Richard Kauffmann

Dissertation project  - Anke Kühnel

Richard Kauffmann was an extremely prolific German Jewish architect born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1887, died in Israel in 1958. After studies at the TU Munich and in spite of a successful career start in Europe, he answered positively in 1920 a call of Arthur Ruppin, the head of the Zionist Commission to Palestine, to follow Patrick Geddes as director of the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning (PLDC). In Palestine, and then in Israel, Kauffmann authored some 200 projects all over the country, working for Zionist organizations, affiliated institutions, and individual housing societies. The work in Palestine became the center of his professional life. Kauffmann had a decisive impact on the translation of German and European concepts of spatial planning and architectural principles to the Middle East, thus detaining a key role in the formation of Palestinian and Israeli architecture. These transfers had a broad impact on the Jewish collectives that were in various stages of formative processes at the time.

The German-Jewish culture he belonged to had decisively informed his work in British Mandate Palestine. His emigration had not just been a biographical turn, but the motor of a cultural transfer, standing at the heart of an extraordinary process of cultural fusion. Richard Kauffmann will be presented in the dissertation as the first architect of Zionism. Although well known through many, various building and planning activities, Kauffmann has never been the subject of academic inquiry, his imprint on the Palestinian and Israeli architecture, his positioning in the history of architecture and town planning of his own times being still vague and indistinct. Above all, his professional and cultural background, his specific German roots, especially the impact of his study years in Munich with Theodor Fischer, are almost entirely ignored. The present dissertation focuses on the ways Kauffmann translated his European-German-Jewish impregnated concepts and perceptions to the new, Middle-Eastern context.  

The research bases on sources, which at least in their larger part, have not been explored previously. They belong to two private archives of Kauffmann’s family, in Jerusalem and Potomac (Washingron D.C.), as well as to the official Central Zionist Archive (CZA) in Jerusalem. The dissertation, supported by the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES), is planned to be accomplished towards the end of 2018.