Design fans may know to pin Tel Aviv as an architectural destination for its unlikely connection to the Bauhaus movement, which originated in Dessau, Germany, but few know why the style traveled over 2,000 miles  during the 1930's. 

When the Nazi party gained control of Germany, the Bauhaus School was one of several creative institutions to be shut down, causing its faculty to disperse across the globe. While some of the more famous names from the school, such as Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer found a foothold in America, several of its students found opportunities in The White City. 

According to Artsy, "The 700 total students that enrolled at the Bauhaus during its short 14-year existence dispersed globally, too, including four architects—Arieh Sharon, Munio Gitai Weinraub, Shmuel Mestechkin, and Shlomo Bernstein—who moved to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s. There, they found a rare opportunity, a modernist architect’s dream: the chance to shape a 20th-century city almost from scratch, serving thousands of newcomers in need of housing and urban amenities. That city was the newly established Mediterranean metropolis of Tel Aviv."

The Bauhaus movement therefore became the image of Tel Aviv, as the two were equally nascent and eager to define human-centered design for the modern era.

The historical significance learned here can be neatly summed up by Artsy's Karen Chernick: "When the Nazis expelled the Bauhaus from Berlin, they couldn’t have imagined that the school’s design aesthetic would find a warm embrace in the outstretched terraces of the first modern Jewish city."