Azrieli Finalist

We propose an additional level 3 international airport for Tel-Aviv and it’s metropolitan area with a runway on a floating platform, located at sea approximately 600 meters off the Yarkon river estuary and the Reading power plant in northern Tel Aviv.

Kansai International Airport in Osaka-Bay, Japan served the project as a prototype for a land-filled artificial island used as an airport Despite it’s 4 km distance from the shoreline some of the airport’s facilities and infrastructure are bound to be on- land.

This fact presented us with a chance to question and re-establish the priorities in planning and positioning the various components of the contemporary terminal, on water as well as land. in an attempt to formulate an approach that seems to be contradictory by it’s own nature - an Urban Airport Terminal and to possibly apply it on the city of Tel-Aviv.

To fulfill the site’s evident potential - proximity to the waterline and to the Tel-Aviv Port leisure district, with approved future development schemes, such as the northern extension of the port promenade in mind, a need for a more radical programmatic and design action became clear.

Our scheme combines the elements that embody the contemporary airport’s terminal programmatic content in terms of it’s urban value. It does so by prioritizing infrastructure and transportation in design strategies over the often common approach of Terminal design as an exercise in high class engineering.

The architectures of the Terminal typology presented here are drafted directly from and motivated by analyzing and formulating in precision the various infrastructure parts and their interweaving performances as a single operating machine.

A strategy of extreme, yet calculated infrastructure - led intervention may trigger the creation of the critical mass essential in sustaining urbanity. As the starting point for acquiring this mass and creating new urban scenarios- a single building / structure that corresponds to the architectural and conscious qualities of “Bigness is put forward”.

A division of the airport function into two linked parts - a terminal for planes and a terminal for people, leads to a thorough re-evaluation of the nature of this building typology. A place that by it’s default meant to attract and re-locate 7 million passengers per year, can be re-invented in a way that it is defined by the intense urban environment it produces. This type of Airport building can densify the City fabric and cause a radical transformation of a large chunk of it , that despite it’s potential, suffers neglect mainly because of being on the wrong side of the river.

The notion of ‘Bigness’ of a single building / structure in our minds is concerned less with size or scale per se. Instead, it is about the occurrence of a significantly different type, when self- generated intensity of a building is integrated into a city, increasing it’s density and intensifying the velocity of one’s exposure to it’s sensations.

September 2008