Sharon Rotbard (Hebrew שרון רוטברד) (born Tel Aviv, Israel, October 2, 1959),[1] is an Israeli architect,[2] publisher and author, senior lecturer at the Architecture department in the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem.
Rotbard studied fine arts between 1982 and 1984 at HaMidrasha art college with Rafi Lavi, Tamar Getter and Michal Na'aman. Between 1985 and 1991 he studied architecture in Paris at the École Spéciale d'Architecture with Bernard Tschumi, Jean Nouvel and Paul Virilio.
After returning to Israel in 1993, Rotbard worked until 1997 as a project architect at Yasky and partners, a leading Israeli architectural firm.
In 1995, with his wife Amit, he founded Babel publishers, one of Israel's first independent press. Since 1998, he has directed the first architecture book series in Israel at Babel and published major architectural classic titles such as Le Corbusier's Toward A New Architecture, Adolf Loos' writings, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour's Learning From Las Vegas and Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman censured catalogue A Civilian Occupation: the politics of Israeli Architecture (co-published in English with Verso Books and in French with Les Editions de l'imprimeur).
In 2000 Sharon Rotbard launched the press' website, Israel's first cultural Hebrew website, known today as readingmachine. That same year, Rotbard and Babel moved to a concrete house he designed and built in Shapira neighborhood at the south of Tel Aviv.
Since 2004 Rotbard has been directing The Library of Babel, the fiction series of Babel, in which he has published translated titles by Georges Perec, Nadine Gordimer, Michel Houellebecq, Marie Ndiaye, Thomas Bernhard, R.K. Narayan, Atiq Rahimi, Marek van der Jagt, Harry Mathews, as well as young Israeli authors like Dror Burstein, Assaf Schur, Ben Vered, Daniel Stavru and Dvir Tsur.
Rotbard's first book White City, Black City (Hebrew עיר לבנה, עיר שחורה), on Jaffa and Tel Aviv's histories appeared in 2005 and was widely acclaimed by the Israeli press and by the Israeli public. The book challenges the official historiography of Tel Aviv that gained its inscription in the World Heritage sites' list of UNESCO, and demystifies its Bauhaus urban legend and its narrative of a White City that had emerged on the dunes. White City, Black City traces a new history of Jaffa and Tel Aviv and shows not only how the relationships between the two cities has been at the very origin of the Middle East Conflict, but also "how History can change the Geography".
Sharon Rotbard's second book Avraham Yasky, Concrete Architecture (Hebrew אברהם יסקי, אדריכלות קונקרטית), a vast monograph on the work of Avraham Yasky, one of Israel’s leading architects, was published in 2007. The book traces the history of Israeli architecture through Yasky's career and shows its development from the concrete social architecture of the early Fifties to the commercial architecture of the 21st century.
In 2008, Rotbard founded a new architectural practice collective, Babel architectures, which was selected as one of the teams of the Ordos 100 project in Inner Mongolia (China).
Sharon Rotbard is a recipient of the Graham Foundation 2008 grant and was selected to the Ledig House international writers' Residency program.