Tel Aviv Museum of Art | Preston Scott Cohen, Inc.

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.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.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.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. 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. 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. 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.