Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel: Building Social Pragmatism

Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel: Building Social Pragmatism offers the first comprehensive survey of the work of Arieh Sharon and analyzes and discusses his designs and plans in relation to the emergence of the State of Israel.

A graduate of the Bauhaus, Sharon worked for a few years at the office of Hannes Mayer before returning to Mandatory Palestine. There, he established his office which was occupied in its first years in planning kibbutzim and residential buildings in Tel Aviv. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Arieh Sharon became the director and chief architect of the National Planning Department, where he was asked to devise the young country’s first national masterplan. Known as the Sharon Plan, it was instrumental in shaping the development of the new nation. During the 1950s and 1960s, Sharon designed many of Israel’s institutions, including hospitals and buildings on university campuses. This book presents Sharon’s exceptionally wide range of work and examines his perception of architecture in both socialist and pragmatist terms. It also explores Sharon’s modernist approach to architecture and his subsequent shift to Brutalist architecture, when he partnered with Benjamin Idelson in the 1950s and when his son, Eldar Sharon, joined the office in 1964. Thus, the book contributes a missing chapter in the historiography of Israeli architecture in particular and of modern architecture overall.

This book will be of interest to researchers in architecture, modern architecture, Israel studies, Middle Eastern studies and migration of knowledge.

Eran Neuman (B.Arch., Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, 1996; M.A., UCLA, Los Angeles, 2000; Ph.D., UCLA, Los Angeles, 2004) is an architect, designer and architectural historian and theoretician. He is a professor of architecture at Tel Aviv University’s Azrieli School of Architecture, which he headed from 2010-2018. Since October 2019, he has held the position of Dean of the Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University. Prof. Neuman is also the founding director of the Azrieli Architectural Archive at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Prof. Neuman’s research concentrates on the history of Israeli architecture, both before and after the establishment of the State of Israel; architecture and commemoration; and the influence of technology on architectural design. He lectures frequently at leading institutions around the world. His numerous publications include Shoah Presence: Architectural Representation of the Holocaust, Performalism: Digital Design in Architecture (with Yasha Grobman), David Yannay: Architecture and Genetics, and Arieh Sharon: The Nation’s Architect.