TEL AVIV MUSEUM PRESTON SCOTT COHEN TEL AVIV - PALESTINE
SITE The Tel Aviv museum is located in the center of Tel Aviv, Palestine. The building is situated in a triangular site with one of the three triangular corners of the museum facing Berkovch st. where you first approach the building. The Tel Aviv museum sits freely in the site not indulging with any of the buildings around it. The way the building sits sculpturally helps to call out the sculptural form of the overall heavy massing of the building.
When you first enter the building, you are on the second highest level in the building. After getting your ticket and going through the galleries on that floor, you can either walk to the library or walk up to the top level and from there go down to the levels below grade with long escalators that take you down for two whole levels without a landing in between.
Going down
Going down
ramp up
Level 1 (Lobby Level)
ramp up
Level -2 (below Lobby)
The front faced and main entry lobby are the major and only punctures that happens to the skin of the building besides the very small windows that are scattered around the skin.
Level 2 (Above Lobby)
When you first arrive to the building, you are greeted with a double height flat glass wall that gives you the first and only glimpse of what the building holds inside it. Once you walk around the front facade and walk up the stairs to meet the lobby level, you walk for about a 100 feet until you reach the end corner that take you around to the main entry that carves into the solid entirety of the building mass.
Level -1 (below Lobby)
PLANS
Going down
Going down
Going up
Going up
Lobby
Going up
Entry
Level 0 (below Lobby)
Going up
Serves
Gallery
Gallery
Level Roof
Going up
Going up Gallery Going down Gallery Gallery Coffee shop
Gallery
ELEVATIONS
As you walk around the building to reach the main entry in the back, you start to experience the different changing components of the pre cast concrete skin. Besides the major entry punctures, you are always walking by the ever changing different patters and twists of the heavy concrete skin. The skin twist around to give the user a hint of what is happening inside the building and reflect the force the void is exerting on the spaces around it including the heavy skin.
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The front facade of the building with the glassed wall covering the library.
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The skin angulate to cantileaver on top of the vistors, create shading and starts to announce the entry to the visitor
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The heavy skin is punctured to create an entry point to the building.
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SECTIONS
The visitor here starts under the awning extruded facade that is extended by the manipulation of the skin. The saddle ramping takes you into your journey through the galleries and prepare you to start your journey through the other levels as it enhances the first moment to when you meet the Lightfall. After the progressive ramping, you take the stairs to the top level to some of the biggest galleries in the museum. After that, your movement through the spaces are through extremely long escalators that take you through two levels at once without a landing in between. What is fascinating about the void is that it always gives you a reference to where you are going, where the spaces are situated in the building and how you can reach those spaces on the opposite side of where you are. The lightfall starts from the roof top all the way to the bottom of the buried three levels under ground. The whiteness and geometry of the void helps the light to transfer, reflect and travel all the way from the top to the lowest level as you can see on the picture on the right.
SECTION A
SECTION C
What's every important to understand about the void is that It becomes the organizing princable in the whole museum. It's very important to be clear about the intensions if the void and that it wasn't just the left over spaces that brings the light in. There are many sculptural elements about the void that makes it's form demand the attention it's getting. When each of the twists happen in the void, every single gallery follow such authority and respond back by following the rotations that are exerted by the lightfall.
SECTION B
This is the only moment to when you can walk “through” the void but its not really “through ” the void since its the lowest level in the building and the limit to where the void actually stops.
DIAGRAMS
The beautiful complicated Lightfall is constructed out of poured in place concrete. Its 87 foot high with a top lit atrium that has a complicated form that is defined by the twisting surfaces that curves up and down the light fall. The surfaces of the void are filled with long cut outs to bring light into the gallery spaces and the circulation routes. The Lightfall is a free standing structure that holds itself up. It doesn’t support the building structurally neither does the building support it to stand. The interior layers of the void are painted white while the exterior layers are left exposed to juxtaposition the purity and lightness of the interior of the light fall. *See pictures on the side to show the relationship between the void choice of materials on the interior and exterior.
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22.5 degrees
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The overall triangular shape of the building with the void situated in the center of the museum half
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The ramps, stairs and escalators always wrap around the void and never penetrate it. The slashes in the lightfall keep the visitor in reference to where they are heading and how they are progressively walking through the building in reference to where they have been before. The slashes in the lightfall becomes very playful as people start to experience and curiously look around the void to see the other gallery spaces on the different levels and the people experiencing them.
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The gallery spaces sit very rigidly around the void and follow the rotational motion the lightfall exsert on them.
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The Tel Aviv Museum is one of my favourite buildings ever built. I haven’t been to the building myself but the complexity that was able to be achieved in this building is truly admirable. I have been a fan of the Lightfall since I started studying architecture and some how it always has been an influence on my projects. I believe there has been incredible amount of thought being every single detail that is done in the building. From the complex geometry to the choices of different materials that are chosen in the building. It’s an extremely difficult job to achieve such clean details with the complexity of the exterior skin and the interior lightfall combined. It’s amazing how most of the gallery spaces are still rectangular even with all the geometric complexity that happens around it on both side from the heavy skin or the lightfall. I believe the Tel Aviv museum is an impressive one and it reminds me of the guggenheim museum in New York by Frank Lloyd right and the Mercedes museum in Stuttgart, Germany by Ben van berkel. The Tel Aviv museum almost does what Ben has done in the Mercedes museum by taking people all the way to the top level and actually taking them down to the lowest level bit by bit. The Tel Aviv museum is more about a directed path than a free hallway with galleries on each sides and no directed path through the galleries. I beleive the musuem achieves what it is supposed to be doing with the exterior heavy skin and the lightfall on the interior.