Page 16 - The Architecture of Nadler-Nadler-Bixon-Gil

rationalism movement in Europe, also guided the
“expressionistic Brutalism” that informed the firm’s work,
especially in plans for public buildings, but also during its
“structuralist” phase beginning at the end of the 1960s.

The fact that all the firm’s architects were
graduates of the Technion – where structural rationalism,
organic in essence, had ruled since its establishment –
was a significant factor of their prolific collaboration.
Moreover, this common denominator explains the success
the firm’s architects had in expressing the character of
“Israeli design”: simplicity, material and functional integrity
and rugged massiveness had become the identifying
features of all Israeli design, from ceramics and jewelry to
sculpture. Israeli artists and artisans sought to combine the
local with the universal and the modern with the primitive.
This trend was well suited to architects operating in a
society seeking to connect the future with the past, and
progress with rural settlement and archaic culture.

The organic-expressionistic style in architecture,
which had been revived after World War II in the works
of such leading architects as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd
Wright and Louis Kahn, was soon (and by no mere chance)
assimilated into Israeli architecture. The principles of the
“arts and crafts” movement and the spirit of German
expressionism had already seeped into all areas of local
design at the beginning of the 20th century, when Boris
Schatz founded the Bezalel Art School, and were present
until its end. The Nadlers’ ties with local artistic milieus
(especially the expressionist artists, among them the
painter Lea Nikel) and the partnership with Shmuel Bixon,
a former student at Bezalel under the painter Mordechai
Ardon, contributed to the sculptural quality of many of the
firm’s designs. Collaborations with artists such as Yehiel
Shemi, Aharon Kahana and Dov Feigin were far from
limited to “decorating” buildings with artworks, but were
expressed in a dialogue between art and architecture. The
Jerusalem (Sherover) Theater (1958-71), with its flowing
lines is a prime example of a building in which the Nadlers
and Bixon formed a connection between a complex of
spaces and an outer shell, and between architecture and
works of art. Yehiel Shemi’s expressive composition of

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