Alfred Mansfeld


Alfred Mansfeld was an Israeli architect.

Biography

Mansfeld was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1912. While still a child, he moved with his family to Berlin, Germany. He began studying architecture in 1931 at the Technische Hochschule Berlin but, with the rise of the Nazis to power, he moved in 1933 to Paris, France, where he completed his studies in 1935 at the École Spéciale d'Architecture, as a student of the architect, Auguste Perret, a pioneer of concrete construction. In 1935, he emigrated to Mandate Palestine.
From 1937 until 1959 Mansfield worked in partnership with Munio Gitai Weinraub.
Their firm was held in high regard, and by the time the partnership ended, the office was among the largest in Israel. Together, Weinraub and Mansfield won eleven national architecture competitions. Mansfield's winning entry into the design competition for the Israel Museum, submitted without Weinraub, was the catalyst for terminating their partnership. In 1959 Mansfield set up his own practice. Following the dissolution of his partnership with Weinraub, there was a dispute between the pair about the attribution of a number of collaborative projects, as well as their shared archive of work. After Weinraub's death, some of the archive ended up in Paris, and in 2012 Mansfield's descendants successfully petitioned for the work to be returned to Israel, in accordance with Mansfield's wishes.
In 1949, Mansfied joined the faculty of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he taught for over forty years and was Dean of Faculty of Architecture from 1954 to 1956.
Mansfield was the senior partner in the Haifa firm of Mansfeld-Kehat Architects, which he founded, and of which his son, Michael Mansfeld, is a partner.
He died on 15 March 2004, at his home, designed by him, in central Carmel, Haifa, Israel.

Selected projects