Tel Aviv Museum of Art / Preston Scott Cohen / The Superslice

Here is one of the latest built projects of progressive building designer, Preston Scott Cohen. He is based in Boston and is a professor and chair at the Harvard GSD. Scott Cohen is known for his interest in pushing formal geometry into built space. Using computer modeling, he will work with, for example, self-intersecting surfaces, Möbius strips, formal torsions to attempt to create architecture out of these complex formal models. Here is the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, located in the center of the city’s cultural complex and designed by Preston Scott Cohen‘s office.

From the Architecture Office:

The program for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building posed an extraordinary architectural challenge: to resolve the tension between the tight, idiosyncratic triangular site and the museum’s need for a series of large, neutral rectangular galleries. The solution: subtly twisting geometric surfaces (hyperbolic parabolas) that connect the disparate angles between the galleries and the context while refracting natural light into the deepest recesses of the half buried building.

The building represents an unusual synthesis of two opposing paradigms for the contemporary museum: the museum of neutral white boxes and the museum of architectural spectacle. Individual, rectangular galleries are organized around the “Lightfall”, an eighty-seven foot tall spiraling atrium.

(click to enlarge)