Israel, the 100th smallest country, has the most museums (about 230) per capita in the world. Yet it never had a museum devoted to architecture until the prominent Israeli film director Amos Gitai  stepped up to the task.

 

The Museum of Architecture in Haifa is scheduled to open on March 16, 2012, the birthday of Gitai’s late father, Munio Gitai Weinraub - and that’s fitting, because the museum is located in what used to be the studio of his father, one of the principal architects of modern-day Haifa and Tel Aviv.

In addition to a permanent exhibit on Weinraub’s projects, an opening show will focus on public housing in Israel from the 1940s to the present. “The museum is a homage to this generation of architects, like my father and his friends from the Bauhaus, but at the same time we want to draw attention to the fact that architecture has to look at social issues,” says Gitai, 61, who earned an architecture degree at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and a PhD at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

“Looking back, I feel that architects became too consumed by designing airports and museums - flashy buildings - while we need some talented architects to design modest apartment houses for people who don’t have means. The museum is meant to draw attention to these issues.”

 

 

The museum opening will also serve as the venue for the premiere of Gitai’s newest film, Lullaby for My Father. This movie tells the story of Weinraub, who was a student at the Bauhaus design and architecture school in the German city of Dessau before the rise of the Nazi movement sent him on a perilous journey from Poland to Palestine.

 

“I have been working for several years on the biography of my father and along the way discovered very interesting documents,” says Gitai, whose career has been marked by  numerous honors ranging from Cannes and Venice Film Festival nominations to a major retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

 

At 18, Gitai’s father left home and made the acquaintance of prominent late 1920s avant-garde artists, such as Kandinsky and Klee, both of whom taught at the Bauhaus school. “They sent him for one year to study the use of wood since they wanted to have a craftsman,” says Gitai. “Then he was admitted as a student at the Bauhaus.”

 

But the Nazis came to power and closed the Bauhaus in 1932. Following the racial laws enacted in April 1933, Weinraub and three other Jewish former Bauhaus students got arrested. “He was beaten; they broke his teeth and then they threw him in jail in June 1933.” The friends’ court-appointed lawyer managed to get them expelled from the country, “which in retrospect is quite a good thing,” reflects Gitai wryly.

 

The foursome escaped to Switzerland and then had to choose between Palestine and the United States. “I think my father decided on Palestine because he was very much moved by all the social experiments of that period, such as the kibbutz and social housing.”

 

These refugees eventually helped turn Tel Aviv and Haifa into Bauhaus showpieces, with thousands of white stone utilitarian modernist structures marked by large balconies and small windows (suitable for the Mediterranean heat). Many of these buildings are currently being renovated.

 

 

A video installation about Munio Gitai Weinraub, Amos Gitai, Architectures of Memory, was on display through January 8, 2012 at the National Museum of Cinema in Torino, Italy. “The Italians decided to do a very big retrospective including 18 of my films, such as Free Zone with Natalie Portman and Disengagement with Juliette Binoche, and more recent films, and they invited me to do a parallel exhibit in the museum,” says Gitai, who lives in Haifa and Paris. “We will present it also in our architecture museum and in the three big cities [Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa] in July, starting at the Jerusalem Film Festival,” he reveals.

 

Architecture, family and film are intimately intertwined for Gitai, whose traveling film installation Traces is playing in Germany through February 2012, sponsored by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. It features segments of several of his past documentaries, exploring social themes of migration, exile and violence.

 

 

In the meantime, workers are fixing up the 180-square meter Haifa space in accordance with plans drawn up by Efrat-Kowalsky, the same architectural firm responsible for the renovated Israel Museum campus in Jerusalem. The size is cozy enough to dedicate to very specific displays. “I really want to focus sometimes on a single building and sometimes on thematic issues,” says Gitai. “We hope to cooperate with architects here and abroad. We have started to create these networks.”

 

The museum, situated in the central Carmel neighborhood, will not concentrate solely on the Bauhaus style. “Haifa has some great 1930s buildings including a beautiful Mendelsohnian structure. We hope we can make homage to this project and others, but the museum will mostly be dedicated to modernist buildings - we will leave the kitsch to another museum,” says Gitai, who is now “auditioning” directors and curators together with his board of directors.

 

The museum will have an archive and a small area for study and reading in addition to exhibition and screening spaces. Gitai envisions visitors of all ages getting something out of the experience. “I hope a five-year-old would be as interested in architecture as a 90-year-old,” he says.

 

Haifa’s existing roster of museums includes the Israel National Museum of Science, Technology, and Space; the Haifa Museum of Art; the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art (the only museum in the Middle East dedicated solely to Japanese art); the Museum of Prehistory; the National Maritime Museum; Haifa City Museum; the Hecht Museum; the Dagon Archeological Museum; the Railway Museum, the Clandestine Immigration and Navy Museum; the Israeli Oil Industry Museum; the Mane-Katz Museum; and Chagall Artists' House.