Munio Weinraub

Munio Gitai Weinraub (March 6, 1909 – September 24, 1970) was an Israeli architect, a pioneer of modern architecture and urban and environmental planning in Israel, and one of the most prominent representatives of the Bauhaus heritage in the country.

Throughout his 36 years career, Weinraub  was responsible for the construction and planning of thousands of housing units, workers' housing units and private homes in and around Haifa.

Weinraub took part in the initial planning of the Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem.

From the beginning of his career, Weinraub sought to combine the values of Hannes Meyer's social planning with the meticulous construction art of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

His works are designed out of deep social sensitivity and are characterized by minimalist geometry, simple and modest presence and efficient functional planning.

Inspired by his teacher Mies van der Rohe, Weinraub chose to give up "problems of form" in order to dedicate himself to "problems of construction" and focus on the act of construction itself, the treatment of the material and the processing of the architectural individual.

Munio Gitai Weinraub was born in the small town of Szumlany in Galicia and grew up in the city of Bielsko, in Silesia - German-speaking region of Poland.

His father was a farm manager in the service of Polish landlords and his mother came from a wealthier background of small industrialists.

He was the youngest of four sons and his childhood was overshadowed by many hardships during World War I. After the war he became a member of the Jewish youth group Hashomer Hatza’ir, a scouting organization that combined nature explorations similar to those of Baden Powell's Boy Scouts in Great Britain, and the romantic tendencies of the German Wandervögel groups, with the study of Zionist and Socialist ideologies.

Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus in 1919 as an anti-academic school of the Arts & Crafts type, succeeded in expressing the collaborative spirit of the younger generation, who sought to break free from the barren social and political approaches that led to World War I. "Cathedral of Socialism" is a fitting metaphor for the description of the early Bauhaus, which was devoted to designing a new society.

The school was built on the myth of the Guilds in the Middle Ages and the design project was caught up in the spirit of the shared ethos.

The Bauhaus was an obvious choice for idealist students with leftist tendencies, such as Weinraub.

After his studies, Weinraub worked for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bauhaus director at the time.

At the age of eighteen, in 1927, when Weinraub applied for architecture studies at the Bauhaus School in Dessau, it was suggested to him to be first enrolled in the art school Tischlerschule in Berlin, where he studied drawing, perspective, traditional furniture design and more, and gained a deep understanding of the woodwork and carpentry.

In 1930, he enrolled in Bauhaus.

Weinraub's desire to study at Bauhaus is in line with the political activism of his youth group, as the Bauhaus had the reputation of being the most artistically and politically progressive design school in Europe at the time.

Mies hired him to work with him in his Berlin office, where his main mission under was to supervise the installation of a number of works at the 1931 German Building Exhibition.

With the rise of Nazism and the closure of the Bauhaus by Goebbels in 1933, Weinraub was arrested, beaten and jailed on the ridiculous pretext of “treason against the German people”.

He was then expelled and managed to find refuge in Switzerland, where he worked for the architect Moser in Zurich.

At the end of 1934, he left Europe and immigrated to Palestine and settled in Haifa, which was the urban base of the Hebrew labor movement.

He maintained close ties with Kibbutz Hashomer Hatzair when he took part in the planning and design of sixteen of the movement's founding points.

The leadership roles he played in the movement as a teenager instilled in him a sense of solidarity with such cooperative societies..

In 1936 he married Efratia Margalit (Munchik) (1909–2004).

From 1937 to 1959, he worked in partnership with architect Al Mansfeld, with whom he founded the Munio Weinraub et Al Mansfeld architects office.

Their work focused on serving local labor movement institutions and designing schools, cultural structures, factories, employee housing, kibbutzim, private residences, office buildings and industrial facilities.

The salient features of their joint work in its first decade were the reduction of the status of pre-given compositional patterns and a preference for pragmatic solutions.

The couple had two sons, photographer Gideon Gitai (1940-2019) and Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, who himself studied architecture at the Technion in Haifa and University of California, Berkeley.

In 1949 Weinraub was nominated as the head of the Department of Architecture in the planning office at the Ministry of Labor and Housing, directed by Arieh Sharon.

He was therefore involved in the initial planning policy-making of Israel.

In addition to this honorable mention, the firm won a dozen more national competitions during the 1950s.

Weinraub and Mansfeld both began teaching at the Technion, in Haifa at that time.

In 1951 Weinraub-Mansfeld collaboration won the entry for the site planning of the government center Ha-Kirya, in Jerusalem.

Their academic roles, combined with the challenge of entering numerous architectural competitions, influenced their diverging theoretical conceptions and their collaboration ended in 1959.

When Weinraub and Mansfeld dissolved their partnership, it was one of the leading firms in Israel, regularly published in Bauen und Wohnen, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, and other international publications.

Weinraub continued his distinguished career on his own, pursuing commissions for socially conscious architecture, working for the labor federation, the kibbutzim, and various educational institutions.

One of his final projects was the water tower at Gil Am (a youth rehabilitation institution in Shefar'am).

This project perhaps best embodies his lifetime commitment to create useful works, designed with precise details and expert knowledge of materials to achieve a serene, minimalist aesthetic.

In 35 years of career, Weinraub has established a substantial body of work of some 300 projects, consistently applying the Bauhaus principles and developing them.

He left behind a number of masterpieces, such as the Hydraulic Institute of the Technion in Haifa.

He died in Haifa in 1970 at the age of 61, buried in Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk.