practice.  

 

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Architect Daphna Levine is a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She is engaged in searching for routes to integrate social issues into urban planning by creating models representing abstract social phenomena. By combining cutting-edge technology (e.g., Spatial Microsimulation) and qualitative research, she strives to encode and assess urban regeneration processes’ demographic dynamics and social impacts. Her research was awarded the Azrieli Fellowship for outstanding academic merit and exceptional personal achievements. Daphna graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in architecture and from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in philosophy and comparative literature. In 2016 her master’s thesis was published in book form The Third Space – Center and Periphery in Israeli literature.  

Elad Horn, Or Aleksandrowicz

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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. 

 

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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.