The Rubinsky House, Tel Aviv

Photograph of the south-eastern facade of the Rubinsky House - a modernist building located at 1 Ha-gilboa st. in Tel Aviv. The building was designed by an architect Lucjan Korngold (1897–1963). It is the architect's one and only project in Tel Aviv. Apart from it, he was active in Warsaw and Sao Paulo. His most important projects include the headquarters of the Polonia Insurance Company, created in cooperation with Henryk Blum, and the villa on Chocimska Street in Warsaw, as well as Edifício Vista Alegre office building and CBI Esplanad office building in Sao Paulo.

The building in Tel Aviv implements the postulates of the theoreticians of modernism, for whom architecture is indifference, not mass. It also meets the Corbusier's criteria of free plan and facade. Owning to the use of reinforced concrete, the walls are detached from the side of Shekin street - raised on the pillars, thus creating a shaded space between the concrete pillars, where you can rest from the burdensome heat. The block's dynamics is provided by a semi-circular avant-corps from Ha-gilboa street, alluding to the ship forms. The functional tenement house was erected on an irregular plan, with three repetitive floors (each with three apartments of similar size), located around a central staircase (see Artur Tanikowski, Lucjan Korngold, Katalog wystawy „Gdynia – Tel Awiw” [Gdynia - Tel Aviv exhibition catalogue], Warszawa 2019, p. 265). See also MPOLIN-M693.

JO