Page 25 - The Architecture of Nadler-Nadler-Bixon-Gil

an architect. In planning Ruppin College of Agriculture,
a complex debut work on a public-national scale, the
Nadlers had to deal with the campus’ modernistic
typology, topographic challenges and its academic
curriculum, issues they had encountered until then only
as exercises in planning rural settlements and schools
as Technion students. “It was a campus on a hill. We sat
down on the hill and solved all the surroundings,” says
Shulamit. “Everything was clear: you looked at the plan
and immediately understood what, who and where.”
Shulamit insists that the agricultural expression of the
mild-modernist plan stems from the campus’ stark tiled
roofs. This gesture was so bold, almost postmodernist
in relation to the history of modernist-rural architecture
in Eretz Israel, that its representatives (architects such
as Richard Kauffmann, Shmuel Mestechkin and Arieh
Sharon) often sought to replace traditional tiled roofs with
flat roofs.

“Our success in competitions was achieved by
efficiency and economy, simplicity and clarity. This is
the root of our architecture: rural appearance and clarity
throughout. Our proposals were very simple and people
understood them right away. When I compared our plans
to others, I saw the difference. This was the case with
the College of Agriculture and Beit Sokolov: these are
defined buildings, simple and not overly complicated,”
says Shulamit.

In July 1948, while planning the college, the
Nadlers also won first prize in another competition, this
time for planning an official urban building: Beit Sokolov,
the Journalists Association House on Dizengoff (today
Kaplan) Street in Tel Aviv [pp. 356-361]. Unlike the
agriculture campus, this prize presented the Nadlers’
first assignment dealing with an architectural object
representing a powerful professional union in one of the
developing (then and now) areas of Tel Aviv. This building
began the consolidation of an elegant modernism, official
and constrained, that would characterize many of the
buildings the firm planned over the next two decades,
many of which clearly manifest a transitional stage in
Israeli architecture – from mid-modernism toward late

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