"The Felicja Blumenthal Music Center and Library", a magnificent building designed by architect Nili Portugali and built in 1996 on Bialik Square, is the only contemporary layer that has been added to this unique district, at the very center of the historic heart of the city of Tel Aviv.
"The powerful presence of a building in its environment emanates from it being an integral part of it and not from the efforts to distinguish it from its environment by creating an architectural icon. Nevertheless preserving the spirit of an existing environment does not necessarily mean a fanatic repetition of its language."
Bialik Square (named after Haim Nachman Bialik, Israel’s national poet) is a micro document of the architectural history of the city of Tel Aviv. Here stands the first Tel Aviv municipal building built in the eclectic period of the 1920's, as well as buildings dating from the 1930's, when International Style was the "dernier cri".
The book aims to trigger a public discussion regarding central debates, challenging the general public and 21st-century architects, as how should contemporary architecture intervene within an existing environment in general and the one with a significant historical value in particular, respecting and
preserving the existing one.
What is unique in Portugali's work (including in this building) that even the most modern buildings look as if they’ve been there forever.
Portugali argues that in order to change the feeling of the environment and create buildings we really feel "at home" with and want to live in, what is needed is not a change of style or fashion, but an adaptation of a holistic and cross cultural worldview that will transform the mechanistic worldview underlying current thought and approaches. The Music Center and Library, more than any other building designed by Portugali expresses her unique planning process and her particular interpretation of the holistic phenomenological worldview. A worldview which stands in recent years at the forefront of the scientific discourse, and is tightly related to the Buddhist philosophy.