Zvi Hecker Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Zvi Hecker (1931-2023) was a Polish-born Israeli architect and artist whose buildings are built from geometry: polyhedra, spirals and the petals of a sunflower. His works include the Bat Yam City Hall, the Spiral Apartment House in Ramat Gan, the Palmach Museum in Tel Aviv and, in Berlin, where he later lived, the Heinz Galinski School.

Kraków, Samarkand and Haifa

Hecker was born in Kraków in 1931 and spent the war years in Samarkand. He studied architecture in Kraków and at the Technion in Haifa, as well as painting at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv.

Geometry in Israel

With Alfred Neumann and Eldar Sharon he designed the Bat Yam City Hall (1963), an inverted pyramid of polyhedral forms. His Spiral Apartment House in Ramat Gan (1981-1989) twists upwards in stone-clad segments, and the Palmach Museum in Tel Aviv (1998), with Rafi Segal, is built around the existing trees of its site.

Berlin

The Heinz Galinski School in Berlin (1995), the first Jewish school built in Germany since the war, is planned like a sunflower. He also built the Jewish Community Centre in Duisburg (1999) and later lived and worked in Berlin, where he died in 2023.