Photography and text by Gili Merin
uncube correspondent Gili Merin travelled around Israel searching out the key experimental buildings from Zvi Hecker’s early career to see how they’ve fared over the years. She found most of the projects largely intact and still in use, but with their often extreme formulistic geometries altered and adapted by their users.
»The Bat Yam Town Hall, standing among the homogenous residential units now surrounding it, looks as alien as it did in 1963. Its basic form and outer appearance seem unchanged. You need keen eyes to notice the missing rooftop ventilation shafts that were removed due to supposed security issues.«
»Over the years, random additions and makeshift solutions were added: air conditioning, pipes and extra cables. Whereas with most other buildings these would be visual nuisance, on the colourful façade of Bat Yam’s Town Hall they even seem to embellish the geometrical complexity with an added layer of randomised accessories.«
»The military training campus Bahad 1 rises from the Negev Desert like a futuristic micro-climatic urban entity. It could be an internationally acclaimed architectural monument, if it didn’t also happen to be a high security facility for the Israel Defense Forces.
The concrete complex is kept in good shape by cadets in a never-ending cycle of cleaning and maintenance, almost like a ritual of architectural appraisal.«
»With its austere façades, repetitive structure and the obsessive gardening of the inner courtyards, the edifice has the atmosphere of a cloister or penitentiary. An exception is the synagogue – an autonomous crystal with triangular windows. Unfortunately, it is no longer in use, making it a relic of Neumann’s morphological doctrine, shut and sealed.«
»The Dubiner Apartment House is the only project by Neumann, Hecker and Sharon that is listed as a monument and has thus not fallen victim to additions or severe alterations.«
»The most striking feature to me is the balance of density and porosity, of shared and private outdoor spaces, and how greenery has in the meantime overgrown the building almost completely hiding it from the street.«
»Perhaps Hecker and Neumann’s purest morphological experiment was the Technion faculty building, set on a steep slope above Haifa. It was also their last joint project before Neumann left for Canada.«
»With the construction of the Spiral House in Ramat Gan, Hecker became a one-man bricoleur community, creating perhaps the most astounding architectural object in Israel.«
Gili Merin (b. 1987 in Jerusalem) is an architect, photographer and journalist based in Tel Aviv and Berlin. She studied architecture at the UdK Berlin, Waseda University in Tokyo and recently graduated from The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. She has worked with AMO*OMA in Rotterdam, with COBE in Berlin and ArchDaily in Santiago de Chile. She publishes her writings and photography in numerous international print and online publications including Mark Magazine, Wallpaper, Haaretz, ArchDaily, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Quaderns, Detail and Frame.
gilimerin.com
»Its iconographic incompleteness leaves little room for makeshift tenant adaptations, so the Spiral House is probably Hecker’s most precise and immutable architectural piece.«
»He used to live in the Dubiner House opposite, which allowed him to keep a close eye on the building, spending many days on the construction site himself.«
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