Ron Arad Architects has revealed a twisted tower that is narrow at the base but widens at the top, built as the first phase of the ToHA office complex in Tel Aviv.
British-Israeli designer Ron Arad designed the offices to take advantage of a constricted site by expanding and rotating the 28-storey tower as it rises.
The building is set to complete later this year, with a second 70-storey tower planned for the next phase of the Totseret Ha-Aretz (ToHA) project due to be built by 2024.
The first building has a stepped facade as the floors wider towards the middle of the tower before reducing slightly before the roof. Horizontal louvres and the overhang from the rotated floor plates create sunshades for levels below.
Seven lower narrower levels in the building, contain the building's technical plant. This leaves the roof level free for several restaurants, two terraces, and a perimeter walkway.
A facade of cross-mounted panels forming a pattern of X shapes clads these levels. The woven pattern makes the facade permeable to allow for ventilation for the plant facilities.
The building's entrance is marked by a 30-metre-tall cable-supported glass wall that leans out from the building.
A seven-storey-high lobby has views all the way up to the roof via an atrium void that runs through the building, allowing daylight to penetrate the offices from another inside.
Sky is visible through this 100-metre-high vertical space, and trees have been planted in the centre of the foyer. Access to the underground car park is also through this space.
No two floors of the office building are the same. Floor sizes range between 1,850 and 2,780 square metres, and can be sub-divided between as many as seven tenants or left entirely open plan.
Arad's architecture studio combined more traditional passive approaches with a high-tech facade to improve the development's sustainability credentials, and it has been given a LEED Platinum certification.
Ron Arad Architects has also designed a cancer treatment centre in northeastern Israel that will serve both Israeli and Palestinian patients.
"Architects have a duty to do good things," he told Dezeen in an exclusive interview, where he said he regularly turns down projects commissioned by what he calls "dark regimes".
Project credits:
Architect: Ron Arad
Executive architect: Avner Yashar, Yashar Architects
Project director: Asa Bruno,
Senior associate: Paul Madden
Associate: Julia Almeida
Team: Julian Gilhespie, Benjamin Dresner-Reynolds, Shalhevet Visner, Alan McLean, Adam Furman
Consultant structural engineer: Buro Happold, David Engineers
Landscape architects: VOGT, TeMA
Project director: Asa Bruno
Senior associate: Paul Madden,
Associate: Julia Almeida
Architectural assistant: Benjamin Dresner-Reynolds