To the death of Zvi Hecker

“Zvi Hecker would have wished for his obituary to start with this amusing story. The story took place in 1966, when Hecker was only 35 years old, but he was already an established architect in Israel. He was working with his former teacher Alfred Neumann on modern projects that expressed the dynamics of the newly founded state through their radical forms. He was constructing a town hall in Bat Yam that looked like a concrete flower. In the harsh Negev desert, he built a similarly brutalist military academy that resembled a huge concrete wardrobe with many drawers and doors - next to it stood a synagogue that seemed carved from crystal. It was a new era that allowed for a radical approach.
The mentioned story concerns one such radical building, the aeronautics laboratory of the Technion University in Haifa. Neumann and Hecker designed the laboratory as a large jagged rod, strongly pushing against the slope. A dispute arose between the university and the architects right from the beginning. In 1966, the building owner, due to rising costs, had cheaper skylights installed. However, the architects proposed their own windows that reflected daylight into the laboratories below. The cheaper non-reflective version thus ignored a crucial quality of the entire design.
When all resistance was futile, Hecker and his colleague Henry Hutter got into a car one night. They drove to Haifa, climbed onto the construction site roof, and used two crowbars to destroy all 28 cheap window frames so thoroughly that they could not be repaired. The next day, Hutter and Hecker reported themselves - but not without prior informing the press. This became the “Technion affair” in the Israeli media, and the university reluctantly backed down, with the originally planned windows being used.
This story shows the determination, joy, passion - and perhaps a bit of stubbornness - with which Zvi managed to assert his designs. Compromises disgusted him. In interviews, he would occasionally say that good architecture cannot be legal or that he worked against the will of his clients for 40 years. He also had his typical mischievous, quiet smile.”
At the age of 92, Polish-Israeli architect Zvi Hecker passed away on Sunday, September 24, 2023, whose deconstructivist work left a significant mark not only in post-war Israel. Zvi Tadeusz Hecker came from a legal family that had to flee the Nazi persecution of Jews in occupied Poland to Siberia in 1939, and in 1941 moved to the Uzbek city of Samarkand. After World War II, he returned to his native Krakow, where he studied architecture at the local polytechnic from 1949 to 1950, but later moved to Israel, where he first studied architecture (1950-54) at the Technological Institute in Haifa and later also painting (1955-57) at the Avni Academy of Art in Tel Aviv. After completing military service, he won a competition for the Bat Yam town hall in 1958, which allowed him to establish the architecture office Neumann-Hecker-Sharon with his former classmate Eldar Sharon and his teacher Alfred Neumann, which operated in this composition until 1964 when Eldar joined his father’s office. He participated in urban planning in Tel Aviv, Montreal, and Philadelphia. In 1968, after Neumann's death, he opened his own architecture office and operated a second office in Berlin from 1991. Since 1959, he served as a teacher at several universities around the world. He was a member of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Israel and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Zvi Hecker last visited the Czech Republic in the autumn of 2019, when he presented his exhibition House Neumeister at the Winternitz Villa.