A new materiality in praise of the ordinary, in Palestine-Israel c. 1940–66

Extract

This article examines the emergence of a new materiality in Israeli architecture in the 1950s. I refer here to two distinct but interrelated senses of the word materiality. The first is predicated on the socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions in which architecture, like all fields of artistic production, takes shape; the second reflects the use, handling, and finishing of materials in construction. I show how several key figures in architectural circles in the recently founded State of Israel expressed this new materiality by developing a new style, characterised by restrained formal gestures, abstention from material extravagance, the use and exposure of local materials, an emphasis on the legibility of structure, and an appeal to rational building procedures. This style was a product of both pressing objective material constraints, which were acute in the postwar welfare state and its austerity regime, and ideological frameworks from the interwar period, the foundations of which were cultural as well as disciplinary.