This is a topic that has a special place in my heart, not only because it was the theme of my Ph.D. dissertation, entitled ‘Hotel Design in British Mandate Palestine: Modernism and the Zionist Vision,’ but also because I have come from a German Zionist family who had contributed immensely to the building of the Jewish State in Palestine. Now, Yale Architecture Gallery has opened an exhibition ‘Social Construction: Modern Architecture in British Mandate Palestine,’ which comes to present to the American public the way in which the German Movement had been instrumental in building the Jewish establishment in pre-state Israel during the 30s and 40s, and in expressing a Jewish identity. While the scholarship exploring this territory is extensive, this exhibition is based on a research by Israeli architects Ada Karmi-Melamede and Dan Price, and it seeks to tell the fascinating story of the Zionist dream and its built fabric, which were substaintiated in the International Style.
