(b Odessa, 14 July 1891; d Tel Hashomer, nr Tel Aviv, 29 Jan 1965). Israeli architect, theorist, teacher and military strategist. He studied at the Technische Hochschule, Karlsruhe, where he qualified as an architect in 1922. He settled in Palestine in 1923 and taught from 1926 in the Department of Architecture at the Technion, Haifa, as an assistant to Alexander Baerwald. His first independent designs in Palestine were in Haifa: Beit Hapoalim (‘workers’ house’; 1926) and the adjacent 2000-seat amphitheatre (1927). They were composed in an austere and restrained early modernist style evocative of the Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann and contrasting emphatically with existing Romantic eclectic architecture. In 1928 he won the competition for the National Institutions Building in Jerusalem, designed with an articulate, classical plan tempered by an early modern language in local stone; it is still considered his most significant contribution to the development of a local modernist style. The Kupat Holim Building (1929–30; with Baerwald), Haifa, approaches European avant-garde Functionalism and assured Ratner’s place as a pioneer of modernism in Israel, with such architects as Richard Kauffman and Ze’ev Rechter. In 1930 Ratner was appointed head of the School of Architecture at the Technion, and he subsequently devoted much of his energies to architectural education. He was particularly interested in the debate surrounding the search for an Israeli national style in architecture. He rejected the idea of using vernacular motifs, remaining faithful to a modernism that would gradually be modified, he believed, by local considerations of climate, construction techniques and social factors. These trends find their clearest expression in the Aeronautics Building (1951–4) at the Technion, Haifa, and in Ratner’s designs for S’de Boker (1960), near Beersheba.