Tel Aviv is known as the "White City" because most of the city’s buildings are white and exemplify the International/Bauhaus style of simplistic facades! Tel Aviv has the world’s largest collection (over 4,000 buildings) of International/Bauhaus style architecture. This modern style of functionality and lack of adornment, includes: massive balconies to capture Mediterranean breezes, small ribbon windows to minimize heat, building pillars and flat roofs to be used as an outdoor social space. Dozens of architects were commissioned to build a “new city” for the tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe between 1920-1940. The most influential European architects selected were six German Jews who had studied architecture at the Bauhaus school in Germany.