Sharon Rotbard (born 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...

, Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, October 2, 1959), is an Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

, publisher and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, senior lecturer at the Architecture department in the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem.

Rotbard studied fine arts between 1982 and 1984 at HaMidrasha art college with Rafi Lavi, Tamar Getter

Tamar Getter

Tamar Getter is one of the prominent artists of the Israeli avant-garde and fine arts teachers.- Biography :Getter studied with Raffi Lavie in 1971-1972, and soon after began to exhibit her works and gain recognition as a promising young Israeli artists. Her subjects were mythical, such as the...

 and Michal Na'aman

Michal Na'aman

Michal Na'aman is an Israeli artist.- Biography :Michal Na'aman is a painter. Lives and works in Tel Aviv. Michal Na'aman belongs to a group of young artists who emerged in the early 1970s, and who are today at the forefront of Israeli art...

. Between 1985 and 1991 he studied architecture in Paris at the École Spéciale d'Architecture

École Spéciale d'Architecture

The École Spéciale d'Architecture is a private school for architecture at 254, boulevard Raspail in Paris, France.The school was founded in 1865 by engineer Emile Trélat as reaction against the educational monopoly of Beaux-Arts architecture...

 with Bernard Tschumi

Bernard Tschumi

Bernard Tschumi is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism. Born of French and Swiss parentage, he works and lives in New York and Paris. He studied in Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he received his degree in architecture in 1969...

, Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel 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...

 and Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....

.

After returning to Israel in 1993, Rotbard worked until 1997 as a project architect at Yasky and partners, a leading Israeli architectural firm.

In 1995, with his wife Amit, he founded Babel publishers, one of Israel's first independent press. Since 1998, he has directed the first architecture book series in Israel at Babel and published major architectural classic titles such as Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...

's Toward A New Architecture, Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos

Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was a Moravian-born Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau...

' writings, Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States...

' The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is a greatly influential book on the subject of urban planning in the 20th century...

, Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi

Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. is an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major figures in the architecture of the twentieth century...

, Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown, is an architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia...

 and Steven Izenour

Steven Izenour

Steven Izenour was an American architect, urbanist and theorist. He is best known as co-author, with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown of Learning from Las Vegas, one of the most influential architectural theory books of the twentieth century. He was also principal in the Philadelphia firm...

's Learning From Las Vegas and Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman

Eyal Weizman

Eyal Weizman is an Israeli intellectual and architect. Involved in political theory through the case of Palestine, Weizman's most known theoretical work describes the acts of the Israeli army as founded upon the post-structuralist French philosophers and a reading of them...

 censured catalogue A Civilian Occupation: the politics of Israeli Architecture (co-published in English with Verso Books

Verso Books

Verso Books is a publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left Review. The company claims "global sales approaching $3 million per year and over 350 titles in print," possibly making it "the largest radical publisher in the English-language...

 and in French with Les Editions de l'imprimeur).

In 2000 Sharon Rotbard launched the press' website, Israel's first cultural Hebrew website, known today as 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

Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...

, Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and political activist. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".Her writing has long dealt...

, Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq , born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1958—or 1956 —on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French author, filmmaker and poet. To admirers he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire;...

, Marie Ndiaye

Marie NDiaye

Marie NDiaye is a French novelist and playwright. She published her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, when she was only 17 and she won the Prix Femina in 2001 for her novel Rosie Carpe...

, Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.- Life :Thomas Bernhard was...

, R.K. Narayan, Atiq Rahimi

Atiq Rahimi

Atiq Rahimi is a French-Afghan writer and film-maker.-Life:He was born in 1962 in Kabul to a senior public servant and attended high school in Lycée Esteqlal...

, Marek van der Jagt, Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews is an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays.-Life:Born in New York City to an upper class family, Mathews was educated at private schools there and at the Groton School in Massachusetts before enrolling at Princeton University in 1947...

, as well as young Israeli authors like Dror Burstein, Assaf Schur, Ben Vered, Daniel Stavru and Dvir Tsur.

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

Jaffa

Jaffa is an ancient port city believed to be one of the oldest in the world. Jaffa was incorporated with Tel Aviv creating the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. Jaffa is famous for its association with the biblical story of the prophet Jonah.-Etymology:...

 and 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...

's histories appeared in 2005 and was widely acclaimed by the Israeli press and by the Israeli public. The book challenges the official historiography of Tel Aviv that gained its inscription in the World Heritage sites' list of UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

, and demystifies its Bauhaus

Bauhaus

', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...

 urban legend and its narrative of a White City that had emerged on the dunes. White City, Black City traces a new history of Jaffa and Tel Aviv and shows not only how the relationships between the two cities has been at the very origin of the Middle East

Middle East

The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...

 Conflict, but also "how History can change the Geography".

Sharon Rotbard's second book Avraham Yasky, Concrete Architecture (Hebrew אברהם יסקי, אדריכלות קונקרטית), a vast monograph on the work of Avraham Yasky, one of Israel’s leading architects, 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.

In 2008, Rotbard founded a new architectural practice collective, Babel architectures, which was selected as one of the teams of the Ordos 100 project in Inner Mongolia (China).

Sharon Rotbard is a recipient of the Graham Foundation 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