Architecture and Utopia

The first comprehensive academic study of the architectural planning of the kibbutzim and the moshavim, the utopian agricultural settlements that were created in Eretz-Israel during the 20th century. The book discusses the connection between the ideology and the architecture of these settlements in the broad historical context of the orientations intent on creating utopian societies and planning ideal settlements to house them. It presents the ideas on the architectural planning of ideal settlements that appear in the writings of social visionaries such as the prophet Ezekiel, Plato, Fourier, Owen, Marx and Engels, and of architects such as Vitruvius, Ledoux and Le Corbusier, and examines the extent of their creative imagination and their influence on the ways of thinking of the fathers of Zionist settlement such as Tabenkin and Eliezer Yaffe and architects of the kibbutzim and the moshavim, such as Kauffmann, Sharon and Bickels.

The book presents an analysis of the spatial layouts of settlement models as related to the various social ideological movements that existed in Eretz-Israel. It surveys the development of these settlement models in light of the extreme political, economic and technological changes that took place in the world and in Israel in the course of the century, and examines the influences of the changes in the ideology on the changes in the spatial layouts of the settlements.