THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE

September 22, 2004

Tel Aviv - The White City

By Daniel Schwammenthal

Irmel Kamp-Bandau first walked the streets of Tel Aviv - the "White City" - in 1987 and she still remembers how dumbfounded she was. "I couldn't believe my eyes, all these treasures - and here of all places." What left Kamp-Bandau so perplexed was the world's largest collection of modern movement buildings, altogether some 4,000. Also called the international style, it emerged in Europe in the 1920s, with the German Bauhaus school probably being its most famous representative. But in Weimar, Paris, Brussels, and Europe's other modern movement centers there are only relatively few examples of this architecture left. Kamp-Bandau documented the buildings, producing in 1994 a catalogue of black and white pictures of 83 buildings. Her work played an important role in helping the city receive UNESCO's World Heritage Award in June, only the second modern city after Brasilia to win this award. The modern movement reached the Eastern Mediterranean shores with the arrival of Jewish architects in the 1930s, many of them graduates of Europe's top avant-garde architecture schools.