Ita Heinze-Greenberg
When the Government Hospital in Haifa officially opened on 22 December 1938, it was met with superlatives such as “finest medical institution in the Middle East” and “a record of speed and efficiency”. The 250-bed hospital was indeed a prime example of well-organized planning and construction, which took only about two years to complete. Hardly conceivable nowadays, Erich Mendelsohn was able to hand over the bowl to the medical staff two months earlier than scheduled. The breathtaking building process was due in no small part to the client: the British Mandate government was tightly and hierarchically structured and knew neither the time-consuming practice of equal-opportunity competitions nor the call for “Jewish labor”, both common in Palestine’s Jewish community.
The order of the mandate government, which simplified a lot for the architect, came at a price: Mendelsohn was forced to follow its authoritarian colonialist guidelines of a rigid separation between British and native (Arab and Jewish) sections. The obvious discrimination was met with resentment within the Yishuv. Added to this was the severely restricted immigration quota for Jewish refugees by a new British White Paper. Its announcement fell on 9 November 1938, the day synagogues went up in flames in Nazi Germany. When the Government Hospital was opened a month and a half later by the British High Commissioner, it was boycotted by the Jewish population from the very beginning. Although the hospital complex was undoubtedly one of Mendelsohn’s most exquisite designs, the circumstances surrounding it did enormous damage to his reputation in the country.
The aim of this paper is to recall the conflicted story of the Government Hospital, which is now – partially altered – incorporated in the 1000-bed Rambam Health Care Campus. Like hardly any other project, Mendelsohn’s architectural complex reflects Haifa’s evolving modernity, in which British, Arabs and Jews played an equal, if tense, role.
Ita Heinze-Greenberg is an architectural historian and professor emerita of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, where she was assigned to the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) from 2012 to 2019. She earned her doctorate from the University of Bonn with a thesis on Erich Mendelsohn’s buildings in Mandate Palestine. Subsequently, she held research and teaching positions at various institutions, including the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Technion in Haifa (1984-1998), the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem (1993), the University of Augsburg (1999), the Delft University of Technology (2004-2005) and the Technical University of Munich (2008-2012). Her numerous publications concentrate on 19th and 20th century architecture with foci on nation building, identity construction, migration studies, and on the work of Erich Mendelsohn.