26 Facts About Munio Weinraub

Munio Gitai Weinraub was an Israeli architect, a pioneer of modern architecture and urban and environmental planning in Israel, and one of the most prominent representatives of the Bauhaus heritage in the country.

Munio Weinraub took part in the initial planning of the Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem.

Munio Weinraub's works are designed out of deep social sensitivity and are characterized by minimalist geometry, simple and modest presence and efficient functional planning.

Munio Gitai Weinraub was born in the small town of Szumlany in Galicia and grew up in the city of Bielsko, in Silesia - German-speaking region of Poland.

Munio Weinraub's father was a farm manager in the service of Polish landlords and his mother came from a wealthier background of small industrialists.

Munio Weinraub was the youngest of four sons and his childhood was overshadowed by many hardships during World War I After the war he became a member of the Jewish youth group Hashomer Hatza'ir, a scouting organization that combined nature explorations similar to those of Baden Powell's Boy Scouts in Great Britain, and the romantic tendencies of the German Wandervogel groups, with the study of Zionist and Socialist ideologies.

At the age of eighteen, in 1927, when Munio Weinraub applied for architecture studies at the Bauhaus School in Dessau, it was suggested to him to be first enrolled in the art school Tischlerschule in Berlin, where he studied drawing, perspective, traditional furniture design and more, and gained a deep understanding of the woodwork and carpentry.

Munio Weinraub was then expelled and managed to find refuge in Switzerland, where he worked for the architect Moser in Zurich.

Munio Weinraub maintained close ties with Kibbutz Hashomer Hatzair when he took part in the planning and design of sixteen of the movement's founding points.

In 1949 Munio Weinraub was nominated as the head of the Department of Architecture in the planning office at the Ministry of Labor and Housing, directed by Arieh Sharon.

Munio Weinraub was therefore involved in the initial planning policy-making of Israel.

Munio Weinraub continued his distinguished career on his own, pursuing commissions for socially conscious architecture, working for the labor federation, the kibbutzim, and various educational institutions.

In 35 years of career, Munio Weinraub has established a substantial body of work of some 300 projects, consistently applying the Bauhaus principles and developing them.

Munio Weinraub left behind a number of masterpieces, such as the Hydraulic Institute of the Technion in Haifa.

Munio Weinraub died in Haifa in 1970 at the age of 61, buried in Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk.

Munio Weinraub's work was deceptively simple, meticulously detailed, well-proportioned, sensibly planned, and respectful of the environment.

Munio Weinraub sought to bring to the Jewish settlements in Palestine a transcendent modern architecture that would resist ideological frames and operate neutrally to serve basic human needs through elegance, progressive technology, and infrastructural foresight.

Munio Weinraub was a Functionalist in the best sense of the term.

Munio Weinraub's buildings were composed of simple, well-proportioned volumes that are harmonious with their environments but rarely ostentatious in visual or spatial terms.

Munio Weinraub's was a polite architecture that fit in rather than stuck out.

The creative act in Munio Weinraub's practice was based more on solving the problems of building and dwelling than on striving for stylistic originality.

Such as they tiny cubicle houses in the workers' suburbs of Haifa, to the grander projects of the 1950s, such as the Meiser Institute of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Gitai Munio Weinraub's buildings have a harmonious sense of integration of materials, structure, and spatial organization that conveys the quality of security and wholeness.

Apart from his activities as a designer and architect, Gitai-Munio Weinraub was a furniture designer who created desk and chair designs for some large companies.

Many of the most interesting commissions Munio Weinraub received were tied to the Histadrut's initiatives to promote Hebrew labor.

Munio Weinraub designed some of the industrial buildings of two prominent factories in the field of construction: the Phoenicia glass factory and the Vulcan iron and metal industries, both located in the estuary of the Kishon River in the Haifa Bay area.

Munio Weinraub planned two more factories that enabled the establishment of Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, which sits halfway between Haifa and Acre: the Na'aman Brick and Tile Factory and the Askar Paint and Plaster Company.