Richard Kauffmann

Richard Kauffmann (1887–1958) was a German-Jewish architect who immigrated to Palestine, known to Jews as Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), in 1920. His architecture was influenced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a proponent of the International Style, and was applied to the local landscape, laying the architectural groundwork for the nascent State of Israel and the White City, as Tel Aviv's International Style architecture became known.

Richard Kauffmann was born in 1887 in Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany. In 1907, he began to study art at the Städelschule but transferred to architecture studies in Amsterdam the following year. In 1909, he moved to the Technical University of Munich, graduating in 1912. In 1914, he opened an office in Frankfurt. In 1919, Kauffmann met Arthur Ruppin, who invited him to design new Jewish settlements in Palestine.

In 1920, he immigrated to Eretz Yisrael. Between 1920 and 1932, Kaufmann was the chief architect of the Hachsharat HaYishuv company of the Zionist movement. Kauffmann designed and initiated, almost alone, a full architectural master plan for the new rural villages of many Kibutzim and Moshavim in the Jezreel Valley, most notably Ein Harod, Kfar Yehoshua, Degania Alef, Kfar Yehezkel and Nahalal. Nahalal, the first Moshav Ovdim, was designed in a circular shape, where public buildings were located in the middle surrounded by a circular road, then the agricultural farm buildings about 20 metres (66 ft) from each other, and then the farms and fields 45 metres (148 ft) wide and hundreds meters long, forming a whole shape of sunshine rays.

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