In the wake of the movement's 2019 centenary, Gili Merin reflected on how Tel Aviv's Bauhaus buildings have become coveted luxuries and the matter of preservation.

Like many cities, Tel Aviv is captive to its historical legacy. In 2003, UNESCO declared a part of the inner city, the White City, as a Unique World Heritage Site of the Modern Movement for its unparalleled concentration of International Style buildings. Curved balconies, raised pilotis and a lack of ornament characterized this construction style, which was very much style-less. Functionalist and optimistic, it brought to the Mediterranean a dose of European idealism. Imported to Palestine by immigrants who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 (many of them from the Bauhaus school in Dessau, which closed that year), the so-called White City was built, literally, with means salvaged from Germany: not currency, but actual construction materials such as tiles and brick, transported to Palestine as part of a vast property exchange programme.

Today, Tel Aviv’s monochrome Bauhaus buildings have become a coveted luxury: with their spacious interiors, shaded balconies and clean aesthetics, a capitalist interest is invested in these seemingly modest houses, not to mention the aura cast by UNESCO’s declaration and the worldwide affection towards refurbished ‘oldies’ as opposed to shiny ‘newbies’. Preservation laws dictate that the exterior must remain true to its austere sculptural form. But on the inside, one can run free with high-end finishes – from wooden floors to polychrome ceramics, bespoke appliances and designer chandeliers. There’s no way to fight it: it was the free market that saved the legacy of the International Style from demolition. Unfortunately, it is also putting this modernist legacy at risk. Bauhaus is becoming a style. Its elements are now ornaments, applied haphazardly to new buildings and even towers around Tel Aviv.

Standing out in this landscape of commodification is the White City Center (WCC), which opened in September 2019 after four years of renovation. It is situated in the Liebling Haus, a 1936 structure designed by Dov Karmi, one of Israel’s founding fathers of architecture. Here, architects Dan Hasson and Yonathan Cohen took a radical approach: rather than doing a ‘fine’ restoration, they opted for a ‘rough’ one. Working closely with the Bauhaus’s own preservation architect, Winfried Brenne, and the municipality of Tel Aviv as the client, they produced a project of perpetual cultural and structural negotiation.

Preservation is like religion. And once someone decides on a singular narrative, everything that fits this story becomes sacred

Transforming a residential building into a public institute, the design had to carve the building from within. While every floor was initially identical, a blueprint of stacked apartments with a circular design around the core, it now had to accommodate various functions: a café on the ground floor, galleries for temporary and permanent exhibitions, and a laboratory for preservation. For this reason, every level is now completely different, creating a spatial gradation from the ground up – the first being the most open, to the top, which was remodelled to the exact layout of its original.

This methodology led to new vistas that span former partitions and new relationships between spaces. In this surgical process, the ‘scars’ of demolition remain as they were, exposing all the original materials and leaving them as traces of the renovation: cast-concrete skeleton, solid concrete blocks and sand-lime bricks. Nothing was added, only removed: the hard-wood floor and ceramic tiles that were layered with time were peeled to reveal the original terrazzo. Every window and door, made from cheap pine wood, was removed, cleaned, polished and returned to its frame. Walls were sanded and corrected with mineral pigments made from natural materials, as opposed to contemporary oil-based products. Systems could not be placed within ceilings, so electricity was installed below, in special fixtures, and air-conditioning units replaced former heaters that were located in alcoves within the walls.

‘Preservation is like religion,’ says Hasson. ‘And once someone decides on a singular narrative, everything that fits this story becomes sacred.’ In that respect, every original pipe, tile and faucet was to be treated as a treasure, regardless of its value or quality. But what is original? ‘How far back do we preserve?’ questions Hasson. ‘There were wonderful glass bricks from the 1980s in the staircase and we left them in because they are equally a part of this place as the 1930s German components.’ Luckily, there’s some irony in this project: a building within a building that succeeds in questioning the political weight of such a cross-cultural enterprise. ‘Above all, we want this place to generate a debate about design,’ Sharon Golan, programme director of the WCC, tells me. It worked: what and how we preserve is not only questioned, but its results expose its inner contradiction and complexity by proposing a simple radicality: preservation through demolition. In a way, it is no longer, as Rem Koolhaas once said, that ‘preservation is overtaking us’. Instead, it is liberating us.

Merin is an architect and photographer based in London and Tel Aviv. She teaches at the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association in London, where she is also a PhD candidate. This Reporting From piece was originally featured in Frame 133. Get your copy here.

Hero image: The White City Center at Liebling Haus.