Arieh Sharon

Who was Arieh Sharon?

Arieh Sharon was an Israeli architect and winner of the Israel Prize for Architecture in 1962. Sharon was a critical contributor to the early architecture in Israel and the leader of the first master plan of the young state, reporting to then Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. Sharon studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau under Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer and on his return to Israel in 1931, started building in the international or so-called Bauhaus style in Tel Aviv. Sharon built private houses, cinemas and in 1937 his first hospital, a field in which he specialized in his later career, planning and constructing many of the country's largest medical centers.

During the War of Independence in 1948, Sharon was appointed head of the Government Planning Department, whose main challenge was where to settle the waves of immigrants who were arriving in the country, and in 1954 returned to his private architectural office. In the Sixties, he expanded his activities abroad and during the next two decades built the Ife University campus in Nigeria. As the city of Tel Aviv rose from three and four storey buildings to multi-storey buildings in the Sixties and Seventies, Sharon’s office designed many high-rise buildings for the government and for public institutions.