In the very heart of old Tel Aviv, on HaHashmal Street, stands a tower — a silent monument to the time when the city was still learning how to be a city. Its story begins earlier than it seems: before the current reinforced-concrete structure was built in 1925, a stone tower stood here — the original water tower of the **Model Farm**. It was part of a late Ottoman-era vision to create an exemplary agricultural enterprise that would serve as a school and model for Jewish farmers, combining labour with science.

When engineers of a new era arrived in the 1920s, the old stone structure gave way to a new one — modern, rational, and precise. It was built by two men: **Arpad Gut**, a Hungarian engineer who brought reinforced concrete knowledge, and his partner **Berman**, a man almost erased from history. Together, under the firm **Gut & Berman Engineers**, they inscribed their legacy into the fabric of Tel Aviv — in its water towers, industrial buildings, and structural networks.

The HaHashmal tower was more than just a reservoir. At its base once operated a small store called **Sha’ar HaZol**, where locals bought bread, sugar, kerosene, and newspapers. Later, it housed the city’s water department workshop, and during wartime, it served as an observation post. In the 1990s, as Tel Aviv began to turn its gaze back to its past, the tower was restored, and a faint trace of the old lettering remained on its façade — a reminder that everything began with water, light, and the people whose names have nearly vanished with time.

Of **Berman**, no archives remain — no birthplace, no photographs, no date of death. Only a surname in an old technical document, and his invisible mark — in the proportions, the seams of concrete, in the way morning light falls along the tower’s curve. His name is gone, but his work endures — and perhaps that is the most valid form of a city’s memory: to remember those who built it, even when no one recalls where they came from.