This article was originally published in Domus 951/October 2011.
Tel Aviv is hot and restless. The dusty "tent city" of protesting students that appeared in July continues to sprawl its discontent through the main boulevard. I'm told that the weekly marches against the government, which counted hundreds of thousands of participants in recent days, have yet to reach their peak. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is already playing its own role in the city's summer of dissent. Rabin Square, customarily used for mass gatherings, is closed for renovation and so the homemade banners and clanking saucepans of social unrest now parade in the public plaza of the city's cultural cluster on Shaul Hamelech Boulevard. The avenue is grandiose and so is its collection of buildings, with an opera house, library, theatre and the heavy-set 1970s' brutalist museum of art dominating the vista. But from the vast concrete forecourt I can just make out a tangential view of its glistening and dexterous new extension. Could this be the new face of Israeli art?
In a delightful twist, the concrete panels for the facade were cast on site in the belly of the structure, as if the building itself were a factory for its own construction