New TLV Fashion Mall to open this month

Right next to Sarona the Gindi TLV Fashion Mall has just opened its doors. Built on the ruins of the wholesale market, the center contains most fashion brands, including H&M, Zara, Fox, Castro, Factor 54, Forever21, as well as several international brands opening their first shop in Israel, such as COS, Dior Boutique, Zara Home, Rag & Bone, Juicy Couture, or Adidas Originals. Another chain to open up in the mall is Super-Pharm, which just closed its store at the corner of Carlebach and Hahashmonaim. Only a subset of the 180 plus stores scheduled to open in the mall will be open on day 1. On the launching night, the company promised that over 100 stores would be open. The main attractions, such as the COS and Zara Home branches, will not be open on the launching night however; their opening is slated for early April.

The mall was originally scheduled to open in April 2015, but that was postponed several times. According to Gindi TLV CEO Mordi Shabat, the delay was not due to difficulty in finding tenants for the stores. "The late opening of some of the stores resulted from demands by the chains' headquarters overseas, some of them merchants doing business in Israel for the first time, and some of which are undergoing a change in concept," he said, adding, "the engineering complexity of the project, which is part of a complex composed of public centers, not just a shopping center, involves a very difficult engineering challenge, and led to two postponements of the opening date."

New Azrieli Sarona Tower starting to take shape

After more than 2 years of digging, the unconventional 200 meter, 50-story building which will be Tel Aviv largest office tower upon completion in 2016 is now starting to take shape. Azrieli Sarona will offer 125,000 square meters of working space, a three-story, 11,000-sq.-m. mall and a seven-story underground parking lot for 1,600 vehicles. It will be the country’s second-tallest building, behind Ramat Gan’s 244-meter, 68-story, multipurpose Moshe Aviv Tower.

David Azrieli purchased the land from the Israel Lands Authority for NIS522m ($139m) in 2011 and the tower will be built at the eastern end of the Sarona compound near Menachem Begin Road and Kaplan Street, diagonally opposite the three existing Azrieli towers. Architect Moshe Zur who also designed the 17 Arlozorov tower partnered with David Azrieli Architects to design the building. According to the Jerusalem Post, the architects are using simple geometry to create the effect that the building is facing the sea, which lies almost 3km to the west. The tower will be located half a block south of the company's Azrieli Center project. The office and commercial project is part of the Sarona compound in central Tel Aviv. The project offers a greater than usual number of building rights, however existing height limitations dictated a particularly large, wide building mass.

The architectural solution was to create two vertical, rectangular masses that lie alongside each other and twist slightly around two different axes. The result is a twisted tower, the base of which lies parallel to the Sarona compound pedestrian routes. Every viewpoint of the tower offers a new, different perspective. The division into two masses creates vertical proportions, which, together with the twisted effect, forms a spatial, sculptural three-dimensional object that makes a dramatic impact on its surroundings.