The Female View on Building the Land of Israel Architecture, Zionism and Aliyah in the Writings by a Pioneer Woman Architect

• Applicant: Dr. Ines Sonder
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 229151451

The first women architects at the beginning of the 20th century very rarely wrote about their professionalization and the conditions of their architectural production within a male-dominated field. To regard their works and projects as expressions of their "artistic statements" and architectural legacy is, therefore, much less accessible to Humanities Research than the architectural and philosophical reflections and writings of their male colleagues. To obtain information about their work and sphere of activity in architecture is often only possible through contemporary professional journals and women's magazines, because, apart from a few exceptions, the personal archives of this first generation of women architects are missing. Against this background, the personal archive of German-born Jewish Pioneer woman architect Lotte Cohn (1893 Berlin-1983 Tel Aviv), which is largely preserved, is of the greatest academic importance for research into the international history of women architects. In 1921, she emigrated to Mandatory Palestine as the first woman architect in Eretz Israel, and was substantially involved in the first architectural and settlement projects for the new foundation of the Jewish homestead. In letters, memoirs, journal articles and speeches over a period of more than 60 years, she reflected on her personal development, work and professional experiences in the new homeland. She wrote about the beginning of the Zionist building sector and its architectural development, planning the first co-operative settlements of the Kibbutz and Moschav as well as her reflections on architecture and town planning in Israel after the foundation of the state, and in general.As one of the first German-speaking Zionists in Palestine at the beginning of the 1920s, Lotte Cohn later considered herself to be a contemporary witness writing about her generation of pioneer immigrants of the Third Aliya. Her personal archive is also of academic interest in this respect because only a few memoirs and documents chronicle the lives of the approximately 2,000 German speaking Jews, among them many women, who lived in Palestine prior to 1933.The aim of this interdisciplinary project, based on Lotte Cohn's personal archive, is to open up the contextual space of her work in Israeli building history in the 20th century, to document and critically assess it. At the centre of this source-critical study are questions of the sociological, ideological and political dimensions of architectural production in building the Jewish state; the institutionalization of professional networks between Zionist architects; equal opportunities in receiving building commissions, as well as the female view of Zionist architecture and town planning. In addition, an important aim of the research project is the documentation of the German speaking immigration of the Third Aliyah, and their contribution to building the Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel. A database is under development.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants