Page 23 - The Architecture of Nadler-Nadler-Bixon-Gil

generation through to the “Want of Matter”; artists
who were among the Nadlers’ milieu, some of whom
also collaborated on several of the firm’s projects. The
apartment is in a building constructed gradually over
the last century, on a plot on which Shulamit’s paternal
grandparents built one of the first single story houses
in Tel Aviv’s Nordia garden suburb in 1921. In August
1923 Shulamit was born in this house to Rachel and
the economist Dr. Yitzhak Kanev Kanev (Kanievsky,
recipient of the Israel Prize for Social Sciences in 1962).
She studied in the first class of Shalva elementary school
in Tel Aviv, completing her high school education at the
prestigious Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, and was a
member of HaMahanot HaOlim youth movement.

In 1941, following a training year at Kibbutz
Givat Brenner, Shulamit began studying at the
Architecture Department at the Technion in Haifa. There
she met her future husband and partner Michael (Karl)
Nadler, who was born in Bulgaria in 1921, and had
immigrated to Palestine following his graduation from
the French school in Sofia, joining Kibbutz Yagur. Their
Technion class had only four other students: Moshe
Zarhy, Yaakov Rechter, Yehoshua-Yitzhak Gwircman and
Yosef Oron (Wissenstern).

Shulamit and Michael were deeply influenced
by their professor, the architect and Haganah chief
commander Yohanan Ratner. When Ratner was appointed
head of architecture at the Technion, he replaced his
predecessor, Alexander Baerwald’s eclectic-eastern
style of architecture with modernist, pragmatic and
representational design and building concepts that
influenced generations of Israeli architects. The Nadlers
received non-official training from architect Ze’ev Rechter,
a fore figure of Eretz Israel modernism and father of their
fellow student Yaakov Rechter. Ze’ev Rechter would
arrive frequently at the Technion and spend long hours
in conversation with those who in a short time would
play a central role in the state building. During study
breaks Shulamit worked in the office of architects Al
(Alfred) Mansfeld and Munio Weinraub (Gitai). From the
professional literature and journals Shulamit and Michael

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