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In May the city of Tel Aviv hosted a conference on International Style architecture, coorganized by the local municipality, the Tel Aviv Foundation, and UNESCO. The five-day event boasted an international roster of speakers (including designers Daniel Libeskind, Christian de Portzamparc, Santiago Calatrava, Bernardo Fort-Brescia, and Laurinda Spear, to name a few) and attracted a crowd of nearly 2,000 registered participants (mostly Israeli professionals and students). The conference was accompanied by a spate of related exhibitions, architectural tours, and even a "Bauhaus-inspired" fashion show, through which the organizers sought to arouse popular as well as professional interest in Tel Aviv as an "open-air museum" of Modern architecture and urbanism.
A 1930s building boom, propelled by an influx of European Jews, gave Israel's coastal commercial center its decisively Modernist character. And although many buildings of the time--locally identified as "Bauhaus" stock--have long since fallen into disrepair, the legacy of the period is still very much a part of Tel Aviv's architectural tradition, recently fueling campaigns for preservation as well as providing inspiration for new designs.
In the conference's scholarly sessions, many among the more than 100 speakers hurried to distance themselves from the name "International Style," dismissing that term as a simplistic reduction of early Modernism's ideological and architectural aspirations. But as Munich historian Wolf Tegethoff noted, the architecture of the 1930s may indeed have been mostly about a style, not unlike other styles in the history of architecture. Of course, it is the very ambition...