Dan Darin-Drabkin was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1939. He was educated at Tidon Hadash High School, Tel Aviv and undertook his National Service with the Israeli Army from 1958-60, including nine months on a parachute commandos’ course. Prior to this he appears to have spent six months as a researcher at the Housing Department of the Israeli Ministry of Labour. By the time he applied to join the Architectural Association’s five-year Diploma course in London, in 1960, he had also travelled extensively in France, Italy, Switzerland and the UK. Dan Darin made rapid progress through the AA and as part of his Fifth year’s studies elected to join the AA’s Department of Tropical Studies, where he teamed up with classmate Emil Simeloff, to work on a project to design a development plan for a new town at Eliat, in the Gulf of Aqaba, Israel. A letter in the AA Archives reveals that the ambitious scale of the project (and the fact that Darin’s car, containing a draft thesis, had been stolen) meant that the students were permitted additional time to complete the work, formally graduating a year later, in 1966. A set of 21 photographs of the presentation panels for the work are preserved in the AA Archives. Details of Dan Darin’s immediate career, after leaving the AA are not known to us but he appears to have entered the architecture graduate programme at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969. Subsequently, he was amongst the co-founders of the of the International Center for Land Policy Studies (ICLPS), where he was Director of Documentation and Publications, from 1985. He was also closely involved in Tel Aviv politics since the early 1970s and has written extensively on taxation and land policies. He was elected to the Tel Aviv Municipal Council in 1989, serving as Deputy Mayor in charge of planning, building and infrastructure from 1993-1998. Alongside his involvement in politics, Dan Darin has maintained a private practice.
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