Nokia Arena, Tel Aviv

LOCATION: Tel Aviv

PRAGRAMME: Multi Functional Sports Arena

TYPE: Sports

SIZE: 9.000 m2

STATUS: Completed - 2008

PHOTOGRAPHER:  Amit Geron

DESIGN TEAM: Arch' Asaf Lerman - Arch' Tammy Yaniv - Arch' Lev Konikov

 

HISTORY & CONTEXT

Israel’s largest indoor arena, ‘Yad Eliyahu’, was co-designed by a team of T.A planning department architects and by the dominant structural engineers M Milstein & Y Zinger ("Milstein Zinger") and built in two stages during the 1960’s at the south/east edge of Tel Aviv.

The inner city stadium holds 10,000 seats and hosts a variety of events that range from national and international basketball tournaments, musical concerts and political gatherings that are all frequently covered by both the printed and the electronic media.

The stadium’s acclaim as the stronghold of the city’s celebrated basketball club “Macabi T.A” has turned the building synonymous with the team’s successes and earned it national recognition as an undisputed symbol of excellence and a major cultural asset of the city.

City & stadium

The project questions the Stadium’s typological dichotomy between commercial event (in) & public space (out), in-order to articulate a new prototype for an inner city stadium.

This rigid distinction that seems to be embedded in the architectural type "allowed" the old stadium to occupy two contrasting pole positions: “alive” at game times (4 hrs in 1 week), or “dead”, at the rest of the time.

The prototype seeks a new and flexible definition of relations between these two poles that dissolves conventional barriers between in (private) & out (public) and will allow for the emergence of a new kind of public event.