Or Aleksandrowicz

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology | technion · Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning

This article traces the history of building climatology research in Israel during the four decades of its emergence, development and consolidation, a period that coincided with a seemingly constant engagement of the local architectural milieu with climatic discourse and climatic design solutions. By the late 1970s, building climatology research was...

This article presents a methodology for the integration of building performance simulation (BPS) into the writing of architectural history. While BPS tools have been developed mainly for design purposes, their current maturity enables to reliably apply them in simulating the performance of past buildings, even when these buildings have been signifi...

This article presents a methodology for evaluating microclimatic summer conditions across an entire city, focusing on the provision of outdoor shade as a primary comfort indicator. Based on high-resolution 2.5D and 3D mapping of buildings, ground, and tree canopies in Tel Aviv-Yafo, a city of hot-summer Mediterranean climate, we employed a detailed...

The rise in air temperature in urban areas has been attracting the attention of urban climate researchers for years now, focusing on the intensity of the so-called Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon. Recently, though, it has been rightly questioned whether the concept of UHI intensity is helpful in assessing mitigation of urban heat stress, especia...

One of the key challenges in urban heat island mitigation is the efficient allocation of resources to the most effective measures and to locations where they are most needed. While our knowledge on the potential of certain heat mitigation measures to reduce urban heat is generally broad and scientifically sound, in many times we still lack effectiv...

Inconsistent temporal definitions of key events in a building's lifecycles, and especially of its "birth" date, usually impede a large-scale, high-resolution analysis of building trends and construction fluxes based on municipal building datasets. This study addresses this shortcoming by proposing a reproducible ontological dating formulation of ma...

This article presents a new methodology for urban-scale prioritisation of shade-inducing operations by quantifying the gap between the use intensity of public transport stops and the solar exposure of the streets leading to them. By cross-referencing a high-resolution dataset of travel ticket validation with shade maps quantifying the average stree...

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon is a leading cause for concern, yet effective mitigation action remains limited. A knowledge circulation failure has long been suggested to exist between scientists and practitioners, though this hypothesis was rarely systematically examined. Here, we investigated this gap using English-language Wikipedia, a p...

Among the many stories that can be told about cities and urban quarters in Israel/Palestine, the history of the Manshiya neighbourhood in Jaffa has attracted disproportional amounts of attention from within academic and non-academic circles since the early 2000s. In most cases, the story begins with the neighbourhood’s macabre end, or, more precise...

The construction industry is one of the main economic sectors in Israel and it is expected to maintain its central position in the coming decades in light of the country's rapid population growth rate. Unlike many developed countries, where the rate of new construction is slow due to low rates of population growth, in Israel, the built-up area doub...

ENVI-met is currently one of the most popular simulation tools of urban microclimates, used by researchers and designers alike. Yet, in recent years some concerns have been raised regarding the software's capability to accurately simulate the effects of solar irradiance on increased heat stress, especially in hot weather conditions. These concerns...

To date, there is a lack of orderly and data-based methods for quantifying, evaluating, and benchmarking street-level outdoor shade in streets and urban public spaces. The lack of such methods impedes the effective design of walkable and liveable outdoors in locations where shading is essential for significantly mitigating outdoor heat stress. To a...

קידום הצללה ברחובות באמצעות עצים, כחלק מרכזי בהתמודדות המרחבית בישראל עם תוצאות ההתחממות העולמית, עומד במרכזה של החלטת ממשלה 1022 מיום 23.1.2022. התוכנית האסטרטגית הלאומית להצללה וקירור במרחב העירוני באמצעות עצים שפרסמו המשרד להגנת הסביבה, המועצה הישראלית לבנייה ירוקה, משרד החקלאות ופיתוח הכפר והמועצה הלאומית לכלכלה בשלהי 2022 כללה כבר הכרה מובלעת...

The occurrence of a cultural transfer of modernist architecture from Europe to British Palestine during the 1930s has become a widely accepted axiom in current architectural historiography. Disagreements do exist on the degree of influence exerted on local architects by each of the central protagonists of the modern movement in architecture or by d...

Climate has played an elusive role in the history of Israeli architecture, as a concept that was talked about and considered, but never fully grappled with, nor confronted. This dual nature towards climate resulted in architectural designs that, while alluding to climatic themes, refrained from analytical design solutions and rigorous, evidence-bas...

Despite the global call for a paradigm shift towards new environmentally conscious urban planning, little has changed in practice, especially in hot climatic regions. This paper helps bridge this gap by introducing an automated parametric workflow for performance driven urban design. The methodology was tested here in the climatic and urban Mediter...

Exposed building technologies can be defined as the fusion of performative and aesthetic aspects of a building envelope in a single, homogenous building part. Such technologies reflect a design approach that rejects the more conventional modern division between the structural elements of a building facade and the external finishes that conceal them...

Between July 1948 and January 1949, the core of Jaffa's and Tel Aviv's urban landscape was subjected to what can be described even today as the most devastating case of urban transformation in the Israeli history. Although coinciding with the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the demolition of major parts of Jaffa's bustling Manshiya quarter was not inflicted...

