Tel Aviv-based architecture studio A. Lerman Architects has converted old print factory into a new contemporary art gallery in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Named Contemporary Art Gallery, the redesign of the gallery is inspired by the building's industrial past and provides a clean, pure and elegant intervention as a new gallery space. 

Set in a former print factory at the southern end of Tel Aviv, this intervention within an existing industrial building explores the boundaries and potentials of re-use as a design brief.

Image © Amit Geron

"The building on 117 Herzl Street was a mediocre architectural product in the positive sense of the word. It had other qualities too, being practical, average, unremarkable, generic, and faded," said A. Lerman Architects.

"But in fact, its actual neutrality allowed a major intervention that did not suffice with a mere facelift and the creation of a polished art space."

Image © Richard Jochum

According to the architects, the intervention's aim was to tackle the existing building with contemporary tools and concepts aimed at manifesting the conflict between the found object/building, and the new use inserted into it.

Intending to create a tension raised between these two extremes - between the old and new - it can be described as a new category of space. 

Image © Richard Jochum

The studio added that "Rather than re-enforcing a mythic – out of the sands tabula rasa modernism - as the history of Tel Aviv has been branded with, we were looking at its bastard forms that emerge out of the TLV Jaffa hybrid at the places of its overlap and seem." 

Image © Richard Jochum

"Not black, or the 'authentic' of romantic Oriental’s, nor the white of the conscripted modernism, but dirty 'bastard' or mongrel modernism, emerging not out of clear ideologies but out of the confusions and contradictions of urban life."

Image © Richard Jochum

The studio also described the extremes as a ‘hot-cold’ interaction for the gallery space. Potential tensions are mapped, then highlighted: new versus old; sensual versus alienated; exposed versus hidden; high versus low; shining versus dim; clear versus opaque; open versus closed; clean versus dirty. 

"This, for us, is the city of Tel Aviv."

Image © Richard Jochum

Image © Amit Geron

Image © Amit Geron

Image © Amit Geron

Image © Amit Geron

Image © Amit Geron

Image © Amit Geron

Image © Amit Geron

Plan

Elevation

A. Lerman Architects was established in 2006 by Asaf Lerman, an Architectural Association graduate. A. Lerman Architects is situated in the south of Tel Aviv in a locksmith workshop turned into an architectural studio. 

Project facts

Client: Contemporary art gallery

Completion year: June 2009

Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

Principal architect: Asaf Lerman

Top image © Amit Geron

All images © Amit Geron, Jochum Richard

> via A. Lerman Architects