” These are the only requirements to be considered when building a house. We look at the daily routine of each person living in the house and this gives the function diagram for father, mother, child, infant, and other occupants. We examine the interactions between the house and its occupants and the world outside: postman, passer-by, visitor, neighbor, burglar, chimney-sweep, washerwoman, policeman, doctor, charwoman, playmate, gas inspector, tradesman, nurse, and errand boy.”

(Hannes Meyer)

These pictures are a personal history of the White City in Tel Aviv as it looked to us  in the summer of 2015. We call it a history because these 80 year old buildings of the White City testify to their origins in an earlier era, the 1930s.

Our paradigm for photographing this history was to approach the buildings as structures that fit into the lives of their residents as they went to work or school or shopping or visiting and as they returned home, over eight decades.

The camera was first set up on the street, facing the entrance, then moved inside the building’s grounds, towards the main entrance. The entrance was photographed, the lobby, the stairs, the landings. Up to the roof and to the blue sky if we could get to it. Building occupants ascend and descend and the camera descended back down the stairway as well, to the lobby but now looking at it from the perspective of someone leaving.

The camera’s eye looked for details because the brass door knobs, wooden railings, and terrazzo stairs create the texture of everyday life for the man, woman, and child going from the public street to the privacy of home. We want to show that texture in this book. The glass eye of the camera also looked at room views, the whole lobby, the whole landing, the whole bench and fish pond, landmarks on the public to private, private to public daily journeys.

The green and the blue that we encounter daily give life a rhythm tied to nature and our camera looked for those colors inside and outside these buildings so that the photographs have a rhythm. This rhythm of color joins with daily rhythms of action, sitting on a tiled bench, grasping a brass door handle, pulling mail from a wooden mailbox.

Using our paradigm, the buildings invited us to take their pictures, to document their survival and prosperity.

Bauhaus Center,  info@bauhaus-center.com.
www.bauhaus-center.com