Richard Kauffmann (1887–1958) was a German-Jewish architect who migrated to Palestine in 1920. His architecture was influenced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a proponent of the International Style, and was applied to the local landscape, laying the architectural groundwork for the nascent State of Israel and the White City, as Tel Aviv's International Style architecture became known.

The White City is a collection of over 4,000 buildings in Tel Aviv from the 1930s built in a unique form of the International Style, commonly known as Bauhaus, by German Jewish architects who fled to the British Mandate of Palestine from Germany after the rise to power of the Nazis. Tel Aviv has the largest number of buildings in the Bauhaus/International Style of any city in the world. Preservation, documentation, and exhibitions have brought attention to Tel Aviv's collection of 1930s architecture. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed Tel Aviv's White City a World Cultural Heritage site, as "an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century." The citation recognized the unique adaptation of modern international architectural trends to the cultural, climatic, and local traditions of the city. Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv organizes regular architectural tours of the city.