Location: Technion Haifa
Arranged & Described by: Neta Feniger
Further information: Ruth Enis Finding Aid

Ruth Enis is a pioneering Israeli landscape architect, teacher and historian. Professor Ruth Enis was born in Cernauti, Romania in 1928. In 1937, she emigrated to British Mandate Palestine with her family. During a family visit to Europe in 1939, World War II broke out and young Enis was unable to leave the continent again, and was deported to a labour camp in the Ukraine. Only in 1943 did she return to Palestine, where in 1954 she was one of the first women to receive a B.Arch from the faculty of Architecture at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. After an extended professional stay in The Hague between 1958-1965, where she acted as chief landscape architect of the city (1960-1964), she opened a private landscape architecture practice in Haifa with projects across Israel. In 1970, she began her academic career, teaching at the Technion, developing a curriculum for a landscape architecture program at this school, and heading this program for many years.

The materials in this collection reflect Enis’ work as a scholar, teacher, and as a practitioner of landscape architecture. It displays her work as a professor of landscape architecture in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, her devotion to research and teaching the history of landscape architecture in general and in Israel in particular. Her most important historical studies are on landscape in Kibbutzim, and on a large number of Israeli graduates from the Ahlem Agriculture and Horticulture School in Germany and their vital impact on the Zionist creation of designed landscapes. The collection also holds Enis’ professional work as a landscape designer, revealing her involvement in the creation of the Israeli landscape, especially her planning of school yards and Kibbutzim landscapes.