WHITE CITY, BLACK CITY: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa

Monday, January 22, 2024

Sharon Rotbard discusses White City, Black City, his landmark book which documents Tel Aviv’s contested history By Daniel Roche (January 3, 2024 , The Architect's Newspaper)

“We may formulate this simple state of things in the following paradoxical rule: A city is always a realization of the stories that it tells about itself,” Sharon Rotbard wrote in White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The volume, published by the MIT Press, studies how history and narrative alters geography. It takes aim at a longstanding construct that Tel Aviv, labeled by UNESCO as “The White City” for its designs by Bauhaus architects, miraculously rose from the desert, seemingly overnight.

In White City, Black City, Rotbard tells the story of how Tel Aviv’s creation in 1909 and the architecture built under the British rule of Palestine came at the ancient Palestinian city of Jaffa’s expense. Jesse Fox, writing in Haaretz, called Rotbard’s book an “unsentimental take-down of the White City narrative that shatters Tel Aviv’s founding myth.”

AN spoke with Rotbard, an Israeli architect and scholar who currently lives in Tel Aviv and teaches at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, about his research. He cofounded Babel Press in 1995, and has edited and published a few hundred titles. His latest book, The War of Streets and Houses and other texts about the city (2021), translates and introduces 44 French texts into Hebrew.

https://www.archpaper.com/2024/01/sharon-rotbard-discusses-white-city-black-city-book/

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

"New Books in Architecture" podcast by Marshall Poe

New Books in Architecture podcast by Marshall Poe

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Ariel Aberg-RIiger / Unpacking Tel Aviv’s White City (Citylab, March 2019)

If Tel Aviv’s history is a story of sanctuary and self-isolation, then its buildings designed in the Bauhaus style are monuments to just that. For CityLab’s Building Bauhaus special report, visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger explains how Tel Aviv’s concentration of Bauhausarchitecture came to be and what it represents today. (https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/03/tel-aviv-history-white-city-bauhaus-architecture-buildings/584872/)

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Miriam Berger / The Other Side of Israel's 'White City' (CITYLAB)

Tel Aviv is known as the “White City” because its 1930s Bauhaus style buildings, mostly designed by Jewish architects from Germany who escaped Nazi rule for what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. But architect and city historian Sharon Rotbard argues in his book, White City, Black City, that this narrative only tells half the story. Before Israel’s founding in 1948, south Tel Aviv was part of Jaffa, a neighboring majority-Palestinian municipality. Rotbard characterizes areas like it as the “Black City” because of their long history of institutional neglect and marginalization. “From the very definition of the White City, all the other places to do not make it into the story and the definition of Tel Aviv”.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/the-other-side-of-israels-white-city/559850/

Monday, March 5, 2018

Léopold Lambert / PALESTINE REPORT PART 5: THE COLONIAL AND GENTRIFYING VIOLENCE OF ARCHITECTURE IN JAFFA (The Funambulist Magazine, August 2017)

White City Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (The MIT Pres, 2015) written by Sharon Rotbard is instrumental to understand this history, and how “there is […] no difference between neighborhood politics, city politics, national politics, and global politics.”

https://thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/palestine-report-part-5-colonial-gentrifying-violence-architecture-jaffa

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Asya Chachko Interviews Sharon Rotbard / The Myth of the White City: Why Tel Aviv isn’t actually a Bauhaus City (YomYom, December 2017, English and Russian)

״THE FIRST MESSAGE OF YOUR BOOK SOUNDS SO UNEXPECTED THAT I’D LIKE TO MAKE SURE I UNDERSTOOD IT RIGHT: THE “WHITE CITY”, THE UNESCO HERITAGE SITE WHICH IS THE MAIN BRAND OF TEL AVIV, IS FAKE?״

http://yomyom.co/episode-08-sharon-rotbard

Monday, November 27, 2017

Laura Francis / Ornament is Crime: The White City of Tel Aviv (Boat Magazine, November 2017)

Laura Francis explores the distinctive International Style of Tel Aviv’s UNESCO-protected White City, reputed to be the only ‘Bauhaus city’ in the world.

