Sitting high on a hill in its holy city, Carpenter’s addition to the Israel Museum adheres respectfully to Mansfeld’s precedent. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s (TAMA) new addition, on the other hand, asserts a distinct identity among the bustling, cosmopolitan setting of Tel Aviv. The museum sits at the heart of the city’s crowded cultural district. When it came time to add 200,000 square feet of new gallery space, the museum only had one place to grow: an idiosyncratic triangular site between its original building, a public park, and the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center plaza. The problem was that there simply wasn’t enough space on the lot to fit a structure of that size without exceeding the municipal height limits and overshadowing the older cultural buildings. Cambridge, Mass.–based architect Preston Scott Cohen, however, knew exactly how to solve this; his competition-winning design buries half of the project underground.
While this design direction remedied the issue of having enough space, it created a new concern: The subterranean parts of the structure threatened to become too disconnected and cavelike. “I wanted the building to create a seamless transition from the outside world to the artificial realm of art,” Cohen explains. To accomplish this, he created a void in the middle of the building topped by a skylight, an 87-foot-tall atrium that Cohen calls the Lightfall. Piercing through all five floors of the museum, the Lightfall brings daylight to the lowest reaches of the museum. “You get an incredible glow below the building,” Cohen says. “You know you have gone down into this subterranean condition, but the light there is uplifting. You also get a combination of warm natural light and cool artificial light that animates the white surfaces of the interior.”
The Lightfall also presented a handy way of answering another of the project’s dilemmas. The museum wanted traditional rectangular galleries, spaces that are difficult to accommodate in a triangular plan. To mediate the forms, Cohen established within the Lightfall subtly twisting geometric surfaces—hyperbolic parabolas—that connect the disparate angles between the galleries. These angles also help to refract daylight into the deepest recesses of the half-buried building.
The exterior of the addition, whose official name is the Herta and Paul Amir Building, has its own way of playing with light. Its poured-in-place concrete panels are faceted in a variety of angles that manipulate the blinding sunlight that strikes its surfaces. “The building is like a hovercraft,” Cohen says. “It has lots of cantilevers that create interesting shaded porticoes and undercrofts. The upper part of the façade curves, catching the light and dissolving into the sky. It doesn’t appear to have a definitive limit.”
At night, Tillotson’s electric lighting scheme picks up where the sun leaves off. While the galleries are soberly lit with 100W track-mounted halogen fixtures, the wild angles of the public spaces were given a more sensual treatment. “We decided to light the Lightfall and try to do things at night that daylight couldn’t do,” Tillotson says. The team outfitted the rim of the skylight with pipe-mounted theatrical metal halide spotlights that pour light through the twisting void to the bottom floor. “We have tons of layers of light,” she says. At the bottom of the Lightfall, the designers placed an outline pattern of LEDs in the paving that describes the form of the skylight above. A similar “placemat” of LEDs in the sidewalk pavement marks the entrance of the museum outside. The team did not neglect the nighttime façade either. Pole-mounted 150W metal halide lamps illuminate the faceted surface, making it shine into the general illumination of the nighttime city.
Just as the trailblazers of Modernism developed one set of guidelines that were interpreted in hundreds of different ways for different conditions, the Israel Museum and TAMA show that there are even multiple ways to handle the singular condition of an abundance of natural light. One serene and contemplative, the other wildly imaginative, they both prove that with talented designers on the job such as Carpenter, Cohen, and Tillotson, a fresh perspective can always be found.
Details Project: Israel Museum Addition, Jerusalem
Client: Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Architect (new circulation and amenities buildings): James Carpenter Design Associates, New York
Architect (renovation of existing museum buildings): Efrat-Kowalsky Architects, Tel Aviv
Project Architect: A. Lerman Architects, Tel Aviv
Lighting Designer: Tillotson Design Associates, New York
Project Cost: $100 million
Project Size: 624,000 square feet on a 20-acre campus: 84,000 square feet (new public entrance facilities, enclosed route of passage, gallery entrance pavilion, and new temporary exhibition galleries); 204,500 square feet (galleries)
Manufacturers: B-K Lighting, Bega, Concord, D-LED, Gaash Lighting, Hydrel, Lumiance, Lucifer Lighting, Osram Sylvania, Platek Light, Philips Lumileds, Unilamp
Project: Herta and Paul Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
Client: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
Architect: Preston Scott Cohen, Cambridge, Mass.
Lighting Designer: Tillotson Design Associates, New York
Project Cost: $45 million
Project Size: 200,000 square feet
Manufacturers: Bega, Erco, Exterieur Vert, Gaash Lighting, Louis Poulsen, Lucifer Lighting, Osram Sylvania, Philips, Regent Lighting, Targetti Poulsen, We-ef, Xenon Architectural Lighting