From September 9 to October 9, 2005, the Design Centre at the Universit du Qubec Montral presents the exhibition Tel Aviv’s White City: the modern architecture movement. This exhibition follows inclusion by UNESCO of the central Tel Aviv neighborhoods in the World Heritage. It includes rare historical documents, maps, drawings, photographs, models, videos, films and animations illustrating the development of the city as well as the construction of hundreds of buildings in the International Style, from the 1930s to the 1950s.
The Design Centre at UQAM, in collaboration with Monopoli, galerie d’architecture, also presents the exhibition Fragments of a Style: 172 photographs of Tel Aviv’s White City by Yigal Gawze, with texts by Rjean Legault, professor at UQAM’s School of Design, to take place from September 9 to October 2, as well as a series of lectures on modern architecture in collaboration with DOCOMOMO Qubec.
Of Tel Aviv’s White City, architect Nitza Szmuk states: "The confluence of historic events at the time when the city of Tel Aviv was first created gave birth to a place representing various aspects in the history of Modern Architecture. In the early thirties, architects and engineers who had studied in Europe and then immigrated or returned to Palestine, could develop a modern architectural language forbidden at the time by the Nazi regime in Germany. Thus, the Modern Movement in architecture finds its full expression in the building style and urban planning in Isral in general, and Tel Aviv in particular. The waves of immigration from Europe called for construction on an unprecedented scale in comparison with modern urban centers built in Europe during the twenties, mostly at the outskirts of large cities, and then only on a small scale. The White City is Tel Aviv’s nucleus, and is nowadays considered the largest urban concentration of the Early International Style."