Biography

Avraham Yaski was born in Chişinău

Chisinau

Chișinău is the capital and largest municipality of Moldova. It is also its main industrial and commercial centre and is located in the middle of the country, on the river Bîc...

, Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

 (now in Moldova

Moldova

Moldova , officially the Republic of Moldova is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe, located between Romania to the West and Ukraine to the North, East and South. It declared itself an independent state with the same boundaries as the preceding Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, as part...

) on 14 April 1927 and moved to the British Mandate of Palestine with his family in 1935. Yaski studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Early in his career he worked in the office of Arieh Sharon

Arieh Sharon

Arieh Sharon was an Israeli architect and winner of the Israel Prize for Architecture in 1962—the first in this discipline. Sharon was a critical contributor to the early architecture in Israel and the leader of the first master plan of the young state, reporting to then Prime Minister, David...

. At the age of 25 he made the plans for Rabin Square

Rabin Square

Rabin Square , formerly Kings of Israel Square , is the largest open public city square in central Tel Aviv, Israel. Over the years it has been the site of numerous political rallies, parades, and other public events...

 with Shimon Povsner, and later the Tel Aviv City Hall on the square. Early works by Yaski, such as the "quarter-kilometer apartments" of 1960 with Amnon Alexandroni, were primarily of concrete

Concrete

Concrete is a composite construction material, composed of cement and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate , water and chemical admixtures.The word concrete comes from the Latin word...

.

In 1965, Avraham Yaski founded the architectural firm now known as Moore Yaski Sivan Architects

Moore Yaski Sivan Architects

Moore Yaski Sivan Architects is one of the largest and more influential architecture firms in Tel Aviv and Israel in general. It was founded in 1965 by Avraham Yaski, and has been involved in some of the most high-profile skyscraper projects in the country, such as the Azrieli Center, YOO Towers...

. From 1987 to 1991 he was an assistant professor at the Technion. In 1994, he established the school of architecture at Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv University is a public university located in Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel. With nearly 30,000 students, TAU is Israel's largest university.-History:...

 where he was the head of the department until 1998. As of 2006, Moore Yaski Sivan Architects is the largest architecture firm in Israel with 73 employees. With this firm, Yaski contributed significantly to the urban development of Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...

. Projects such as the Azrieli Center

Azrieli Center

Azrieli Center is a complex of skyscrapers in Tel Aviv. At the base of the center lies a large shopping mall. The center was originally designed by Israeli-American architect Eli Attia, and after he fell out with the developer of the center David Azrieli , completion of the design was passed on to...

 created a chapter in the city's architectural history that highlighted the skyscraper

Skyscraper

A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building of many stories, often designed for office and commercial use. There is no official definition or height above which a building may be classified as a skyscraper...

 and skyline

Skyline

A skyline is the overall or partial view of a city's tall buildings and structures consisting of many skyscrapers in front of the sky in the background. It can also be described as the artificial horizon that a city's overall structure creates. Skylines serve as a kind of fingerprint of a city, as...

. Later work by Yaski shifted somewhat from the use of concrete, in the era of brutalist architecture

Brutalist architecture

Brutalist architecture is a style of architecture which flourished from the 1950s to the mid 1970s, spawned from the modernist architectural movement.-The term "brutalism":...

, to a brilliant architecture emphasising glass

Glass

Glass is an amorphous solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives...

, "[a]nd yet, he unhesitatingly points to the "gray years" of building the country with exposed concrete - of which he made such widespread and amazing use - as the best period of his life and in the life of Israeli architecture."

Further reading

• Sharon Rotbard
  Sharon Rotbard
  Sharon Rotbard , is an Israeli architect, publisher and author, senior lecturer at the Architecture department in the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem....
  
  , Avraham Yasky, Concrete Architecture (Hebrew אברהם יסקי, אדריכלות קונקרטית), Tel Aviv: Babel, 2007

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients