Tel Aviv Museum of Art contains spaces that are completely internalised and without natural light
‘I love this city,’ enthused my taxi driver, ‘it’s like New York: 24 hour.’ And keeping up the banter until Ben Gurion Airport, he presented a good simulcrum of a New York cabbie though the statement itself was a touch hyperbolic, considering the scale and physical make-up of Tel Aviv. Its inner-city population is only 400,000 and until recently the city was relatively low rise. But the parallels are there. Tel Aviv-Yafo – to give the city its full name reflecting its municipal union with the ancient port city of Jaffa – is Israel’s most financially robust, culturally dominant, and liberal city.
Starting with the celebration last year of the Tel Aviv’s centennial, it seems the city is looking afresh at how to market itself internationally: casting around for its ‘Big Apple’ ticket. In some ways, self-promotion is an inherent part of the city’s identity. The name Tel Aviv can be seen as an early form of marketing, designed, like New York, to hold similar historical-but-new resonances. It comes from the Hebrew translation by Nahum Sokolow of Altneuland, the title of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist novel. Tel means an archaeological mound or site literally layered in history; aviv means Spring.
Now, the city has appointed an international outreach coordinator, the highly personable Eytan Schwartz, who runs through the expected routine ‘not competing with the big global cities’; ‘looking at what makes us a unique destination’; ‘learning from Barcelona’ but then also, much more tellingly, states: ‘we want to be normal’, underlining the desire to lose what makes living in Israel utterly unique: its political context as a state existing as part-palimpsest with that of the Palestinians.
The design of the Museum of Art is redolent of Libeskind’s work
Architecture and construction is always political – a potential tool of those in power – and this truer in Israel than anywhere else, as the remains of the Ottoman and British presence here attests. In Gaza, on their withdrawal in 2005, the Israelis demolished their settlements before pulling out. Rather than a process of relinquishing control, this was a planned destruction: a removal from use. Sandi Hilal highlighted the key importance of the ability to plan, and the impact of its denial to the Palestinians, in the May 2010 Tate Modern debate, Decolonizing Architecture. This is also the name of the architectural collective she has founded with Eyal Weizman and Alessandro Petti to consider the questions such as what does it mean to reuse ‘the house of your enemy’ and how ex-Israeli security structures might be recycled by the Palestinians.
But just as New York is not America, Tel Aviv is also notorious for being semidetached – politically, culturally and attitudinally – from the rest of the country. This was encapsulated in the 2006 film The Bubble, which follows a story of doomed gay love between a Palestinian and a Jew set against the backdrop of a liberal Tel Aviv, starting during the intifada and concluding in a suicide bombing. In this context, the city’s current spate of look-atme buildings is particularly interesting in that it reveals Tel Aviv’s ambition to be thought of as an international city, rather than tied to controversies over territory.
The Perez Center for Peace overlooks the sea, and when empty seems like a viewing station, a folly perhaps
This phase started in Holon, a separate city from Tel Aviv and one stereotypically looked down on culturally. It’s a bit ‘bridge and tunnel’ as one Tel Aviv architect put it. Here, Ron Arad’s Design Museum has put the city on the ‘cultural icon’ map with it’s vividly red, orange peel-like, Corten skin.
Tel Aviv’s riposte is currently under construction: the extension to the Museum of Art by US architect Preston Scott Cohen. This proto-Libeskind essay in facetted angled facades has a skin formed of silvery pre-cast concrete panels, hung off a concrete frame. Internally it has a steel frame with a series of huge steel beams allowing for the large spans of the gallery spaces described as a series of ‘abstract boxes’, which, surprisingly, will be internalized, having no option of even partial natural lighting.
Further south on the coast in Jaffa, another distinctively clad building has just been completed. The Peres Center for Peace, named after Shimon Peres is on a prominent site, facing the ocean. The Center runs a series of ‘professional, educational and recreational’ programmes designed to bring together Arabs and Israelis. Its design, a linear striated form facing out to the sea, is based on a sketch by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas produced over dinner with Peres, and subsequently translated on site by a local architect Yoav Messer.
Its flanks are formed by alternating layers of greenish concrete and glass, the former cast on site using local sand, layer by layer, with bespoke glass panes fitted between. This laborious process of construction has meant it has taken 10 years to complete. Inside, the facade creates very beautiful effects of light, especially in a strange tall void space at the rear, while at the front, a conference auditorium on the top floor faces a stage with a fantastic panorama of the sea beyond.
