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 CityRotbard 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/

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 bookWhite 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”.


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


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.