Tel Aviv White City Architecture

Tel Aviv White City architecture is a unique, climate adapted form of the International Style, commonly known there as Bauhaus, built across more than four thousand buildings in Tel Aviv during the 1930s by Jewish architects who had emigrated from Germany and central and eastern Europe following the Nazi rise to power in 1933; Tel Aviv holds the largest concentration of buildings in the Bauhaus and International Style of any city in the world. Its builders modified the European International Style for Mediterranean and desert conditions, favoring white and light colored surfaces that reflect heat, small recessed windows in place of the large glass panes typical of European Bauhaus design, stacked and shaded balconies, flat roofs in place of pitched ones, and buildings raised on pilotis to allow air to circulate beneath them. UNESCO inscribed the White City as a World Heritage Site in 2003, recognizing it as an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early twentieth century.