Looks like white is the new ‘black’…

From HAARETZ:

Blinding white

By Shani Shilo

When UNESCO added Tel Aviv’s White City to the World Heritage List of sites designated for preservation, it made white fashionable and desireable. Thanks to the White City’s historical designation, that default color of Israeli architecture is now identified with quality.

“This is a trend that began about 15 years ago as part of Tel Aviv’s branding as the White City,” says architect Sharon Rotbard, author of the books “White City, Black City” and “Avraham Yaski: Concrete Architecture.” “In the mid-1990s, Ram Carmi began to talk about white architecture at the same time that architects began whitewashing raw concrete structures in conjunction with Brutalist architecture - for example, the planned Amal School. Eldar Sharon also painted white the Coor Building - now the Beit Amot Hamishpat Building - which he planned with his father, Arieh Sharon.

“When French architect Jean Nouvel visited Israel, he suggested making Tel Aviv a symphony of white, painting all the buildings in shades of white, and strengthening its identity as the White City, just as Jerusalem is identified with stone,” Rotbard adds.

In recent years, real estate marketers have promoted architectural values associated with the White City and made them synonymous with elegance and prestige. The ecology movement commonly uses the term “green wash” to describe companies that, instead of taking meaningful steps to protect the environment, suffice with painting their buses green, for example. Architecture launched a similar trend in its efforts to “whitewash” while ignoring architectural detail and failing to create intelligent, elegant architecture. Painting the building white is enough to insure that buyers will come.

The architectural trigger stems from marketing personnel. Architect Gil Shenhav, a partner in the Canaan Shenhav firm, which is currently planning Gindi Buildings Engineering & Development’s White Tower in Rishon Letzion, does not consider it problematic that architects are designing in accordance with marketing demands.

“The basis of [this] creation is marketing. The question is what you do with it. We took the opportunity to create something significant. The work orders generate motivation, and the question becomes how the work is done. Even the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by a man of means.”

Rotbard believes that describing architecture in marketing terms does not necessarily indicate that architects have sold out to wealthy buyers.

“Architecture is not just buildings. There is an entire dialogue that surrounds it. The rhetoric was invented by architects. The trend began with modernization. It is only gaining strength, and marketers use it, too,” Rotbard says.

The use of architecture-marketing terminology attests to the significance that marketers attach to architecture - they use it to sell properties. Architectural white’s greatest influence on marketing can be seen in the sales of upscale high-rises. Architect Richard Meier’s high-rise apartment complex on Rothschild Boulevard will be white, a color identified with Meier.

“I would be happy if I could live there,” says architect Yossi Matalon, owner of the ArchiTimes Web site (www.architimes.co.il). “White is the trademark of the minority that acknowledges its own worth. People who live in white buildings must have means, because they have to pay a maintenance crew a high price to maintain the building’s white facade. The cost of that crew is equivalent to the rent of several colorful apartments in the center of the city,” he says.

Matalon describes the new projects’ character as “a mask of external cleanliness that may conceal internal dullness. Every white product has a name. Every high-rise has a catchy name rather than a street name and a number, preferably a non-Hebrew name that spurns localness and stresses the universal.

“People in the White City want to be different - they want white,” he continues. “In urban Tel Aviv, white is universal. White is lack of local color. It does not belong to any place - it belongs to every place, but in a condescending, dismissive, haughty way. Respectable high-rises, Tel Aviv’s upcoming skyscrapers, will be white. They will adopt no color - not Hapoel Tel Aviv [soccer team] red, not Beitar [soccer team] yellow, not [anti-disengagement] orange, and not [patriotic] blue. They will be the shade that results after all color has been filtered out, all the material and the human has been filtered out. New high-rises will have no color, no place. Local pollution will not stick to them, and they will be planned to remain pure.”

Like other forms of globalism, architectural globalism is controversial. Some consider architectural globalism to be a sign of progress and connection to the world and its architectural events. Some consider it the architecture of magazines, which ignores the physical and even tramples local values.

“The play between local and global means every culture expresses its characteristics in a way that is almost commercialized. There’s a model windmill at the Amsterdam airport that is part of an attempt to display local flavor in an easily digested fashion. They design a white high-rise in the White City on Rothschild Boulevard for the same reason,” Rotbard notes.

Matalon prefers color to the sterility of white. “White does not adhere to Israeli color. It doesn’t adhere to the other - only to itself, just as money sticks to money. White sends a decisive, financial-social message. That color comes from a desire to be somewhat different, neutral, but prominent and supremely lofty. Not like the other - in opposition. White is not a color. White is a haughty label that sells the illusion that ‘We are clean,’ clean of negative human elements. Color has personality. It has an opinion. It isn’t clean.”

Shenhav, on the other hand, believes that “white offers originality and a return to sources. In our mad rush to excite and condescend in our use of surfacing materials, we somewhat forgot the quality of the White City that was here for many years. White is pure and primal. It has tremendous power to communicate visually and broadcasts numerous values without the need to speak. There is something in white that is beyond hue, color or fashion. White provides maximal visual effect with minimum energy. We are constantly exposed to stimuli, and white provides emotional calm. True, this is a new trend that is a response to many years in which we made many original, lovely things. Perhaps, after we did so much, the time has come to do a bit less.”

Shenhav cites the “Less is more” axiom raised in architectural dialogue at the mention of white. White is associated with cleanliness and elegance, and is identified with the architect Mies van der Rohe, one of the founding fathers of the Modernist movement, who believed in unadorned architectural cleanliness and attention to detail. Moreover, white is now used for the exteriors of expensive homes, in architectural design associated with prestigious addresses, lofty lobbies, marble floors and glass walls. Humility and restraint are not necessarily the guiding principles of this type of architecture.

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