Lightfall - Genealogy of a Museum

Preston Scott Cohen, K. Michael Hays, Wes Jones, Robert Levit, Sylvia Lavin

For architecture, the Tel Aviv Museum of Arts Paul and Herta Amir Building provides a new spatial and tectonic paradigm; for museology, it represents a new approach for resolving tensions between divergent cultural agendas. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an unusual synthesis of two opposing paradigms of the contemporary museum: the museum of neutral white boxes dedicated to aesthetic contemplation and the museum of architectural spectacle, a site of public excitation. Rather than being concentrated in a grand lobby or atrium, the public spaces of the building are dispersed, becoming sites for artistic interventions. A series of rectangular galleries are organised around the light fall, a twenty-six-meter tall spiraling atrium that organises the building according to multiple axes that deviate significantly from floor to floor. The geometry and organisation of the building stimulates...