ד״ר אדר׳ דפנה הלף

A New Materiality in Praise of the Ordinary; Palestine-Israel, Circa 1940-1966

If we remove all illusions and clearly see the means available to us, we have no other way but to declare a new style, the alignments of which are simplicity and austerity’, wrote Yaakov Ben Sira in 1952. The new style that Ben Sira was referring to was a product of both pressing objective material constraints, which were acute in the post-independence welfare state and its austerity regime, and ideological frameworks originating in the inter-war period, the foundations of which were cultural as well as more narrowly based on architectural disciplinary concerns. Thus, in addition to being driven by functional and rationalist considerations, this new style went further to display notions of a sachlich architecture that were prominent in discussions on modern architecture in the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine. For the proponents of this sachlich stance, simplicity, propriety and modesty were seminal cultural principles tied to the prospect of nation-building, which they carried into the practice of architecture