Ḥayim Dotan

Ḥayim Dotan was born in 1954 in Jerusalem

Haim Tzvi Dotan was born in 1954 in the Makor Baruch neighborhood of Jerusalem. His father, Hanina Detina, came to the Land of Israel from Ukraine. His mother, Nitzhiya Seidoff, was born in Shanghai, where her family had fled from Bukhara in 1917.

He attended the high school next to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After military service he moved to New York and worked as a jazz dancer. A year later he left dance, worked in construction and studied architecture at the University of Southern California, earning a B.Arch and an M.Arch in architecture and urban design.

After working in Japan and the United States, including his own office in Manhattan, he founded Haim Dotan Architects in Tel Aviv in 1990. A branch opened in Shanghai in 2010. In the 1990s he designed many projects in Ashdod, and his works include the Ashdod culture hall and buildings at Ben-Gurion University and the Technion.

In 2008 he won the tender to design the Israeli pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. In 2016 a glass bridge he designed opened in Zhangjiajie, Hunan, and in 2017 the city made him an honorary citizen. He also writes poetry and received an honorary doctorate in literature in 2017.