A penthouse apartment, situated in Newe Tzedek, a historical neighborhood, in the south of Tel Aviv. The architecture of the neighborhood is characterized by low buildings, with tile roofing, and building on zero street level. The clients, whose grown up children have left home, so they decided to settle down in Newe Tzedek.
A View : Image Courtesy Herzsage & Sternberg Architects
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.
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.
The Fashion and Art Graduate School building marks the main entrance to the college compound, and sits onthe campus central square. Its ground floor opens onto the square such that the square seems to be a part the entrance foyer. The building is intended to bring together students from various disciplines. In planning the building, as in planning the entire campus, emphasis was placed on creating spaces where meetings and interactions can take place between the school’svarious disciplines.
Situated on one of Israel’s most breathtaking waterfronts, the Tel Aviv Port was plagued with neglect since 1965, when its primary use as an operational docking port was abandoned. The recently completed public space development project by Mayslits Kassif Architects, managed to restore this unique part of the city, and turn it into a prominent, vivacious urban landmark.
Project Name: Tel Aviv Port Public Space Regeneration
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Program: Design and Strategy for Tel Aviv Port’s public spaces
Client: Marine Trust Ltd., Port Architect: Eliakim Architects.
Budget: 4,000,000 E
Site Area: 55,000 m2
Design Team: Ganit Mayslits Kassif, Udi Kassif, Oren Ben Avraham, Galila Yavin, Michal Ilan and Maor Roytman.
Photographers: Iwan Baan, Adi Branda, Galia Kronfeld, Daniela Orvin, Albi Serfaty.
Construction Company: Green Sky.ltd
Date of project: 2003-2008
Status:Complete –2008
Collaborators:
Project Management: Avinoam Horowitz
Graphic Designer: Hila Ben Navat
Awards:
2003– First Prize in the Public Competition for the Renewal of the port’s public areas. Proposal by Mayslits Kassif Architects in collaboration with architect Galila Yavin.
2007– Israeli DesignAward for the best Urban Architectural Project in Israel.
2008–Rechter Award for an outstanding architectural achievement by the Israeli Ministry of Culture.
2010- Winner of The Rosa Barba European Landscape Prize and the Audience Choice award in The 6th European Biennial of Landscape Architecture.
A typical 2 Bedroom 59 sqm Tel-Aviv apartment transformed to accommodate a new baby on the way.
In order to allow an addition of a second bedroom, the architects had to rethink the apartment’s circulation in a bid to gain further habitable space, which meant removing all corridors and unused storage spaces.
SFARO Model
Project Name: Dajczman Residence, Tel Aviv, Israel
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