Arieh Sharon

Arieh Sharon (אריה שרון; May 28, 1900 – July 24, 1984) was an Israeli architect and winner of the Israel Prize for Architecture in 1962.

Sharon was a critical contributor to the early architecture in Israel and the leader of the first master plan of the young state, reporting to then Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.

Ludwig Kurzmann (later Arieh Sharon) was born in Jaroslau, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, (now Jaroslaw, Poland) in 1900.

After graduating from high school in 1918, he studied at the German Technical University in Brno.

In 1920 he emigrated to Palestine with a group of young pioneers belonging to the “Shomer Hatzair” movement and worked for one year with a farmer in Zikhron Ya'akov.

He joined Kvutzat Gan Shmuel in 1921 which evolved into a kibbutz, working as a beekeeper, and later, taking charge of planning and constructing simple farm buildings, cow-sheds and dwelling units.

In 1926, on one year's leave from the kibbutz, he traveled to Germany to extend his knowledge in building and architecture.

Sharon spent a month in Berlin and arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he was admitted to the preliminary course – the famous Bauhaus Vorkurs – by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus.

Sharon studied under Josef Albers, whose teachings were based on letting the student experience different materials, trying them out, and making experiments.

Sharon's exercises – turning two-dimensional sheets of paper and metal into three-dimensional shapes – were shown in a Bauhaus exhibition.

In April 1927, Hannes Meyer was appointed head of the building department and Sharon was to be greatly influenced by his teacher's pragmatical and functional approach to architecture.

In 1928 he and two other Bauhäusler, Gunta Stölzl, head of the Bauhaus weaving workshop and the student Peer Bücking visited the Vkhutemas Academy in Moscow, an avant garde art school with similar aims as the Bauhaus.

In 1929, some time after their return, Sharon and Stölzl were married and their daughter Yael was born.

In the same year, he received his Bauhaus diploma and was immediately put in charge of Hannes Meyer's architectural office in Berlin, to supervise the construction of the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (ADGB Trade Union School) in Bernau bei Berlin.

Next to the Bauhaus school buildings in Dessau, it was the second largest project ever undertaken by the Bauhaus.

Sharon studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau under Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer and on his return to Israel (then Palestine) in 1931, started building in the International Style, better known locally as the Bauhaus style of Tel Aviv.

In 1931, Sharon returned to Palestine and opened his architectural office in Tel Aviv, while Gunta Stölzl emigrated to Switzerland with their daughter, Yael.

Sharon's first commission in Tel Aviv was the construction of four pavilions for the Histadrut (General Federation of Labour) exhibit at the Levant Fair in 1932.

These pavilions, for which he had won first prize in an architectural competition, were composed of modular wooden elements, progressively growing in height and length, covered by jute.

There followed a series of buildings in the so-called international style which would help define the city's architecture as the "White City."

In 1936 the two divorced.

In addition he built residential cooperative housing estates, private houses, the central administrative seat of the Histadrut in Tel Aviv, and in 1936 his first hospital for 60 beds, near Tel Aviv.

Sharon's housing estates, known as Meonot Ovdim in Hebrew, were built around large garden patios in the center, a continuous group layout, a public space for the residents, while communal services, such as a kindergarten, laundry, shops, and synagogue were placed on the ground-floor.

A distinctive feature of Tel Aviv's townscape are the pilotis on which most of the apartment buildings in the residential quarters are raised.

This feature was achieved on the part of several avant-garde architects in the early thirties in a fierce struggle against the existing municipal bylaws.

The spacious voids between the pillars created a shaded streetscape, added to the natural ventilation during the hot summer days and connected the pavements with the green areas.

During the Second World War, building activities in the big towns all but stopped, due to the lack of fundamental building materials such as concrete and iron.

Sharon began building simple structures in the kibbutzim, above all community buildings and schools, which were constructed from local materials, like sand, bricks and limestone.

The dining hall in a kibbutz forms the center of the community, where in addition to its primary function, the members used to meet on social occasions, cinema or theatre performances, or political meetings.

The school communities were built for 200–300 children of several kibbutzim, where the youngsters aged 12–18 lived, studied and worked together.

Their layout was, in fact, that of a micro-kibbutz.

Sharon's main activity, however, was directed towards planning in the kibbutzim.

He designed a great number of outline plans for existing collective settlements and their extensions as well as general layouts for new agricultural settlements, and school communities.

Sharon built private houses, cinemas and in 1937 his first hospital, a field in which he specialized in his later career, planning and constructing many of the country's largest medical centers.

During the 1947–1949 Palestine war in 1948, Sharon was appointed head of the Government Planning Department, whose main challenge was where to settle the waves of immigrants who were arriving in the country, and in 1954 returned to his private architectural office.

In the sixties, he expanded his activities abroad and during the next two decades built the Ife University campus in Nigeria.

As the city of Tel Aviv rose from three and four storey buildings to multi-storey buildings in the sixties and seventies, Sharon's office designed many high-rise buildings for the government and for public institutions.

He is the father of Eldar Sharon and the grandfather of Arad Sharon.

The building underwent an extensive restoration which was completed in 2007.

It is a protected building and in 2012 it was proposed for World Heritage Site listing.