Art Metropole

#11052

Concrete Desert Brutalist structures in Israel’s periphery

Date

2013

Publisher

Public School Editions

Format

Artists' Books

Size

12.5 × 18 × 0.2 cm

Length

24 

In Israel’s first years, Brutalism and its varied concrete features were seen as an allegory for the “New Jew” – rough, direct, aggressive, just like cement itself. Out of the general movement of the Bauhaus cosmopolitan style imported from the Diaspora, grew a new generation of architects. The native-born Israeli architects were looking for authenticity, and found that in cement, a cheap and widely-spread resource, the ultimate Israeli material. The great irony is that their buildings were constructed mostly for newly arrived immigrants whom the state was sending to the country’s far geographical periphery to live inits Israeli-conceived concrete works. The architects themselves, of course, didn’t know.