Letter from[ldots] TEL AVIV.

Israel's architecture is intensely heated in the pressurized crucible of a small society 'perpetually on the verge of hysteria'. Timothy Brittain-Catlin contrasts Israel's heroic period with the less clear cut and perhaps more petty-minded professional atmosphere today. Yet the country sometimes produces memorable architecture and buildings which distil the noblest aspects of the nation's culture.

Most characteristics of Israeli culture are derived from the fact that the country is so small that everyone can feel part of the national daily adventures. One occurrence last summer will serve to illustrate something of what that entails. During an all-night session of the Israeli parliament, a caller identifying himself as a hospital doctor notified the speaker of the Israeli parliament that a prominent member, currently hospitalized for a minor matter, had suddenly died. Eulogies and prayers were immediately instigated on a grand scale, and only later it emerged that the call was a hoax. Breathless television and radio updates the following days described how the police leapt on a convivial old couple who had, to their misfortune, put through a call to the parliament earlier that fateful night; it was only after their thorough humiliation in the press that the culprit was revealed as a famous transvestite and campaigner for prostitutes' rights, who explained that lack of public attention to himself was ca using him personal distress. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be an acquaintance of the distinguished parliamentarian, the humiliated grandparents, or of the famous transvestite.

This bizarre little story illustrates so well what a well-known columnist here calls 'the public psychodrama' of a nation 'perpetually on the verge of hysteria', a country which had recently won both prizes of international camp: Eurovision and Miss World. It's therefore appropriate that the nature of public space should be a popular theme for architectural debate. The Israeli street is a chaotic place, and the architectural profession has added its own hazards: sprawling building sites, and crooked and vulgar finishes. Worst of all, a regulation requires developers wanting to maximize building rights to build balconies at two floor intervals only, or in zigzags across the facade: the result can only be described as revolting.

And yet Israel in fact has at certain periods built some very fine public structures; with no old palaces or cathedrals, its museums and law courts must play the part of the major civic monument, and consequently some fairly recent architecture already assumes the role of national heritage. A current debate concerns the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The building was designed in 1959 by Alfred Mansfeld with the interior designer Dora Gad, and developed over the next 20 years or so in accordance with the architect's original principles: white stone pavilions of various sizes grouped over the brow of a hill in the centre of the city, supposedly in the manner of an Arab village (one of which was largely demolished to build the government centre nearby). Thanks to a foreign donor, James Freed was recently commissioned to design a new entrance pavilion.

Freed's original design looked like some kind of biblical shrine, with a pair of wings poised over a huge cube: since it added merely an entrance pavilion and shop, it appeared out of scale. His revised proposal is lower and broader, but will still dominate the overall composition. Mansfeld claims that the museum management is treating him with contempt; he has many on his side, including the only architectural critic writing regularly in a national daily newspaper.

It looks, from an outside perspective, like a nostalgia argument; the austerity of Mansfeld's design is a metaphor for the vanished high-mindedness of public life here. That's an unrealistically rosy picture of the past. Mansfeld's partner, Gad, was one of a group of designers, some of them with friends in high places, who supplanted the vastly more talented Yosef Klarwein in the design of the parliament building, following a competition which Klarwein had won: behaviour that in retrospect looks scarcely ethical, Some distinguished architects publicly support Freed. The most prominent of these is David Reznik, who, not long after arriving in the country in the 1950s designed, with his mentor Heinz Rau, the only synagogue of any architectural distinction in the whole country, and possibly the only building here that could be described as magical. Reznik sees Freed as a first class architect by international standards who should be given the chance to design in Jerusalem; in any case, he adds, the current buil ding functions badly for the visiting public, who are greeted by a perfunctory entranceway surrounded by a large car park. A younger architect, Hillel Schocken, the designer of some sophisticated stone-clad buildings in Jerusalem, echoes Reznik's support for Freed, but is sceptical that the new scheme will succeed in rooting the museum to its floating, non-urban location.

Another well-known foreign architect to have found himself under attack here is Mario Botta (with Israeli associates Zucker Shiran) who recently completed here the Zymbalista Synagogue on the campus of Tel Aviv University. Stone clad in an environment of concrete, the building takes the form of two large cylinders set together, like two chimneys or the two Tablets of the Law. The profession locally seems to have reacted with indifference or hostility to a work of the highest constructional standards. The former university architect declared that the new building was a 'red elephant': perhaps it showed up the locals' inability to deal with atrocious workmanship, or to detail something properly.

And yet there are some magnificent exceptions. David Guggenheim, Jerusalem born and Israeli trained, has, with Daniel Mintz, recently completed the International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem, displaying a fine grasp of stone detailing and a rare romantic sense of location which echoes the heroic vision of the country's founding generation without being anachronistic. A talented younger generation and a clientele which have travelled abroad and have seen and require higher standards will, in time, start to create a real architectural culture for this rollercoaster nation, this dizzying and frantic society. Look at Hecker's 'Palmach House' in Tel Aviv: its rising crests of stone and concrete seem to invoke the limestone ridge, characteristic of the Israeli coast, wrenched angrily out of the ground. It's a monument rather than a building, architecture as art, in Loosian terms; it is superb, and it is something that belongs utterly here.

Timothy Brittain-catlin is a British-Israeli architect who works and teaches in Isreal, and is a frequent correspondent to The Architectural Review.