Tel Aviv is a modern city that hides its charm behind dusty streets, and rather than following one of these architecture tours I can't but suggest to visiors to just walk randomly through the city, even going into streets that aren't on the tours' list because suprises are at every corner. The other reason is that these
dusty box buildings that were certainly built in hurry in the late 1940s' and 1950s'
also deserve interest, they're not just the equivalent here of soviet-era architecture but they also perspire this middle-eastern relaxed feel where perople don't care too much of aesthetics.
The French novelist Pierre Loti who travelled extensively in the East [Orient] wrote somewhere that the Orient begins where people stop maintaining buildings and there's some truth in this, we in the West put an oversized emphasis on real estate as these bricks and stones were part of ourselves while in the East people have a more relaxed approach. That's my interpretation of why buildings are often dusty and messy in Tel Aviv, you can see all kind of stuff on balconies and walls, flags, posters, empty flowerpots, AC units, anything, and that's part of the charm, I hope the gentrification of the town with all these expensive buildings will spare the dusty mess or Tel Aviv would loose some thing authentic.
These random pictures give you a glimpse of what Tel Aviv looks like for real, you have of course lots of Bauhaus marvels that have been renovated but also older buildings and other, dusty and more vulgar ones that were clearly just built hastily with the quality of cement that was then available.
