Article source: Yoram Shilo and Yael Benaroya
Client: The Neopharm Group was established in 1941 and dealt in providing integrated solutions for the medical field – production, marketing and commerce in pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, parallel to a specialization in cleaning soil and water by means of advanced biological technologies.
Architects: Yoram Shilo and Yael Benaroya, established their joint firm in Tel Aviv seven years ago. Both of them are graduates of architecture schools in New York – Benaroya of Cooper Union and Shilo of Columbia.
More than anything else, the ‘Razel Residence’ is the house of its residents; The colorful house with the spectacular appearance reflects its owners character in the most precise way – open and vivid, modest and true to its way, inspired by art and music.
The Polonsky Academy building is situated on the cliff facing south towards the Jerusalem Theater. Its northern side faces the Main Garden Court which will function as the heart of the campus in the new master plan. This court has two levels, with a one storey differential between them which makes it possible to create two entrances to the structure on different levels: main entrance near the Van Leer Institute and secondary entrance near the Council for Higher Education.
Designed by James Carpenter Design Associates, New York, to resonate with Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad’s original campus plan, the renovated campus features new visitor facilities and public spaces that allow for an integrated experience of the Museum’s art and archeology, landscape and architecture.
House Y was planned for a family with 3 adolescent children, and privacy aspects played an important role in the design.
The lot is large, sloped, and has attractive open views. We placed the house in the middle of a huge garden, lower than the street level so it is almost hidden from it, in accordance with the client wish.
Following Tel-Aviv’s soaring housing prices over the last 3 years, many people were forced to renovate their existing apartments instead of selling and buying bigger ones. This owner decided to transform her studio apartment into a 1 bedroom, including storage units, a large separate kitchen and a full size queen bedroom.
The house is built on a very long, narrow and sloped lot of 940 sq. m. The proportions were one of the generators for the design. The clients wanted a large, spacious house on one hand, while maintaining the intimacy and the sense of a warm family life on the other.
The Polonsky Academy of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Polonsky Academy building is situated on the cliff facing south towards the Jerusalem Theater. Its northern side faces the Main Garden Court which will function as the heart of the campus in the new master plan. This court has two levels, with a one storey differential between them which makes it possible to create two entrances to the structure on different levels: main entrance near the Van Leer Institute and secondary entrance near the Council for Higher Education.
Apartment Renovation
First Floor Penthouse extends the ephemeral relations between inside and outside. The primary asset of the apartment; its view onto the vast city hall square, is funneled in, creating a horizontal courtyard. This funneled landscape separates public from private, turning the bedrooms into a remote entity, when viewed from the open public space. The concept of the artificial landscape was carried through to shape the wall elevations and plans.
Design and construction of a freestanding new building for the complex of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the leading museum of modern and contemporary art in Israel. Housing an installation of the Museum’s comprehensive collection of Israeli art, as well as its architecture and design galleries, drawings and prints galleries, photography study center, art library, new auditorium, a large gallery for temporary exhibitions and public amenities, the Herta and Paul Amir Building is intended to create an outstanding, forward-looking work of architecture for the Municipality of Tel Aviv.
Structural: Ove Arup & Partners, Caroline Fitzgerald, Tom Dawes
MEP: Ove Arup & Partners_Mark Walsh-Cooke
Cost Estimator: Hanscomb Faithful and Gould
Plan00
Location
The Museum is located in the heart of Tel Aviv at 27 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard, set back from the street behind a large plaza. The Ministry of Justice stands to the east; the Beit Ariela Municipal Library and the Center for the Performing Arts are to the west. The site for the Amir Building is a triangular plot between the existing Museum complex , the Library and the Center for the Performing Arts.
Plan01
The design for the Amir Building arises directly from the challenge of providing several floors of large, neutral, rectangular galleries within a tight, idiosyncratic, triangular site. The solution is to “square the triangle” by constructing the levels on different axes, which deviate significantly from floor to floor. In essence, the building’s levels—three above grade and two below—are structurally independent plans stacked one on top of the other.
Plan02
These levels are unified by the “Lightfall”: an 87-foot-high, spiraling, top-lit atrium, whose form is defined by subtly twisting surfaces that curve and veer up and down through the building. The complex geometry of the Lightfall’s surfaces (hyperbolic parabolas) connect the disparate angles of the galleries; the stairs and ramped promenades along them serve as the surprising, continually unfolding vertical circulation system; while the natural light from above is refracted into the deepest recesses of the half-buried building. Cantilevers accommodate the discrepancies between plans and provide overhangs at the perimeter.
SectionA
In this way, the Amir Bulding combines two seemingly irreconcilable paradigms of the contemporary art museum: the museum of neutral white boxes, which provides optimal, flexible space for the exhibition of art, and the museum of spectacle, which moves visitors and offers a remarkable social experience. The Amir Building’s synthesis of radical and conventional geometries produces a new type of museum experience, one that is as rooted in the Baroque as it is in the Modern.
SectionC
Conceptually, the Amir Building is related to the Museum’s Brutalist main building (completed 1971; Dan Eytan, architect). At the same time, it also relates to the larger tradition of Modern architecture in Tel Aviv, as seen in the multiple vocabularies of Mendelsohn, the Bauhaus and the White City.The gleaming white parabolas of the façade are composed of 465 differently shaped flat panels made of pre-cast reinforced concrete. Achieving a combination of form and material that is unprecedented in the city, the façade translates Tel Aviv’s existing Modernism into a contemporary and progressive architectural language.
Design Competition
Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. was selected through a two-stage design competition organized under the direction of architect Jacob Grobman.
Stage One, January 2003: Open and anonymous competition for Israeli licensed architects. 77 firms submitted proposals, joined by a parallel group of 20 Israeli architecture students (whose submissions were judged separately). The jury was comprised of Mordechai Omer (chairman); architects Zvi Hecker, David Reznik, Shulamit Nadler and Dani Keizer; and Meira Yagid Haimovici, Curator of Architecture and Design, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Four of the submissions were selected to advance to the next round: the proposals from Yehoshua Gutman and Lluís Ortega; Toledano Architects; Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, with Merav Twig; and Lyd and Uri Zur Architects.
Stage Two, April 2003: The four proposals from the first stage were joined by proposals from five invited firms: Gigon-Guyer Architects, Zurich; Chyutin Architects, Tel Aviv; Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi Architects, Tel Aviv; Sanaa Ltd., Tokyo; and Preston Scott Cohen, Inc., Cambridge, MA.
The jury for the second stage was comprised of Mordechai Omer (chairman) with Herta and Paul Amir; Robert Oxman, The Technion, Haifa; Yehuda Safran, Columbia University; Moshe Safdie, Jerusalem and Boston; Dani Keizer, Tel Aviv; and Meira Yagid Haimovici.
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