Sharon Rotbard (

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

: שרון רוטברד; born October 2, 1959), is an Israeli

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

publisher Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

and

author In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...

, senior lecturer at the Architecture department in the

Bezalel Academy Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design () is a public college of design and art located in Jerusalem. Established in 1906 by Jewish painter and sculptor Boris Schatz, Bezalel is Israel's oldest institution of higher education and is considered the ...

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

Biography

Sharon Rotbard was born in

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv-Yafo ( or , ; ), sometimes rendered as Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and usually referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the Gush Dan metropolitan area of Israel. Located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline and with a popula ...

. He studied fine arts between 1982 and 1984 at HaMidrasha Art College with

Raffi Lavie Raffi Lavie (; 23 February 1937 – 7 May 2007) was an educator and music/art critic. Lavie's work is a cross between graffiti and abstract expressionism. Biography Rafael (Raffi) Lavi was born in Tel Aviv, During the British Mandate. He began t ...

, Tamar Getter and Michal Na'aman. Between 1985 and 1991 he studied architecture in Paris at the

École Spéciale d'Architecture The École spéciale d'architecture (ÉSA; formerly École centrale d'architecture) is a private school for architecture at 254, boulevard Raspail in Paris, France. The diploma from the École spéciale d'architecture (DESA), recognized by the St ...

with

Bernard Tschumi Bernard Tschumi (born 25 January 1944 in Lausanne, Switzerland) is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism. Son of the well-known Swiss architect Jean Tschumi and a French mother, Tschumi is a dual French ...

Jean Nouvel Jean Nouvel (; born 12 August 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of ''Mars 1976'' and ''Syndicat de l'Architecture'', France’s first labor union for architects. He has ob ...

and

Paul Virilio Paul Virilio (; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018) was a French Culture theory, cultural theorist, Urban planning, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation ...

Architecture and publishing career

After returning to Israel in 1993, Rotbard worked until 1997 as a project architect a
Yasky and partners
a leading Israeli architectural firm. In 1995, with his wife Amit, he founde
Babel publishers
one of Israel's first independent presses. Since 1998, he has directed the first architecture book series in Israel at Babel and published major architectural classic titles such as

Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , ; ), was a Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture ...

's ''Toward A New Architecture''. In 2000 Rotbard launched the press' website, Israel's first cultural Hebrew website, known today a
''readingmachine''
That same year, Rotbard and Babel moved to a concrete house he designed and built in Shapira neighborhood at the south of Tel Aviv. Since 2004 Rotbard has been directing ''The Library of Babel'', the fiction series of Babel, in which he has published translated titles by

Georges Perec Georges Perec (; 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Ho ...

Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer (20 November 192313 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great ben ...

Michel Houellebecq Michel Houellebecq (; born Michel Thomas on 26 February 1956) is a French author of novels, poems, and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker, and singer. His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. H ...

, Marie Ndiaye,

Thomas Bernhard Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard (; 9 February 1931 – 12 February 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, poet and polemicist who is considered one of the most important German-language authors of the postwar era. He explored themes of death, iso ...

, R.K. Narayan,

Atiq Rahimi Atiq Rahimi () (born 26 February 1962 in Kabul) is a France, French-Afghanistan, Afghan writer and filmmaker. Life Atiq Rahimi was born in 1962 in Kabul to a senior public servant and attended high school in Lycée Esteqlal. Following the Soviet ...

Marek van der Jagt Arnon Yasha Yves Grünberg (; born 22 February 1971) is a Dutch writer of novels, essays, and columns, as well as a journalist. He published some of his work under the heteronym Marek van der Jagt. He lives in New York. His work has been transl ...

Harry Mathews Harry Mathews (February 14, 1930 – January 25, 2017) was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language. Life Born in New York City to an ...

, as well as young Israeli authors. In 2008, Rotbard founded a new architectural practice collective, ''Babel architectures'', which was selected as one of the teams of the

Ordos 100 Ordos may refer to: Inner Mongolia *Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China **Ordos Ejin Horo Airport *Ordos Loop of the Yellow River, a region of China **Ordos Plateau or "the Ordos", land enclosed by Ordos Loop *Ordos Desert, in Inner Mongolia *Ordos M ...

project in Inner Mongolia (China).

Published works

* * * * * * Rotbard's first book ''White City, Black City'' (Hebrew ''עיר לבנה, עיר שחורה''), on

Jaffa Jaffa (, ; , ), also called Japho, Joppa or Joppe in English, is an ancient Levantine Sea, Levantine port city which is part of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, located in its southern part. The city sits atop a naturally elevated outcrop on ...

and

's histories appeared in 2005. The book challenges the official historiography of Tel Aviv and traces its relationship with Jaffa. His second book ''Avraham Yasky, Concrete Architecture'' a monograph on the work of

Avraham Yasky Avraham Yasky (; April 14, 1927 – March 28, 2014) was an Israeli architect. Biography Yasky was born in Chişinău, Romania (now Moldova) on 14 April 1927. He immigrated to the Mandatory Palestine with his family in 1935. Yasky studied at the ...

, was published in 2007. The book traces the history of Israeli architecture through Yasky's career and shows its development from the concrete social architecture of the early Fifties to the commercial architecture of the 21st century.

Awards and recognition

Rotbard is a recipient of the

Graham Foundation The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts is a 501(c)3 non-profit that "fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realize ...

2008 grant and was selected to the Ledig House international writers' Residency program.

Selected projects

* 1991, Europan2, cited project * 1994, Ramat gan Museum of Israeli Art, with Efrat-Kovalsky (unbuilt) * 1997, Rubinstin Towers, with Avraham Yasky and Yossy Sivan * 2000, town houses in South Tel Aviv * 2003, Tel Aviv Museum of Art competition * 2005, Hadera Democratic school competition (2nd prize) * 2009, ORDOS 100 Villa * 2010, South Tel Aviv urban strategic plan, in association with local residents and planners

References