From Kibbutz to Bauhaus
Arieh Sharon was born in 1900 in what was then Austro-Hungary and immigrated to Palestine in 1920 at twenty. He helped found the kibbutz Gan Shmuel and spent several years there before taking leave in 1926 to study in Europe. He enrolled at the Bauhaus Dessau that year, admitted directly to the preliminary course by Walter Gropius.
The timing shaped what he found there. In 1927, Hannes Meyer took over the building department; in 1928, he became school director. Meyer’s programme was the most explicitly political the Bauhaus had seen: design was a social tool, buildings should serve collective needs before individual taste, and empirical analysis of users and climate should drive form ahead of formal invention. Sharon found in Meyer a teacher whose principles aligned with what he had experienced in the kibbutz — the idea that architecture’s first obligation was to the people who would live and work in the buildings, not to the building’s own formal integrity.
The ADGB Trade Union School
In 1928, Meyer won the competition to design the trade union school for the ADGB — the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund — in Bernau bei Berlin. Sharon was appointed construction manager for the teachers’ and employees’ residences. After Hans Wittwer’s departure in spring 1929, he effectively ran Meyer’s Berlin office for the project, drawing the majority of the plans for the complex. The school was inaugurated on 4 May 1930 — the second-largest project ever realised under Bauhaus auspices — and Sharon appears prominently in the official photographs. He received his Bauhaus diploma in 1929.
Tel Aviv
Sharon returned to Palestine in 1931 and opened an architectural practice in Tel Aviv immediately. The principles he applied were those he had developed under Meyer: modularity, unadorned surfaces, functional planning calibrated to climate and collective use, pilotis that lifted buildings above ground to allow air circulation in a hot climate. Early projects included modular wooden pavilions for the Histadrut at the 1932 Levant Fair and the Meonot Ovdim workers’ housing estates, with central garden courtyards and shared services designed around the actual lives of working families.
Over subsequent decades he designed hospitals — Ichilov in Tel Aviv, Beilinson, Rambam, Soroka — and contributed to national urban planning, including the development towns built to house mass immigration in the 1950s. He received the Israel Prize for Architecture in 1962.
Sharon’s career is the clearest documented case of direct transmission of Hannes Meyer’s social functionalism into a non-European built environment. What he brought back from Dessau was not a formal vocabulary but a method: analyse the users, respond to the climate, build for collective welfare. That method proved more durable in the context of a new state building quickly for large numbers of people than any aesthetic position could have been.