"Though architecture has a longer lifespan longer than individual people, as a historical testimony it can easily be altered to fit the narrative of the victors. In the case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, one of the world’s youngest cities had devoured one of its oldest. Architecture, like all art, is politics. Expressing the notion that the Palestinian situation is complex and fraught is to state the obvious, but when we speak about Israel and Palestine, we are frequently baffled, rendered mute by the sheer weight of history and injustices perpetrated on both sides, the accumulated scar tissue wrought in flesh and stone."

http://www.port-magazine.com/architecture/ornament-is-crime-the-white-city-of-tel-aviv/

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Ville Blanche Ville Noire - Conférence à l'Université Libre de Bruxelles

MARDI 29 AOÛT 2017 à 18H30
Invité et présenté par Romain Meunier avec le soutien d’Axel Fisher

ENTRÉE GRATUITE
Université Libre de Bruxelles; Faculté d’Architecture La Cambre-Horta
Auditorium Victor Bourgeois
Place Eugène Flagey, 19 - 1050 Bruxelles

En 2004, la ville de Tel Aviv a été inscrite sur la Liste du Patrimoine mondial de l’UNESCO, comme ensemble exemplaire d’architecture et d’urbanisme moderniste. Aujourd’hui, la ville juive de Tel Aviv brille de blancheur sous le ciel du désert, son architecture d’inspiration Bauhaus trahissant à peine ce qui lui précéda : la ville arabe de Jaffa.

Dans White city, Black city (Pluto Press - MIT Press, 2015), l’architecte et écrivain Sharon Rotbard dénoue deux discours entremêlés, celui du colonisé et celui du colonisateur. Il s’agit de l’histoire d’une campagne de révision de l’histoire architecturale et culturelle pousuivie sur plusieurs décennies qui jette un regard sur le mythe de Tel Aviv comme «Ville Blanche» moderniste émergeant des dunes tout en ignorant ses fondations réélles : l’oblitération de Jaffa.

Rotbard montre que Tel Aviv n’est pas, à en croire un célèbre poème, faite «d’écume et de nuages», mais qu’elle est née à Jaffa et s’est formée à travers sa relation avec Jaffa. Le mythe de la «Ville Blanche» est à la fois le générateur, l’instrument et le résultat du conflit historique opposant Tel Aviv à Jaffa, préfigurant à l’échelle urbaine le conflit géopolitique entre israéliens et palestiniens.

Son récit ne traite pas que d’architecture, mais déborde sur des thèmes aussi délicats qu’inéluctables comme la guerre, la destruction, l’agenda politique du sionisme, l’effacement, et l’effacement de l’effacement.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

"White City, Black City" - Russian edition

http://admarginem.ru/books/14337/

Шарон Ротбард

Белый город, Черный город. Архитектура и война в Тель-Авиве и Яффе

Ad Marginem Press

Дизайнер: Кирилл Благодатских, Анна Наумова

Редактор: Карина Бычкова

Перевод: Нина Усова

Обложка, 256 с.: ил.ISBN 978-5-91103-335-4

Цена: 350р.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Шарон Ротбард «Белый город, Черный город. Архитектура и война в Тель-Авиве и Яффе» - soon available in Russian at AdMarginem Press,

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"The history of Tel Aviv, presented for a moment as an architectural history, can be seen as a part of a wider process in which the physical shaping of Tel Aviv and its political and cultural construction are intertwined, and plays a decisive role in the construction of the case, the alibi, and the apologetics of the Jewish settlement across the country."
—White City, Black City

In 2004, the city of Tel Aviv was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site, an exemplar of modernism in architecture and town planning. Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv gleams white against the desert sky, its Bauhaus-inspired architecture betraying few traces of what came before it: the Arab city of Jaffa.

In White City, Black City, the Israeli architect and author Sharon Rotbard offers two intertwining narratives, that of colonized and colonizer. It is also a story of a decades-long campaign of architectural and cultural historical revision that cast Tel Aviv as a modernist “white city” emerging fully formed from the dunes while ignoring its real foundation—the obliteration of Jaffa.

Rotbard shows that Tel Aviv was not, as a famous poem has it, built “from sea foam and clouds” but born in Jaffa and shaped according to its relation to Jaffa.
His account is not only about architecture but also about war, destruction, Zionist agendas, erasure, and the erasure of the erasure.

Rotbard tells how Tel Aviv has seen Jaffa as an inverted reflection of itself—not shining and white but nocturnal, criminal, dirty: a “black city.” Jaffa lost its language, its history, and its architecture; Tel Aviv constructed its creation myth. White City, Black City—hailed upon its publication in Israel as ”path-breaking,” “brilliant,” and “a masterpiece”—promises to become the central text on Tel Aviv.

Praises

"This is an important and fascinating expose through architecture, geography and history, of the rise of the Jewish city of Tel Aviv, the fabled ‘white city,’ and the degradation of its Arab neighbor, Jaffa, once the bride of the sea, into a chaotic, degenerated urban backwater. A sad but revealing history of how myths are forged and histories corrupted."

