Publication

  • Space Packed: The Architecture of Alfred Neumann
    Rafi Segal
    Author
    Park Books, 2017
  • GRANTEE
    Rafi Segal
    GRANT YEAR
    2012

Alfred Neumann, Zvi Hecker, architects, Synagogue at Officers School Training Base I, 1968–69, Mitzpeh Ramon, Israel.

Space Packed: The Architecture of Alfred Neumann is the first-ever monograph on the work of Alfred Neumann (1900–1968). Educated in Brno and Vienna in the 1920s, Neumann gained international recognition for his highly original architecture in Israel in the 1960s that departed from the canonical International Style of modern architecture from this time. Eschewing functionalist and orthogonal expressions, Neumann instead conceived of architecture as spatial patterning, and appropriated polyhedral geometries as a formal vocabulary to address the issues of humanism in architecture and to integrate built forms into environmental conditions. His oeuvre constitutes another strand of modernism that anticipated concerns that remain central to architectural discourse today.

Rafi Segal, architect and scholar, received his PhD from Princeton University and his MSc and BArch from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. His practice, based in New York, is involved in professional and research work on both the architectural and urban scale. Among his projects are  the Ashdod Museum of Art, Israel; the Kitgum Peace Museum and War Archive, Uganda; Villa 003, inner-Mongolia, China; and the MoMA exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. Segal is coauthor of Cities of Dispersal (Wiley and Sons, 2008); Territories Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (KW, Walther Konig, 2003); and A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (Verso, Babel, 2003). He has lectured widely and exhibited internationally at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City; KunstWerk, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunsthall, Malmo; the University of California; and others. He teaches architecture and urban design at the Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and is visiting professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture.