Bauhaus style was influenced by the 19th century English designer William Morris who argued that art should meet the needs of society and there should be no distinction between form and function. It was marked by radically simplified forms, the absence of ornamentation, by harmony between the design of an object or building and its function and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit. These criteria were a good match for the modern city of Tel Aviv, a new Israeli city built in 1909 on sand dunes of the Mediterranean coast.

From a postcard, published by S. Adler, Haifa  Photo by J. Benor-Kalter

In 1925 as Tel Aviv grew, the innovative Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes submitted a master plan for the city where he laid out the streets and decided on block size and utilization – Geddes did not prescribe an architectural style for the buildings in the new city. The impetus for…