When I visited, perhaps because it was nearly empty, the building seemed vaguely purposeless as a structure, more like a viewing platform for the sea, almost a folly: obviously not the intended message. In domestic architecture too, there seems to be more of a look-at-me attitude that means small architectural ‘icons’ are replacing the relatively modest houses of the socialist state dating from the 1950s in which even the Israeli leaders used to live.
In the wealthy northern suburb of Zahala, the architect Arieh Ginzburg is just completing The Orange House: its most immediately striking feature revealed in its name. It is a series of steel-framed boxes, constructed of girders painted bright orange. One cantilevers out and under it you enter the house by crossing a bridge with pools of water on either side that cool the breezes the house is orientated to catch. Every element in the house is off-the-shelf or standard industrial and the colour, exposed steelwork and use of plywood interior fittings, give the house a 1970s high-tech look that feels rather novel again.
It is not surprise that architecture is seen as central to marketing the new Tel Aviv. For Tel Aviv has at its heart the White City: the late 1920s extension laid out by the British planner Patrick Geddes as a garden city, following the ideas of Ebenezer Howard. In its development, it presented a blank canvas for a flood of emigrant Jewish architectural talent who had trained in the International Style in Europe.
What resulted is the highest concentration of early modernist buildings in the world, with street upon street of so-called Bauhaus buildings (although only two of the original architects actually trained at the German design school). For this, Tel Aviv was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, catching a bit of a zeitgeist moment for the renewed appreciation and reappraisal of modernism worldwide. Consequently the city has been able to project itself as at heart an untouched modernist gem: a gift for the municipal marketing department.
Reflecting the renewed importance and appreciation of the original master plan, which still sets the feel and grain of the city, the centennial year kicked off with a conference on the architectural future of the city. Overall, the year-long celebration has had a galvanising and profile-raising effect on discussions of the planning and built heritage and contemporary architecture in the city. Guides to the White City were produced and, this year, Houses from Within, an Open House-inspired event organised by Aviva Levinson and architect Alon Bin-Nun, was promoted for the first time by the Municipality of Tel Aviv.
A clutch of fabulous apartments owned by graphic designers and architects opened up to the public over the course of the two day event, but Houses from Within also gave a fascinating insight into the history of the city, showing how it can be read through its architecture. It included talks and tours on some of the major planning and infrastructure decisions that have shaped it and are shaping it now: such as the reworking of the central space to provide an expanded public space: one of many landscaping projects that are greening the city.
In the centre, the White City is beginning to see major conservation work carried out. One of the leading figures in this is Professor Nitza Szmuk, an expert on the modernist back-catalogue of Tel Aviv. She is currently advising on the restoration of one of the most significant modernist buildings, Polishuk House, built in 1934 as offices over commercial space on a prominent corner site adjacent to the central Ha-Carmel market.
The Polishuk House built in the International Style is being turned into a boutique hotel with pool
The developer plans to convert it into a boutique hotel – one of a rash of such projects that seem to have sprung up in the city in the last couple of years. While this seems a good re-use of an otherwise neglected building, surprisingly, despite its historic status it is going have a rooftop pool, which will mean completely gutting of the building. Conservation laws appear only skin deep.
Many poorer neighbourhoods though, such as the Shapira district in the south an area with a high illegal immigrant population on the border of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, remain under the radar of the official image of the city. This was highlighted in a recent study by the architect Sharon Rotbard and in his 2005 book White City, Black City. It was significant that the three ‘route’ maps produced by the municipal authorities for the centennial, to celebrate the city’s history, focused first on the White City (the ‘white route’) and then merely used the two natural features of Tel Aviv’s site, the Nahal HaYarkon River to the north and its coastline as a‘green route’ and a ‘blue route’, leaving much of the city as unexplored hinterland.
The blue route though does highlight the much-upgraded beach front, coastline promenade and cycle routes that connect central Tel Aviv down to Jaffa. The historic port there is undergoing major renovation, although there are less welcome signs of new money coming in, such as Andromeda Hill, a gated neighbourhood perched on the slopes behind the port, a development that has already elicited local protest.
The White City was built to a garden city master plan
Overall, Tel Aviv does seem to have an energy that doesn’t need to be glossed-up by marketing-speak. It looks like a good place to live and feels like it’s getting better. There are the usual pressures of traffic, concerns over high-rise over-development and of the wealthy displacing the less well-off in newly fashionable neighbourhoods, but these are the signs of a ‘normal’ city. Whatever the normality or otherwise of Tel Aviv, there seems an optimism in the city, which for the most part is embracing change while maintaining what is undoubtedly its unique feel
