ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which an Israeli sense of place is created not only out of the physical and national characteristics of its environment, but also from the voices, sometimes desperate and sometimes discordant, of its people. Hecker's Dubiner House brought something of Israel's heroic desert brutalism into the heart of the suburbs. The flats in Zvi Hecker's Spiral House in Ramat Gan were occupied in 1991 but whether the building was then finished or not is not exactly clear, for it is a structure that has gone on mutating over the decade that has passed. Hecker's Dubiner House entirely conquered the little street it sits over, with its scale and its panache but most of all with its discipline and its platonic conception, the benign carceri of the suburbs. At the close of the decade over which the Spiral House ruled, the Architectural Review returned to Israel to record the changes that had come over Hecker's architecture.