(Raja Shehadeh, author of Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape and winner of the Orwell Prize)

"Mr Rotbard chips away at the façade of his birthplace. He describes how Tel Aviv supplanted Jaffa’s Arab-owned orange groves, and goes on to explain how, in the violent birth of Israel in 1947-48, Jewish paramilitary fighters overpowered and subsequently largely levelled the city from which it had sprung. His tale of Tel Aviv’s growth from a Jaffa suburb founded in 1909 to a metropolis whose population grew 20-fold in the 1920s is gripping."

(The Economist)

"A superbly researched and exemplary architectural study ... If you want an explanation of the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict – and of just how deep they go, right into the very foundations of the buildings – this book gives one of the most unusual and convincing accounts."

(Owen Hatherley, Guardian)

"Rotbard, ultimately, is neither impartial observer nor objective researcher. His writing is impassioned and emotive. He makes no secret of the fact that he is deeply invested in the subjects he writes about, particularly the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv, where he lives. 'Whoever wants to change a city must first change its story,' he writes. And that is precisely what White City, Black City sets out to do."

(Jesse Fox, Haaretz)

"a path breaking and brilliant analysis that combines architecture, urban design, military strategy and general culture into an exhilarating war of streets and homes. If every city should have a book – one book -- this should be that of Tel Aviv, sitting on the same shelve as Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, Patrick kieller’s London and AbdouMaliq Simone’s Duala."

(Eyal Weizman, author of A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, FORENSIS)

"a challenging book that deserves to be read and argued over… Rotbard here slaughters an especially sacred cow: Tel Avivness… There are many books on architecture and even more books about history and politics: this book intertwines the two; it is well written"

(Tom Segev, Haaretz)

"a fundamental, fascinating and clever book on architecture in the service of politics".

(Adam Baruch, Maariv)

"White City, Black City is not a book about architecture. It is a political text written in a beautiful clear language, under the cover of a book on architecture… one of the most radical texts published in Hebrew in recent years."

(Joanna Gonen, Time Out)

"a responsible, sharp, critical project, in which Rotbard reads the Zionist representations of Tel Aviv… written with a political and esthetical responsibility: not only in relation to his discoveries, but also in relation to the censored political story of the Tel Avivian landscape, that its false signs are freedom, secularism and progress. Rotbard demonstrates how the cultural imagination marks its narrative on the place, and more important from this, he draws a straight line between the fiction of 'the flourishing of wilderness' and the actual contemporary violence that is supported upon it."

(Omri Herzog, Haaretz)

"Rotbard writes counterhistory, subversive history, which contradicts the official story of the White City that grew and flourished among the sand dunes. As Benjamin puts it, 'he brushes history against the grain'.”

(Michael Feige, Journal of Israeli History)

"Rotbard’s book is a masterpiece of critical essay writing. The book analyses the 'White City' discourse that has attended the city since the 1980s shaping both the city and its local and international image. Rotbard examines the political, urban, cultural and social contexts that gave rise to this image, and exposes its removal from reality.

Rotbard’s fascinating move transcends the narrow architectural discourse, offering a comprehensive cultural analysis of the ways in which communities produce a likeness of their city. Rotbard uncovers the various ‘black’ layers that Tel Aviv arose from, virtually all of which contradict the image of the white city rising from the sands. He deconstructs the conventional local cultural dichotomies regarding the Primitive Arab style vs the Modernist Judeo-European, and general cultural dichotomies between the Establishment and the counterculture."

(Ariella Azoulay, author of Death's Showcase: the power of image in contemporary democracy, The Civil Contract of Photography, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography)

"It is very easy to live somewhere and to assume that what one sees is what had always been. Especially in a place which so to speak lacks apparent history like Tel Aviv (in opposed to Jerusalem for example). Sharon Rotbard's book White City, Black City, looks at the white paint of Tel Aviv's buildings not as an esthetic artefact but as a covering and a concealing layer. One may compare this book to the scratch of a nail upon a white wall. It is spine-tingling as it may sound. What is exposed is a Pandora box of expropriation, expulsion, blackening of a city, urbicide. The dissapearance of Jaffa in Nahum Gutman's drawings; propaganda pop songs about Jaffa’s "the big zone"; architectural conservation projects; a museum which is half an Arabic house, half a modernist glass box; the "empty" dunes enabling to imagine a clean start; open lawns once a Jewish-Arabic neighborhood; the book slowly unveils a mosaic of stories that so many Tel Avivians would not want to hear but are so interesting to know. It is hard to imagine a home in Tel Aviv in which this book is not to be found, even if its mere existence would shake a bit its walls."

(Dror Burstein, Novelist, Ynet)