Tel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building / Preston Scott Cohen

Over the past year, weve been following the development and early construction of Preston Scott Cohens Tel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building. The 195,000 square ft building has recently been completed and now, the museum is open to the public. The $55 million Herta and Paul Amir Building will provide the space needed to permanently display one of the worlds largest collections of Israeli art. From its earlier beginning in 2002, Preston Scott Cohens proposal has been further developed and refined, culminating in the strong geometric aesthetic typical of Cohens design ideas. Paul Amir, a philanthropist who, with his wife Herta, has provided the naming gift for the building, stated, We feel privileged to have been able to advance the work of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, an institution that is truly at the heart of Israels creative community. With this exceptional building by Preston Scott Cohen, and with the ability to showcase the work of Israels artists as never before, the Museum now has the potential to step up to a prominent new role on the international scene, to the benefit of everyone. As we have previously reported, the building has five levels two above grade and three below which subtly twist to connect the disparate angles between the galleries and the context while refracting natural light into the deepest recesses of the half buried building. Preston Scott Cohen explained, The Museums program set the challenge of providing several floors of large, neutral, rectangular galleries within a tight, idiosyncratic, triangular site. The solution we proposed was to square the triangle by constructing the levels on different axes, which deviate significantly from floor to floor and are unified by the Lightfall. This decision enabled us to combine two seemingly irreconcilable paradigms of the contemporary art museum: the museum of neutral white boxes, which provides optimal, flexible

space for the exhibition of art, and the museum of spectacle, which moves visitors and offers a remarkable social experience. In this way, the Amir Buildings synthesis of radical and conventional geometries produces a new type of museum experience, one that is as rooted in the Baroque as it is in the Modern.

For the inauguration of the new 9,000-square-foot temporary exhibitions gallery in the Amir Building, the Museum will present Kiefer in Tel Aviv, a site-specific exhibition organized by Mordechai Omer in collaboration with the artist. Large-scale works by Kiefer inspired by themes of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish myths and mysticism and German-Jewish history will surround two of the artists monumental enclosures: East-West, housing 44 huge metal plates imprinted with images of paintings and objects, and a specially conceived version of The Library, whose multiple pewter and lead books are a record of diagrams and photographs.

Preston Scott Cohens office sent us drawings of his Tel Aviv Museum of Art to add to the images of the recently opened museum we shared earlier in the week. Preston Scott Cohen explained, Conceptually, the Amir Building is related to the Museums Brutalist main building (completed 1971; Dan Eytan, architect). At the same time, it also relates to the larger tradition of Modern architecture in Tel Aviv, as seen in the multiple vocabularies of Mendelsohn, the Bauhaus and the White City.The gleaming white parabolas of the faade are composed of 465 differently shaped flat panels made of pre-cast reinforced concrete. Achieving a combination of form and material that is unprecedented in the city, the faade translates Tel Avivs existing Modernism into a contemporary and progressive architectural language.

East Elevation Project Team: Preston Scott Cohen, principal in charge of design; Amit Nemlich, project architect; Tobias Nolte, Bohsung Kong, project assistants Size: 18,500 m2, built on a triangular footprint of approximately 4,500 m2

Cost : 45 million (estimated) Leadership : Mordechai Omer, Director and Chief Curator, Tel Aviv Museum of Art Key Dates : Architectural competition: 2003; Design development and construction documents: 2005-06; Groundbreaking: 2007; Opening: October 2011