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.
