Beit Ha'ir Museum

Location: Bialik Square, Tel Aviv
Year: 2006 - 2009
Area: 1,600 sqm
Status: Built
Client: Tel Aviv-Jaffa Foundation
Original architect: Moshe Cherner
Team: Yonathan Cohen, Ariel Noyman, Carmit Hernik-Saar
Interior Design: in collaboration with Dan Hasson
Project management: Am-Gar Project Management Ltd. 
Structural Engineer: Rotbart - Nissim Structural Eng. Ltd.

Project Description:

The City museum of Tel Aviv, locally called Beit Ha’ir, was opened to the public in December 2009 in honor of the city’s centennial. The building housed the city hall between the years 1926-1965 and then the city museum until 2001. The aim of the project was to restore the historical building that was the first civic center of the city. Together with Bialik Square, the building functioned as an urban focal point for ceremonies, celebrations, demonstrations and parades. The front facade occasionally served as a balcony for performances and historical events.
The aim was not only to restore the historical appearance of the building but mainly to endow it with another performative cycle and re-structure it as a relevant civic center.

Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum

Location: Kibbutz Lohamei Ha’Ghettaot
Year: 2003 - 2006
New addition: 1,500 sqm
Status: Built
Client: Ghetto Fighters' House Museum
Original architect: Samuel Bikeles
Team: Dror Aviram, Keren Avni, Rinat Calev
Project Management: Barnea Engineering and Building Ltd.
Structural Engineering: Kidan Structural Engineering Ltd.
Competition: Winning Entry

Project Description:

The Museum was built in the 50’s by the founders of Kibbutz Lohamei Ha’gettaot, whose entire population were survivors of the holocaust. The members wanted to establish a place for ongoing testimony and education concerning the holocaust and the rebellion of the Warsaw Ghetto.

GFH was built as an active repository of first-hand testimonies and personal biographies, asking to memorize history as a continuous present, and to emphasize the relation between individual testimonies and the collective experience. The big narrative offered by other museums is here toned down into direct, subjective, spoken, intimate and unmediated meeting of the speakers and the listeners of the testimony. For us, the architectural task was clear, but rather unusual: how to maintain the existing building and to keep it as a reverberation chamber of live testimonies, when the transmitters themselves are no longer there to meet the visitors and guide them through the building. In other words, the conceptual challenge was not to reproduce or simulate, but rather to re-enact the original situation of GFH.