Yaakov Rechter

1924–2001 · Israeli · 4 buildings on the wall

Yaakov Rechter (1924–2001) was an Israeli architect of what has been called the second generation of Israeli architecture, who exposed raw concrete where his father's generation had used smooth white stucco. Born in Tel Aviv, the son of the architect Ze'ev Rechter, he served in Britain's Royal Air Force during the Second World War while studying at the Technion, and joined his father's office in 1952. Influenced by Le Corbusier, he said of concrete that it "is certainly not local, but it's authentic in every sense."

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Heichal HaTarbut (Charles Bronfman Auditorium) in Tel Aviv (1957) was designed with his father and Dov Karmi. The Mivtachim Sanitarium (ELMA Arts Complex and Hotel) in Zikhron Ya'akov (1969), built for the Histadrut labour federation, floats its rooms in a serpentine line along the crown of a hill; it won him the Israel Prize in 1972, and after it closed his son Amnon turned it into a hotel. Atarim Square in Tel Aviv (1975), a brutalist complex of shops and restaurants on two levels, declined after criminal elements took over its shops in the late 1970s.

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