Jerusalem Art Campus
Location: Jerusalem
Year: 2016-2021
Area: 10,000 sqm. + 15,000 sqm. underground parking (450 spaces)
Status: Under construction
Program: 4 higher education performing arts schools, approx. 650 students
Client: Jerusalem Economy Ltd.
Project Architect: Talma Weitzner
Team: Ido Levy, Avinoam Sharon, Adi Samet, Alon Sarig, Artyom Berlinsky, Roy Finkelman, Quentin Derollez
CD: Tami Yaniv Architecture
Landscape Architect: Sack and Reicher Architects
Project Management: Yoni Goldstein - Ehud Tayar ltd.
Structural Engineering: J. Kahan & Partners.
Project Description
The new Performing Arts Education Center is located at Jerusalem’s Menorah square and composed of 3 buildings and a sequence of plazas and internal courtyards. The project’s layout of an open campus relates to the city’s typical massing and introverted public spaces. It connects Jerusalem’s downtown with the old residential neighbourhood of Nahlaot and allows a continuous pedestrian flow through its courtyards. The stone facings of the buildings are designed as thin curtain walls applied on concrete bodies, creating a double skin and leaving air space between the layers for fresh air circulation and insulation. Each building has a slightly different texture, articulation and fenestration.
The Performing Arts Education Center is a joint project of the Jerusalem Municipality, the Jerusalem Development Authority and the Jerusalem Foundation. It will be home to four leading performing arts schools: The Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, The School of Visual Theater, The Nissan Nativ Acting Studio and The Center for Middle Eastern Classical Music.
The Performing Arts Center was described by the city’s Mayor as a “transformative project set to invigorate Jerusalem's city center and enrich the lives of the local young adult community.
Ben-Gurion Center
Location: Ben-Gurion blvd. Tel-Aviv
Client: Ben -Gurion Foundation
Area: 1,500 sqm
Team: Avinoam Sharon, Talma Weitzner, Alon Sarig
Year: 2016
Status: In progress
Project Description
The Ben Gurion Center project is an addition of a new building in the backyard of the historical Ben Gurion House. Currently, the Ben Gurion House is a museum and visitors’ heritage center, located in Ben Gurion Boulevard, at the heart of Tel Aviv. It was David and Pola Ben Gurion’s residence from 1931 to 1973. As such, it offers a view to the formative decades of the State of Israel through the domestic environment and its first Prime Minister.
The new back building designed for the Ben Gurion Center will double its floor area and add a wider and more diversified perspective on the figure of Ben Gurion and his historical, political and cultural context. The design scheme therefore does not rely on common articulation of designated spaces - archive, library, exhibition hall, seminar room, auditorium, etc. - but rather on multi-purpose spaces adaptable to a variety of different activities and technologies of representation.
The volume of the new building exceeds the roofline of the surrounding buildings, built initially in the 1930s and partially reconstructed in the 1960s, in order to mark it as a public edifice tucked-in the fabric of a residential neighborhood. Its architectural expression intends to convey both a certain administrative monumentality and civic notions of transparency and accessibility. The sharp slope of the roof lowers to new volume towards the historical building and evens the heights of old and new at the point they face each. A hovering bridge connects the two and allows a flow of circulation from Ben Gurion’s library to contemporary spaces of retrospection.
The project’s overall layout of a front, preserved building, and a new back building, creates a small urban campus with an internal “pocket garden” (in contradistinction to a backyard) and invites neighbors and visitors to traverse it and explore the interior and exterior spaces of the renewed Center.