(b Palestine, 28 June 1931). Israeli architect, teacher and urban planner. He graduated from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), Haifa, in 1954, winning two housing competitions in that year. His early influences were the post-war architecture of Le Corbusier and then the architects who developed New Brutalism, including Peter and Alison SMITHSON. This brand of Modernism, with its austere Minimalist appearance and total exposure of materials, particularly concrete, was viewed as appropriate for the socialist-oriented and economically straitened Israel of that time. Other related early influences were traditional Japanese architecture and Louis Kahn’s notion of servant and served parts of a building. In 1966 Eytan was appointed professor of architecture at the Technion, and in the late 1960s he demonstrated his assimilation of his early influences in both housing and public buildings, most notably in the Tel Aviv Museum (1965–70) and the Mexico Building (1968) for the Arts Department of Tel Aviv University, both with Yitzhak Yashar (b 1921). In both buildings the structural skeleton and the servicing parts, especially the lift and stair towers of the museum, are clearly expressed in rough exposed concrete. The wall infill consists of slabs of white marble in the museum, and, in the Mexico Building, rough brown–grey cobblestones or glass. This clear distinction between structure and infill is also manifest in his buildings in Jerusalem, notably the National Police Headquarters (1970), the City Tower (1972) and Clal Centre (1972–80) office blocks and the Faculty of Social Sciences (1975) at the Hebrew University. In these the infill is glazed or of stone or marble, to comply with a city bye-law. During a period of greater national affluence in the 1980s, with his new partner Eri Goshen (b 1945), Eytan shifted to an extensive use of glazed curtain walls, mainly for office buildings in Tel Aviv, and later towards Post-modernism, for example in the Tel Aviv University Gallery (completed 1987; with Bracha Chyutin (b 1950)). Here he included a peach-coloured curving wall and false columns in what is nevertheless a restrained and clearly planned design. His extensive urban planning includes projects in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Iran, where his office planned, designed and supervised the construction of the new towns Bandar-e Abbas and Bushehr (1972–7).

• Eytan, Dan
  • Israel, §II: Architecture