The Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is located within the heart of Tel Aviv. This is a freestanding concrete and glass building that has been designed by Preston Scott Cohen. Conceptually speaking, the Herta and Paul Amir Building reflects the Museum’s Brutalist main building which was completed on 1971 by Dan Eytan, architect. In the same manner, the building also reflects the larger tradition of modern architecture that is currently found in Tel Aviv. This architectural design allows dialogue between the new building and the existing structures of the Art Museum and its surroundings. It also complements well with the traditions of Mendelsohn, Bauhaus and the White City.

The design of the building was an attempt to reshape the triangular building into square. In order to do this, the modern architects at Preston Scott Cohen architectural practice have created a solution – to develop a multifaceted, perspective-distorting architecture as one of the buildings in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art complex.

It has been designed to accommodate a number of spacious rectangular exhibition rooms within the tight, peculiar, triangular site. The building stands within an area of 18,500 square meters and now houses a vast collection of Israeli art. Apart from the modern art collection, it also accommodates several architecture, designs, drawings and prints galleries as well as the study center, library and auditorium.

The building now has twisting and gleaming white characteristics with five structurally independent levels – two above grade and three below. The levels have been constructed at different axes and are stacked on top of each other. They twist from floor to floor in order to house the galleries within an irregular site.

It also has the 25 meters spiraling atrium – “Lightfall” – that unifies and connects all incongruent galleries. This atrium has subtle twisting of surfaces that curve and veer up and down the structure. The stairs and ramped promenades in this atrium function as the surprising and seemingly endless unfolding vertical circulation within the floors. This allows natural light to refract and reach the deepest recesses of the building which is half-buried.

The gleaming white parabolas found on the façade consist of 465 flat panels in various shape made of precast reinforced concrete. This is the turning point of the architectural design that makes the design entirely unique.

The decision and solution made to create the building allowed the combination of two seemingly irreconcilable models within a single contemporary art museum.

Posted by JackieAzuela at 27 January, 2012

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