“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/
