Login
Registered users
Pitsou Kedem studied for his master’s degree under Zaha Hadid and other luminaries at the Architectural Association in London, before returning to Tel Aviv and opening his office there in 2000. Since then, he has enjoyed extraordinary success and, together with his team of ten young women, has won awards in Israel and around the world. The office has realized more than 70 private houses, even as they devote more attention to hotels, commercial projects, multiple housing and interiors. Their language is rigorous and inventive, reinterpreting the basic principles of modernism for a newly affluent and sophisticated roster of clients.
From the start, Kedem argued for a minimalist esthetic that was uncommon in Israel at that time and urged his clients to consider new materials. In doing so, he created fresh variations on rectilinear forms that are refined in detail and hide their complexity. His houses may be compared to those of Studio MK27 in Brazil, though those are usually sited on large, lushly planted lots and are shaped by a subtropical climate. Israel is a small country, its habitable areas are crowded, and its hotter months less extreme.
Over the past few decades, Tel Aviv has been transformed by the new wealth of technology and young entrepreneurs. The White City, an enclave of Bauhaus modernism created by Jewish émigré architects from Hitler’s Germany and neighboring countries, has been gentrified and named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Luxury apartment towers have sprung up around it and in other cities, and historic districts have been given new life. Pitsou Kedem has made a major contribution to that transformation and raised the bar for excellence in a country that formerly had little to show in the way of native architectural talent.
The symbolic and spiritual capital of Jerusalem has been fiercely contested for millennia; Tel Aviv was founded as recently as 1909 as a Jewish settlement alongside...
Digital
Printed
Relearning How to Inhabit the City: Housing and Shared Responsibility
Gloria Cabral
In the editorial “Rediscovering How to Live in the City: Housing and Shared Responsibility,” architect Gloria Cabral calls for a rethinking of con...
Restoration as an Exercise in Good Taste
Architettura Tommasi
In his Viaggio in Italia column, Valerio Paolo Mosco examines restoration, using examples from Architettura Tommasi...
Reimagining the Western Range of the British Museum
Lina Ghotmeh Architecture
In the Conversation column, Philip Jodidio speaks with Lina Ghotmeh...
