Sam Barkai was a disciple of the French-Swiss master, as is Avi Mayer in his new book on Barkai.
Avi Mayer’s Hebrew-language book “Sam Barkai: The Architect of Right Dimensions” turns the spotlight on an outstanding Tel Aviv architect who helped bring modernism to prestate Israel in the 1930s. Barkai worked during the golden age of Israeli architecture, which indeed can be described as advocating right dimensions.
Barkai was a founder of a group that made the International Style local and turned it into that era's reigning architectural stream in the country.
Barkai mainly designed villas and apartment buildings in the private market, unlike many of his colleagues who also worked for the establishment in so-called nation-building efforts. Barkai was a good architect, a rare thing in these parts nowadays, just as the right dimensions disappeared from the landscape and left it wide open to any whim.
The book on Barkai’s work — designed by Magen Halutz — shows that research on architecture and the architects of that period has not been exhausted, even when it seems everything has already been researched, said, written and made cliché.
White City architecture has been a target of criticism from all sides and become politically incorrect, and today it’s a lever for raising housing prices. But the last word has yet to be said.
In addition to his interest in Barkai and Le Corbusier, Mayer’s book aims to uproot from the architectural lexicon the ostensibly scientific term International Style and the popular term Bauhaus. The former “has adhered to the European avant-garde movement, to its detriment. The movement included many and varied streams and sub-streams that were sometimes even hostile to one another.”
The second term, Bauhaus, is a deliberate mistake, says Mayer, and even worse, “today it’s the name of a real estate firm.” The correct term, which according to Mayer is more local and Mediterranean, is Purism, which Le Corbusier defined as “the elementary truth that determines that anything of universal value is worth more than anything of merely individual value,” cites Mayer. But with a name like Purism, the architecture of the period would never had come as far as with the winning brand Bauhaus.