un planteamiento urbanístico del pensador británico Patrick Geddes que limitaba el tamaño de los bloques y configu-raba las manzanas. Cuando llegaron este grupo de jóvenes arquitectos desde Alemania, se encontraron con una ciudad ordenada pero sin un estilo arquitectónico marcado, así que aplicar el estilo Bauhaus de funcionalidad y materiales sen-cillos y asequibles fue muy fácil. Pasear hoy por Rothschild Boulevard, o las calles Sheinkin, Dizengoff, Bialik, Mazeh o Kalisher es visitar uno de los centros urbanos de este estilo arquitectónico mejor conservados del mundo. “Pasó mucho tiempo para que los vecinos de estos edifi-cios, desde del reconocimiento de la Unesco, se dieran cuenta de que vivían en un lugar Patrimonio de la Humanidad, por eso muchos están abandonados”, explica Gross. Pero hoy las cosas están cambiando, “sus habitantes están renovándolos, apreciando el valor de estas construcciones”, añade. El ejem-plo son los parques proyectados entre bloque y bloque, reple-tos de vecinos tomando el fresco, el mejor legado de unos jóvenes arquitectos que no solo quisieron salvar sus vidas, también su manera de entender las ciudades. ENG In 1933, with the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany, many Jewish architects went to live in Israel, not just for their own safety, but also to continue articulating the urban planning ideas formed in an already mature Bauhaus School founded years earlier in 1919 by Walter Gropius. These young people, who had trained under the plans of German master Arieh Sharon and others including Shmuel Mestechkin, Munio Gitai-Weinraub and Shlomo Bernstein, used the streets of Tel Aviv to build a city with 4,000 buildings following the guidelines of the International Style. They used white colours, airtight windows, bare pillars and straight lines to adapt to the desert and Mediterranean climate in the so-called White City of Tel Aviv. The city is now celebrating 20 years since UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site “for integrating the architectural trends of the Modern Movement into the local environment”. “It’s the largest concentration of Art Nouveau buildings in the world; we have schools, infrastructure, theatres, cinemas, homes and industrial complexes” explains Micha Gross, direc-tor of the Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv. Of the 4,000 buildings, more than 2,000 are protected by a conservation law passed by the City Council and many of them “need to be refurbished to make them just as they were in the 1930s” he adds. Tel Aviv had already been conceived several decades ear-lier, in 1909, as a “garden city” built on sand dunes to a mas-ter plan designed by British thinker Patrick Geddes that limited the size of neighbourhoods and configured the resi-dential blocks. When this group of young architects arrived from Germany, they found a city that was neat but lacking a distinctive architectural style, making it easy to apply the Bauhaus ethos of functionality and simple, affordable mate-rials. A stroll along Rothschild Boulevard or along Sheinkin, Dizengoff, Bialik, Mazeh and Kalisher streets today is a tour of one of the world’s best-preserved urban centres in this archi-tectural style. “It took a long time for the residents of these buildings, since the UNESCO recognition, to realise that they lived in a World Heritage Site, which is why many of them have been neglected” explains Gross. But now things are changing, “the residents are renovating them, appreciating the value of these constructions,” he adds. An example of this is the park areas planned between the blocks, full of neighbours enjo-ying the cool air, the best legacy of a group of young architects who wanted to save not only their lives but also their way of understanding cities. TEL AVIV © Universal Images Group via Getty Images La plaza Dizengoff en los años 30, cuya configuración aún hoy es ejemplo de buen urbanismo. // Dizengoff Square in the 1930s; even today its design is an example of good urban planning. TEL AVIV Vuelos // Flights: Para ir a conocer la Ciudad Blanca hay que volar hasta Tel Aviv, que gracias a Air Europa, se conecta con Madrid con seis frecuencias a la semana. // To go and explore the White City, you have to fly to Tel Aviv, which thanks to Air Europa connects with Madrid via six frequencies a week. www.aireuropa.com