The application of space syntax to the study of urban history—in this case, that of Tel Aviv and Jaffa (present-day Tel Aviv–Yafo)—can add a valuable, quantifiable component to the understanding of urban processes. However, it also demonstrates that historical spatio-syntactical analysis can prove misleading when interpreted separately from other t...

Tel Aviv is a coastal city of hot and humid climate, exposed to relatively high levels of solar radiation. Such climatic conditions make direct solar radiation a crucial element that negatively affects outdoor thermal comfort between April and October and thus the use of streets and public spaces for a variety of outdoor activities (Shashua-Bar et...

The need to integrate environmental design into the education of architects has been widely recognized in recent years, leading to the development of different pedagogical approaches. While most studies on this challenge are dedicated to the theoretical aspects of creating new pedagogical frameworks, only few examine their implementation in actual...

Double-skin facade (DSF) is regarded as one of the most advanced and promising curtain wall technologies currently available, adopted until recently mainly in cold and temperate climates. Despite their potential for improved thermal performance compared to conventional curtain wall technologies, experience with the application of DSF technology in...

Historical sources, maps, and photographs permit the identification and description of the New Gate of Ottoman period Jaffa, which was located along its southern perimeter wall. While traces of architecture are often mistakenly identified today as elements of the New Gate, the gate was thoroughly destroyed in the late nineteenth century to make way...

A summary of: Aleksandrowicz, O., Vuckovic, M., Kiesel, K. and Mahdavi, A. (2017). Current trends in urban heat island mitigation research: Observations based on a comprehensive research repository (doi:10.1016/j.uclim.2017.04.002)

This paper examines how a cognitive boundary with no physical presence has affected life in the cities of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, not only during its time of existence (1921-1950) but many decades after it was erased from all official documents. In 1921, the national aspirations of Jews in Jaffa, embraced by the local British Mandate government, trigge...

This paper reports on recent final-year undergraduate projects completed at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The final-year studio, which followed the conceptual framework of Research-Based Design, was entitled 'Articulation, Space, and Sustainability', and focused on the adaptation of...

Scientific research on the mitigation of the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon has been growing, reflecting a new awareness from scientists, planning authorities, and governmental bodies to the effects of urban design and planning on UHI summer intensity. This article aims at analysing current research trends on UHI mitigation through a comprehens...

The massive destruction of historic city centres during the Second World War was used, first in Britain and then in the rest of Europe, by contemporary architects and planners for justifying a modernist ‘clean slate’ approach to urban reconstruction; for them, war was ‘a blessing in disguise’ that could be exploited for adopting revolutionary plann...

This study focuses on the design of a university building in Tel Aviv during the 1960's through a combination of building simulation and historical research. The combined methodology was used for tracing the way knowledge in building climatology was implemented by the building's architects during its design, and for assessing the effects of their p...

In Tel Aviv of the 1950s and 1960s, solar protection was hype. Architects loved it: inspired by photographs of the modernist architecture of Brazil, they indulged in the creation of a new architectural idiom in which external shading devices served as the major visual attraction. The ornamental frenzy, justified by climatic considerations, was far...

Since the 1960s the house of Aharon Chelouche, still standing in Neve Tzedek, was widely depicted as the first Jewish house outside Jaffa. According to the commonly accepted narrative, the house was built four years before the establishment of Neve Tzedek, the first Jewish neighborhood outside Jaffa, in what was then uninhabited surroundings. The s...

The discipline of building climatology, which emerged during the first half of the 20th century, combines knowledge in architecture, civil engineering, physiology, meteorology, and physics. It aims at exploring the thermal properties of buildings and the human reaction to thermal conditions created and affected by buildings. Upon its emergence, bui...

A postscript to the Hebrew edition of Reyner Banham's Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment. אחרית דבר למהדורה העברית של ספרו של ריינר בנהאם, ארכיטקטורת הסביבה המתכווננת.

Manshiya was a Jaffa neighborhood that shared a long borderline with the southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv. In the beginning of Israel’s War of Independence it was transformed into an arena of military actions culminating in the IZL operation for the occupation of Jaffa in late April 1948. Following the war, several parties tried to leave the fals...

From the early 1890s until the late 1920s the urban space in northern Jaffa was perceived among Hebrew speakers as consisting of two distinct regions—a southern suburb called “Neveh Shalom” and a northern slum dubbed Harat A-Tanak (Arabic for “Tin Neighborhood”). Jews and Arabs alike resided in both parts, living side by side. Only a few years late...

The imminent threat of destruction and the latent wish for it are both present in the story of the Herzliya Gymnasium’s building from its very beginning. The building was targeted by bold projects which regarded its removal a first, necessary step in the ultimate revolution of Tel Aviv's cityscape, or at least or at least for "breaking out" of its...

Vernacular architecture is believed to integrate certain building features that were developed in a long process of adaptation and adjustment and therefore may embody valuable solutions for maintaining desirable indoor conditions. This claim, however, should not be taken for granted and must be critically examined in different contexts and settings...

The story of the Israeli skyscrapers system of perpetual destruction.

The evolution of construction materials is a whimsical phenomenon, where "advanced" and "primitive" substances and products are used alternately and in parallel, not a linear course in which newer materials continuously replace older ones, inferior in their technical performance. The preference of one construction material over another is always ba...