ד"ר אדר' מרטין הרשנזון

While at the Azrieli Architectural Archive, I explored Arieh Sharon’s approach to institutional design and planning and his architectural contribution to a Zionist welfare and colonial settler ideology from the Mandatory Period and until the decades after Israeli 1948 independence. 

The research analyzed several of Sharon’s commissions for public health facilities and social centers, before and after 1948. Partaking in a wider research project on Zionist welfare architecture culture, it addressed a series of inter-related questions; How did these commissions serve in positioning Sharon’s architectural knowledge relative to welfarist and colonial development practices in Israel and the Third World? What institutional, professional and historical junctures defined the premises of these commissions and respectively of Zionist welfare architecture culture? And finally, how did these commissions shape a certain Zionist settler nativism, around key modern design and planning values such as functionalism, simplicity and resourcefulness.

To respond to these questions, the study analyzed Sharon’s plans and designs, his architectural writings and publications, as they were shaped and revised historically throughout his professional trajectory; The research traced shifts in design strategies relative to the transition from cooperative institutional framework to a state-run welfare system, following the 1948 independence. It also reconstructed the nature of Sharon’s mature design vocabulary, as it resulted from his role as a cultural mediator between various approaches and institutional settings; a functionalist-expressionist Bauhaus mindset, a regional development planning expertise, and the worldview of a pioneer settler in the 1920s collectives.

This research resulted in, and contributed to a series of publications: “The Role of Civic Institutions in Arieh Sharon’s Career.” in Arieh Sharon the Nation’s Architect. (Eran Neuman Ed. Tel Aviv: The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in Hebrew and English); “The Architect as a Civil Servant – Aviah Hashimshoni’s Architecture Education and Historiography in 1960s Israel,” in the Journal of Architecture; “The Environmental Semantics of Rural and Urban Standards in British Mandate of Palestine, 1920-1940,” in the Journal of Architecture and  “Architectural Standards – Negotiating Territories, Publics and Institutions, Palestine, 1920-1940,” in Architecture and Culture.