Page 22 - The Architecture of Nadler-Nadler-Bixon-Gil

* Quotes from the architects are and developing buildings’ sections allowing natural light
from conversations held with the to reach their inner spaces.
authors, 2014-2016.
Shulamit and Michael Nadler had a keen sense
of the frequent shifts occurring in their time and place,
and in the firm’s forming years welcomed architects and
Technion graduates Shmuel Bixon (in 1958) and Moshe
Gil (in 1966-70) as partners. “We added young architects
with whom we worked and had a common language,”
says Shulamit Nadler. “We worked for almost seventy
years. That is a long period of time in which significant
changes take place; we adapted to these changes by
bringing in architects who were aware of that.”

Spanning seven decades, the work of Nadler-
Nadler-Bixon-Gil can be examined in a number of
dimensions. On the time dimension – the firm precisely
embodies processes and shifts in Israeli public
architecture during Israel’s first fifty years; on the spatial
dimension – the firm had a central role in developing the
civic institutional architecture in the capital Jerusalem
with the planning, social, material and topographical
challenges entailed; on the usage dimension – since
winning the competition for building the National Library
in 1955, the firm was associated with a host of public
libraries in Israel, from small scale libraries in peripheral
settlements to university and national libraries. Yet the
firm excelled in other types of usages as well, gaining
valuable experience and achievements in them. For that
reason this book is structured according to the types of
buildings planned by the firm: education, libraries, culture
and community, dwelling units, public buildings and
office buildings.

In recent years the firm’s work is once again
gaining a central place in the historiography of Israeli
architecture and its critical discourse. Yet the full story of
the partnership and the sum of its production has yet to
be told. This book offers a first opportunity to study the
firm’s rich output.

Work on the book began with a meeting at Shulamit
Nadler's home – a sunlit apartment filled with artworks by
Israeli modernist artists, from the early “New Horizons”

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