"Form and Light"
Casa da Arquitectura
6 to 29 march 2020
The exhibition Form and Light, from Bauhaus to Tel Aviv will be presented at the House of Architecture, in Matosinhos, from 6 to 29 March.
This exhibition stems from a partnership between EDP Foundation and the Embassy of Israel in Portugal on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus school, and was first shown at MAAT – Central Tejo between 12 July and 2 September 2019.
Form and Light is a photography exhibition by Yigal Gawze, who documents the impact of Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv, Israel, a city which boasts one of the largest collections of Bauhaus architecture in the world, with 4000 buildings.
Focusing particularly on fragments of the buildings constructed in the 1930s, the photographs examine how the city adapted to the Bauhaus influence brought by architects working in Tel Aviv at the time. 1930s and 1940s Tel Aviv was a sort of laboratory where architects who studied in several European countries created a “modified modernism” along the Mediterranean shores. Most structures built in Tel Aviv in the International Style are modest residential buildings, erected to house the waves of immigrants arriving from Europe during those years.
The bearing of the various trends of the Modernist movement on the city’s architecture and urban planning was one of the factors taken into account by UNESCO when it designated Tel Aviv’s White City as a World Heritage Site, in 2003.
The sharp perspectives and dynamic compositions inherent in this work echo, in their own way, the avant-garde photography of the 1930s. The use of colour, accentuated by the local light, emphasises the elements of modernist architecture and of the city it created.
The 30 photographs on display, taken from Yigal Gawze’s book Fragments of a Style, share the exhibition space with four videos about life in the city of Tel Aviv and Bauhaus. Several documentary media (both printed and audiovisual) invite the visitor to explore the 14 years in which the Bauhaus school operated, having been founded in 1919, as well as its legacy throughout the world.
