GEOLOGICAL FORMATION.

VETERANS' MEMORIAL CENTRE, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

Part memorial centre part museum, Zvi Hecker's Palmach House in Tel Aviv roots itself to its site with an almost geological intensity through the use of excavated local limestone.

Designed by Zvi Hecker with his partner Rafi Segal, the Palmach House is located on the edge of Tel Aviv University. The campus is characterized by object buildings, each intent on drawing attention to itself as well as often commemorating a benefactor and their family. Pressed up against the street, the Palmach House, by contrast, is the opposite to a free-standing object. It is difficult to work out what is space, what is wall and what is landscape. It has no formal entrance. On approaching you are drawn into the complex, not knowing where it begins or ends.

The Palmach House was commissioned by an association representing the veterans of the Palmach, a military unit setup during the 1940s in opposition to the British Mandate government in former Palestine. After 1948 it was merged with the new Israeli army. It was considered a prestigious unit: its young commanders, among them Yitschak Rabin, heroically kept the road open to Jerusalem in the face of the Arab invasion that followed Israel's declaration of independence. In 1992, Hecker's office won a competition for a veterans' memorial centre. In a country spoilt for public buildings, the exact role of this one is perhaps unclear, but it will eventually include a theatre, a library and a memorial room in addition to the classrooms, offices and museum along the street side that have so far been realized. Funding is still needed to complete the rear part, a concrete shell as yet unclad. The interior fitting-out of the museum in the basement, described as an Experience, is not the work of the building's architects.

At the centre of the building is a courtyard; in fact, the original patch of trees, rocks and earth that was here from the very start. During construction it was shored up with piles and the new building built around it. Hecker, Segal and their team stood on site while walls were being finished, and supervised the textures of the stone and plaster. These on-site decisions changed the look of things. The inner courtyard wall of kurkar (local limestone)* has a different pattern from that on the outside, and it alters in texture as the wall progresses upwards. At one point the stone disappears altogether and is replaced by various rendered finishes that blend with the natural colour of the stone. The excavations around the courtyard demanded great care, and as a result, a large amount of kurkar was recovered. The idea of applying found material from the site to the building appealed to Hecker, since it powerfully encompasses the nature of the Palmach ideology and its umbilical relationship with the ground soil of Israel.

The stone face to the front of the building is altogether more geological. Look into the hole dug into the earth for a future car park nearby and you will see that the street elevation is derived from the natural, shattered, fragmented pattern of the rock in the earth. The finesse of the work here is staggering. The limestone pieces are flat like pittas, and scarcely eight inches deep, and yet the frequency and intensity of their placing seems entirely consistent. In front of this stone wall is a smooth concrete balustrade decorated with metal caps used in the construction of the piles.

On the nearby campus, object buildings such as Louis Kahn's engineering faculty and Mario Botta's synagogue (AR March 2000) are rather like unexploded mines landed on site from outside. Each defines a closed zone around them and is still, as it were, ticking away. Hecker and Segal's Palmach House does something entirely different. Searing through the landscape, it is the bomb that has already gone off, twisting and pulling at the stone bed. But, extraordinarily, it has left a trail of nature behind it, in the form of a line of trees that runs uninterrupted through the complex, and an untouched grove of pine and eucalyptus. It is thus both the realization of heroic pioneering Zionism, pre-1948, with its life or death improvisations, its astonishing bravura and its reluctance to concede, and at the same time a tragic imprint of the futility of all human endeavours, reduced at best to a perfunctory smudge across a landscape.

Israel makes few concessions for the tourist. The dusty, rather dowdy country of cacti and kibbutzes presented to visitors through the official publications of the tourism ministry leaves no clue as to the vibrancy, the oddness, the intensity of the place. The Palmach House sits on the edge of the army orchestra's barracks; their parade ground will eventually spill over onto its car park roof. Park your car in this gloomy catacomb and you will hear thumping and trombones above your head. When I last visited the building a bunch of army officers came spilling out of the Experience in the basement. Clad in designer sunglasses and natty purple berets, they leaned across the concrete balustrades sunning themselves before being taken off for some other experience elsewhere, perhaps on the northern front, perhaps in a Tel Aviv nightclub. If you have forgotten what romance there is in Brutalism, you should come here. TIMOTHY BRITTAIN-CATLIN

(*.) In fact kurkor is formed from layers of fragile sandy shale transmuted to stone over millions of years. It has never been used before as a building material, only as a load-bearing sub layer in the construction of road surfaces and highways.

1. The building has a strong geological presence that roots It to the site.

2. Planes of raw concrete combine with massive stone walls.

3. Part of the internal courtyard, where the scale is modest and almost domestic.

4. Walls of local kurkar limestone laid in narrow layers mimic the stone's natural condition and emphasize the building's geological character.

5, 6. The building evolved around a courtyard, which was carefully protected during construction. Existing trees form a shady landscape.

7 Rear of the complex is a raw concrete wall, awaiting future additions.

8 Formwork patterns animate the concrete surface, giving rise to a stark monumentality.

9 Courtyard terminates in tiers of wavelike steps, framed by perforated concrete walls.

1. exhibition space

2. auditorium

3. administration

4. reception

5. entrance

6. courtyard

7. canteen

8. memorial space

9. stage

10. lobby

Architect

Zvi Hecker Architect, Berlin

Project team

Zvi Hecker, Rafi Segal, Micha Peri

Structural engineer

Waintraub-Naginski-Zeldin

Landscape architect

Tichnun Nof

Photographs

Michael Kruger