Tel Aviv waterfront

Tel Aviv is a great city. It has spirit, a lot of things are going on, in some areas you can find even nice architecture (that now is being discovered thanks to UNESCO) and it’s on the sea! potentially the city could have a wonderful waterfront. In reality nothing much is done in this remarkable urban space.

the project of the current promenade was built in the early 80's (the Lahat promenade). It’s paved and covered with a horrible material – pebbles (granolit), a mixture of small stones and cement. you absolutely don’t want to fall on it. there are not many shadow areas. few trees are plant but they are all palms...one good thing is, that when they built it, breakwaters were placed, causing significant expansion of the beaches allowing a greater number of people to enter. but it’s not easy to walk to the water. in the summer the sand is boiling.

The mixture of a wide send beach with pebbles paving, asphalt, armed concrete constructed hotels and no trees or shadow make this space, especially in the summer, a very non pleasant space. forget Nice, Barcelona, Venice beach in LA or Rio.

In my project there is, first of all, a replacement of the paving into alternated “softer” materials such as wood deck and tiles. the wood deck should be used only in limited areas and not all over as lately proposed (what will cause the cut of half of the Amazon forests); it has designed urban elements (not of pebbles) and areas with trees shadow. big trees like the ficus or maritime pines. think how wonderful it would be to sit in the shadow, in front of the see and enjoy the see breeze? the wide send area between the promenade and the water would be partly used for sport activities as biking, rollerskating, beach wolley and services.