NowTel Aviv

Architecture

Architecture in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv was planned in the 1920s and filled in the 1930s by architects who had just left Europe, so its core holds one of the largest concentrations of the International Style anywhere. The recent work builds up; the old city keeps low.

• ToHA

  ·

  Completed 2019

  Ron Arad

  The first of two office towers off the Ayalon motorway, nicknamed the Iceberg. Arad, better known as a designer, cantilevered the upper floors out over a narrow base so the tower widens as it rises and appears to balance on a point, with the lobby left open underneath as a covered public ground. The glass is faceted to catch the light unevenly. It spends its structure on an optical trick and gets a public square in return.

• Meier on Rothschild

  ·

  Completed 2017

  Richard Meier

  A residential tower on Rothschild Boulevard, in the heart of the White City. Meier answered the low Bauhaus around it with his usual white, wrapping a slender slab in a double skin of clear glass and a fine screen of louvres that keeps the sun off the flats and reads as a taut grid from the street. It is the tallest thing in the conservation area. The architect who built a career on white met a district built on it, seven decades on.

• Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Amir Building

  ·

  Completed 2011

  Preston Scott Cohen

  An extension to the city's art museum, wedged onto a tight triangular plot. Cohen twisted the geometry around a top-lit atrium he called a lightfall, a spiralling concrete void that turns the awkward site into the subject and carries daylight down through five levels to galleries that stay square. The folded planes never repeat. The hard plan becomes the most dramatic room in the building.

• Peres Center for Peace

  ·

  Completed 2008

  Massimiliano Fuksas

  A think tank and conference centre on the shore at Jaffa, at the southern end of the city. Fuksas stacked it from alternating layers of clear glass and thick pigmented concrete cast with the aggregate left visible, so the walls read as sediment and the light inside is filtered green. The building sits heavily on the sand and faces the sea. It was built for an institution devoted to negotiation, and its weight and quiet are the argument.

• Dizengoff Square

  ·

  Completed 1934

  Genia Averbuch

  The round plaza at the centre of the White City, the district that carries Tel Aviv's Bauhaus name. Averbuch won a competition at twenty-five for the buildings that ring it, matching them into one curved facade of the balconies, flat roofs and strip windows the émigré architects brought from Germany. Four thousand buildings in this manner earned the city a UNESCO listing in 2003. The square is where the White City reads as one idea rather than a street at a time.