Stripes

Rubinstein Towers, Tel Aviv, completed 1997 / Avraham Yasky & Yossi Sivan, Sharon Rotbard, architects


The "Rubinstein Towers" project was one of my main occupations at Yasky's office, and had been keeping me busy for more than three years.Originally, I arrived there by the end of 1993, shortly after my return to Israel, in order to work in the large team they constituted for the design development of Azrieli towers.

Azrieli Towers was the city's landmark project. It was a three towers composition (round, square and triangular plans) designed by the architect Eli Atyia, and was the winner of a restrained competition organized by the municipality of Tel Aviv joining architects and developers. But after a dispute with the developer David Azrieli, who wished to share the credit on the design, and after a long public controversy and even a longer legal procedure, the project was taken from Atyia and given to Yasky, Israel's largest firm.
At the time, the project was still named "HaShalom Towers" (the Peace Towers) after "HaShalom road" passing nearby, but certainly echoed the Rabin "peace process" of this era. Shortly after the collapse of the peace process, Azrieli easily changed the name of the building and named it after his own.

I worked few weeks on the project. Azrieli was indeed profoundly involved in the design, and sent every night by fax (there were no emails at the time) sketches and comments. After some time I wished to resign from this project.

At this period I met Yasky for the first time. In a discussion he organized one evening, where he presented the office's projects in Tel Aviv, I criticized the design of most of those projects based on what I considered as a simplist and commercial interpretation of certain deconstructivist moves from the Eighties (`this one`, for example).
Yasky was surprised and visibly offended by my comment, but few days later he called me to his office and asked me to be "the house keeper" of the Rubinstein project in Neve Shaanan neighborhood, on the limit of what I called years after, "the Black City". He gave me a rough sketch of the outline of the building and said that I can do everything except changing it since "it was scratched by the legal advisor of the regional committee". Although, as a young architect, I wished to take a project "from scratch", I accepted his offer on the spot. Surrounded by a cacophony of noisy office buildings (especially a horrible Gudovitch building on the other side of the street), I wished that the project would be as calm and as sober as possible. "I'd like it to look as a Swiss medication company's headquarter", I said to him.

At that time, the project was named "HaSharon Towers" after "Hasharon Street" passing nearby, but soon after my own arrival to the project, the client, Avraham Rubinstein, changed it to "Rubinstein Towers". Rubinstein was at his late seventies. He was a small, clever guy ("In his generation", explained me Yasky, "a developer is a contractor with sharp elbows"). Rubinstein had been leading for years a crusade against Tel Aviv's engineering administration, and above all, against the permit department. He used to pun the Hebrew department's name "Agaf HaRishui" and called it "Agaf HaResha" ('Evil department").

Despite its name, certainly echoing Azrieli's landmark project, "Rubinstein Towers" is in fact one building served by three cores, and is probably the shortest office tower in Tel Aviv (13 floors) - a handicap that I tried to correct as much as I could whenever I took photos of the building.

But the main problem of the project was a constraint imposed by an old, forgotten municipal plan, to enable a future extension of the Har Zion Avenue, if and when the old bus station would be shut down. I am probably one of the only people who ever saw this plan. In all the city's later plans, years after the old station had been indeed shut down, this extension never appeared. As a condition to grant him with a construction permit, the "Evil Department" imposed Rubinstein to add to the building's land register a mention of "public pleasure linkage", to ensure the public character and status of the ground level. This condition forced us to coordinate the planning of the basement and ground floor levels according to the different hypothetical phases of the avenue's extension project, and to erect the building over a large span, in order to allow the passage of the future avenue underneath.

In order to solve this structural problem, I convinced the project manager, Uri Madpis, to change the structural engineer, who had provided me with concrete elements' sections of two to three square meters. This change was a unique occasion to work with Shmaya Ben Avraham (1925-2004), one of the giants of Israeli structural engineering (and one of the nicest guys I have ever met), and his team, composed by his partner Moti Cohen and the young engineer in charge, Avinoam Horowitz. In the very first meeting Shmaya changed the structure from concrete to steel. Avinoam had been serving in the Israeli army as an explosive officer. After each working session, we used to start all over again, figuring out the best way to blow the whole thing down.

"Rubinstein Towers" was the first Tel Avivian office building in the Nineties with a "real" curtain wall that goes from the ceiling to the floor. In most of the buildings at this time, the glass served as a cladding material for the spandrels area up to the window's level. This curtain wall was also the first one with the "bull-nose" aluminum clap-on detail. Rubinstein was a difficult client. He couldn't bear the idea that this unnecessary detail will increase the facade's price by 5$ per square meter. In a crucial, endless meeting, I tried to convince him for hours about the visual necessity of the horizontal aluminum stripes for the building's image, showing numerous examples of modern curtain walls from Mies van Der Rohe to jean Nouvel. After three hours I gave up and asked Yasky to join us. Yasky came in, sat near Rubinstein, smiled to him and asked him what is the matter. "Your architect gives me hard time", said Rubinstein, "Those aluminum stripes, they cost me 5$ per square meter and they are good only for the pigeons to sit on them and to shit all over the place". Yasky smiled and replied calmly: "So, Rubinstein, could you please tell me why you are wearing this striped shirt?" Rubinstein looked on his own shirt and indeed, it was striped. He was completely surprised. It was clear that he hadn't been looking at himself in the mirror that morning. "OK, Yasky", he said, "You got me this time. Let's keep those stripes".
This was the last time I saw him. He had a heart attack three days later while visiting one of his building sites.

note: The main user of the building is Bank Hapoalim, who added a giant electricity generator on the back of the building's eastern part, with a horizontal chimney directed to the sidewalk. For the public pleasure, they installed under the building some bycicle parking stands which caused me, literally, a lot of pain.