A new spin to the
White City.
Even the building's location is
set within something else—an interior site with no frontage on Shaul Hamelech
Boulevard, the main street leading to the Tel Aviv Museum. While the museum's
1971 Brutalist-style main building (designed by Dan Eytan and Yitzchak Yashar)
addresses Shaul Hamelech from across an entry plaza, Cohen's adjacent building
sits behind a public library and a performing arts complex. Visitors discover
the addition only by turning left after walking through the entry plaza. (If
they arrive by car, they park below ground, then take an elevator to the
redesigned plaza in front of the addition.)
Asked by the museum to provide
rectangular galleries in a building on a triangular site, Cohen used the
central atrium to negotiate between the two geometries—in the process creating
a skylit element that cants, angles, and curves from three stories below grade
to two above. Beautifully constructed of poured-in-place concrete with long
slashes cut out to bring light and views through it, the Lightfall asserts its
own identity as a freestanding structure within the museum. Although the
Lightfall holds itself up, it does not support any other part of the building.
(See sidebar, A
Spiraling and Twisting Core)
“The Lightfall is both an
autonomous element within the building and the piece that joins everything
else,” says Cohen, who used sophisticated computer software to help shape the
complex (continued on pg. 79) structure. “It's the source of authority in the
architecture, not just the leftover space.” And because the stairs and ramps
around the Lightfall provide most of the circulation in the museum, the
galleries can provide more space for art.
Visitors can enter the new
building two different ways: through a glass-enclosed connector from the main
building or from the plaza. In many respects, the addition acts as a pair of
museums, and the circulation into and through it reinforces this impression. If
you come from the old building, you arrive at a tall lobby with a long
escalator that takes you to a top-floor space called the Israeli Promenade.
From there, you follow a path along the perimeter of the building to a series
of large galleries exhibiting the museum's acclaimed collection of 20th-century
and contemporary Israeli art. In essence, this portion of the building serves
as an extension of the existing museum and the collections found there.
If you enter the Amir Building
from the plaza, though, you discover a different kind of museum—one dedicated
to changing exhibitions, as well as photography, architecture, and design. It
also houses a museum shop on the entry level, a 450-seat auditorium below, and
a two-story library above. From the plaza, the building appears as a horizontal
object rising just a couple of stories. But after you buy your ticket and walk
to the Lightfall, you can look both down and up the full height of the atrium.
“This plunging, vertical space comes as a surprise,” says Cohen.
No matter your route, moving
through the new building is an architectural dance between neutral, orthogonal
galleries and the ever-changing geometry of the Lightfall. Sculpted as a series
of 28 hyperbolic paraboloids, the Lightfall exerts a magnetic pull toward the
center of the building. While its concrete shell is exposed on its sides facing
the galleries, white plaster on its interior surfaces reflects daylight
throughout the building. Cohen stacked the galleries and rotated each one 22.5
degrees from the next, spiraling the spaces around the void.
The museum's director,
Mordechai Omer, who oversaw the project since the design competition in 2003
but died just months before it was set to open in November, had insisted on
simple galleries with no direct daylight. While the resulting rooms do provide
flexible spaces for many kinds of exhibitions, the larger ones—such as the
9,000-square-foot temporary gallery on the lowest level—come across as cold and
distant settings for art. Other museums have found ways of filtering daylight
to protect art while using the light to animate gallery spaces.
The architectural energy
generated by the Lightfall dissipates on the outside of the building, where
large precast-concrete panels form a taut, flush skin of folded planes. Cohen
had wanted to continue the hyperbolic paraboloids found in the Lightfall on the
building's facades, but this proved to be too expensive. So he created faceted
surfaces instead. As a result, the exterior lacks the visual excitement of the
interior and seems a bit disconnected from its geometries. The plaza beyond the
building, which Cohen redesigned as a hard, abstract plane, would benefit, too,
from some shaded areas and places to sit.
Yet the Herta and Paul Amir
Building offers Tel Aviv an exciting new place to see art and experience innovative
architecture. While its Lightfall activates a powerful, centripetal force
inside, it makes strong connections to the museum's main building and to the
city's history of embracing radical leaps in Modernism within its urban fabric.
Gross
square footage: 195,000
square feet
Total
construction cost: $55
million
Architect:
Preston Scott Cohen, Inc.
Preston Scott Cohen, Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment