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Israel’s cities are changing minute by minute. New residential towers, commercial centers, and public transit projects transform not only the urban landscape, but also the urban experience. Though it is still possible to see traditional shop windows and low-rise apartment blocks whose facades evolved gradually over the decades, these already have a nostalgic flavor to them. They have been overtaken by construction on a radically different scale, as if a new city altogether has been superimposed on what was. Perhaps this explains the parallel endeavor to meticulously restore certain historic buildings – not as part of the contemporary urban texture, but as architectural rarities, which underscores even more the sharp divide between then and now.

Architecture reflects the values and aspirations of a society. Walking around a historical city, we are able to intuit the social and cultural intentions that produced it. The Jewish architects active in British Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s were part of the Modernist Movement of the period, but they adapted its architectural language to the local climate and materials and to existing urban master plans. At the same time, in the spirit of this particular place and moment in history, architecture served to redefine the boundaries between the individual and the collectivity. The unique modernist style that evolved came to be identified with the birth of a state.

Contemporary architects Ada Karmi-Melamede and Dan Price have devoted more than two decades to studying the architectural legacy of Palestine during the British Mandate. With the help of colleagues and students, they gathered a wealth of archival material and produced hundreds of original drawings to analyze the buildings presented in their book Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate, 1917–1948. Previously exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the original exhibition focused on the book’s central chapter, investigating the components that made up the local modernist idiom of the 1930s in order to better understand its underlying philosophy, as well as its formal language.

The original exhibition, organized by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 2016, has been adapted for the Yale School of Architecture Gallery with the addition of two sections - Architectural Precedents and Hybrid Modernism - that chronologically bookend the contents of the original exhibition. These sections looks at the early and late years of the British Mandate, transitional periods that were characterized by extreme political and social uncertainty that produced a hybrid architecture that fluctuated between contradictory traditional and modernist concepts.