Plus ça change, but Tel Aviv is more than a city: It's an idea made manifest in bricks and concrete. The city as statement is a perennial theme: Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703 as his window on the West; Brasília and Islamabad, the new capitals of Brazil and Pakistan, respectively, were built in the 1950s and 1960s as modern, inland replacements for coastal Rio de Janeiro and Karachi. But Tel Aviv had an even greater responsibility: It was the world's first Hebrew city since the Jews' Roman exile (the earlier Zionist settlements, such as Petach Tikva, were primarily agricultural). As Koestler wrote: "It grew in hectic jumps according to each new wave of immigration—an island of asphalt and concrete advancing over the dunes," its inhabitants "carried by a wave of enthusiasm which had a crest and no trough." Even now, the crests grow ever higher and there is no sign of trough, for the story of Tel Aviv is that of Israel itself.

We are sitting on the terrace at Cantina, a Mediterranean bar and restaurant on Rothschild Boulevard where Tel Aviv insiders like to meet and greet. It's 10 p.m. and I'm dining with Amnon Rechter and Shlomzion Kenan, the son and the daughter of two of Tel Aviv's most renowned families. This is the heart of old Tel Aviv, its wide green islands flanked by International Style apartment houses. It was on this street in April 1909 that the new Jewish neighborhood, then known as Ahuzat Bayit, was founded. Plot number 43 became 16 Rothschild Boulevard, home to the city's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. In 1932, Dizengoff donated the house to the city, and it became the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. And there, in May 1948, David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel.

Amnon is an architect, like his father and grandfather. Ze'ev Rechter came to Palestine, as it was then called, in 1919 from Russia on the S.S. Ruslan, often dubbed Israel's Mayflower for the number of future eminent Israelis it brought. Among them was Rosa Cohen, mother of Yitzhak Rabin, the first native-born Israeli prime minister, who was killed by a Jewish extremist in 1995 for making peace with the Palestinians. Rechter designed the layout and route of Allenby Street, the spine of the city (named for the British general who captured Palestine from the Turks), which stretches north from the seashore. Inspired by Le Corbusier, Ze'ev Rechter and his fellow modernists fought a battle with the conservative city establishment to build Bauhaus-influenced "six-sided" buildings to house the Jewish immigrants pouring in from Russia and Europe. That is, four walls but on pilotis, or columns, to open up a communal area by the entrance, with balconies and flat roofs for laundry, sunbathing, and evening socializing. This became known as the International Style.

Rechter won, and it's partly thanks to him that Tel Aviv enjoys the largest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings—about four thousand—in the world. Modernism was a natural choice for the early Zionist settlers. Many were strongly influenced by communism and its asceticism. Tel Aviv's open, democratic architecture was both a statement and a reaction to the traditional closed Jewish quarters, the ghettos of Eastern Europe and the mellahs of the Middle East. The White City, as its historic heart is known, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. But this was a battle about more than construction techniques: If environment shapes personalities, both of peoples and of cities, it's also thanks to Rechter and the other modernist pioneers that Tel Aviv is Israel's cultural capital as well as its most easygoing city. And safest: Violent crime is almost unheard of. The cityscape is now marred by brutal tower blocks, but for decades there were no buildings higher than five or six floors, giving Tel Aviv a uniquely human scale, says Amnon Rechter. "My grandfather looked around and said, We have wind and we have shade, so let's elevate everything. We can use the space under the buildings, with a semi-public garden and a place for children to play. This makes Tel Aviv very egalitarian and very light. You are not intimidated by the buildings as you walk. The street, the gardens, even the roofs—everything is within reach."