The Three Sins of the Central Station and the Future of Big Concrete Buildings
Upon completing my studies in architecture, in 2011, I undertook the responsibility of reorganizing the somewhat neglected archives of Ram Karmi (1931-2013). Karmi was one of Israel’s most influential architects, designing some of its most important buildings, starting in the mid-1950s. He was also the chief architect of what is widely considered Israel’s worst building: Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station.
After months of meticulously organizing stacks of deteriorating papers and architectural drawings, I stumbled upon a collection of large, rolled tracing paper that initially appeared insignificant. As I unfurled them, a revelation emerged: the forgotten, 1960s, hand-drawn sections of the station (Figures 1 and 2). Since I lived not far and was intimately familiar with it, I struggled to comprehend the sharp aesthetic contrast between Karmi’s beautifully detailed, optimistic drawings and the rundown and largely neglected state of the building today (Figure 3). While curiosity led me to explore how the station came into being and what made it so despised, I slowly realized that it is also truly captivating and profoundly intriguing. I fell in love with the station.
Figure 1. First design iteration for the Central Bus Station, Ram Karmi Architects, 1965. Courtesy Ram Karmi Collection, Azrieli Architectural Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Figure 2. Design iteration for the Central Bus Station, Ram Karmi Architects, 1966. Courtesy Ram Karmi Collection, Azrieli Architectural Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
The Central Bus Station, at 118 Levinsky Street, is a highly contentious megastructure in the long-neglected southern part of Tel Aviv, at the heart of Israel’s bustling metropolis. Spanning nearly three decades, its convoluted planning and construction started in the early 1960s and was completed only in 1993. Occupying an area equivalent to six soccer fields and constructed primarily with raw concrete, the mammoth structure encompasses a vast expanse of 2.5 million square feet (Figure 4). In addition to serving as a major transportation hub, it housed vast commercial spaces, cinemas, bomb shelters, offices, and galleries.
Figure 3. Tel Aviv Central Bus Station today. Photograph by Chezki Mozes - Ein Hanetz, 2023, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Figure 4. The New Tel Aviv Bus Terminal, promotional video, 1989. Via YouTube.
Today, this gargantuan urban edifice has become an eyesore, causing severe ecological and social strain. The interior is a dark labyrinth, making it almost impossible to find your way around. Much of the structure is unoccupied or inaccessible. Half of its ancillary spaces are underground and some have been deemed unsafe; others teem with informal communal activities. The immense size, maintenance challenges, and incessant roar of buses roaming in and around the building, day and night, has made the area around it a center for crime, poverty, and filth, with severe air and noise pollution in the nearby communities of Neve Sha’anan and Shapira.
As a consequence, support has been building for demolishing the station. Before condemning it, however, the building’s history, along with its current conditions, must be properly assessed. As a starting point, policymakers and the public should acknowledge three fundamental sins that enabled the station's creation: the sins of land, money, and architecture.
Figure 5. The L-shaped Arab orange grove on which the station was built, on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, 1946. Courtesy Micha Granit Maps Library, Department of Geography, Tel Aviv University. Annotated by Elad Horn.
Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station’s original sin was that it was built on land that belonged to an Arab family: an orange grove at the edge of Jaffa, near newly built Jewish neighborhoods in Tel Aviv (Figure 5). As a consequence of the 1948 war in Palestine, vast tracts of Arab land were expropriated and absorbed into the newly independent State of Israel under the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950. This law provided the legal framework for transferring the property of Palestinians who fled their homes, or were deported during the war, to Israeli hands. It was partly enacted to avoid international scrutiny while Israel used primarily Arab properties to serve postwar needs, such as housing increasing number of Jewish immigrants that arrived after Israeli independence.
As the war started, this L-shaped parcel was transformed into a small industrial zone of timber-related businesses, later annexed to Tel Aviv (as part of Jaffa). In the mid-1960s, this small industrial community was displaced by Arie Piltz, a Polish Jewish immigrant who eventually became a well-established private property developer in Tel Aviv. As local authorities were instigating the development of former urban frontiers, Piltz took advantage of the precarious nature of this parcel’s ownership status and bought it. With government support, he conceived the station as a privately owned mixed-use megaproject.
Figure 6. The Central Bus Station under construction, mid-1970s. Photograph by Shimon Fox. Courtesy Ram Karmi Collection, Azrieli Architectural Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Annotated by Elad Horn.
Such a large and complicated piece of public infrastructure might have been undertaken as public works project; however, city leaders could not resist Piltz’s offer — and this was the financial sin. Piltz proposed a creative funding model whereby he would finance and oversee construction in exchange for easements allowing him to include expansive commercial spaces that he could then subdivide and sell to fund the undertaking. In addition, the state agreed to build the public access bridges leading to the upper levels of the station (Figure 6). An estimated half a million visitors a day (in a country of just three and a half million citizens at the time!) was expected to make the project a great success. This blurring of private initiative and public responsibility was aptly described by Sharon Rotbard as the “poisoned gift.”
Having established the land allocation and financial scheme, the station required a shape, and this is when the architectural sin occurred. Karmi had returned to Israel in the mid-1950s after studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London during the heyday of interest in Megastructures and the Brutalist approach to modern architecture. When Piltz awarded Karmi the commission, the architect, naturally, envisioned a concrete city-within-a-city. Inspired by the Old City of Jerusalem, Karmi imagined a building that, he told me, “has no beginning nor end,” where one can enter and exit but have no idea what will happen inside. Employing the latest ideas about megastructure — ones that would quickly become out of date, prompting Reyner Banham to characterize the type as “urban futures of the recent past” — Karmi designed a building that clearly prioritized consumerism over convenient public access for transportation. Work began in 1967.
Figure 7. Design for the main passenger’s hall of the Central Bus Station, Ram Karmi Architects, 1965. Courtesy Ram Karmi Collection, Azrieli Architectural Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Figure 8. The main passenger’s hall, Central Bus Station, April 2013. Photograph by Meged Gozani.
Within a few years, Piltz’s plan started crumbling. During construction it became apparent that there were not enough retail condominiums for sales to cover costs. More shops were added with each design iteration, resulting in a total of more than twelve hundred. In the process, the interior’s clarity was sacrificed, becoming a maze of storefronts, stairs, and corridors (Figures 7 and 8). Later, financial difficulties and a severe shortage of workers and materials caused by the Arab–Israeli War and international oil crisis of 1973 brought the project to a halt.
Figure 9. A promotional booklet image showing the Central Bus Station at the center of Israel. In “The Center of the State,” 1989. Courtesy Elad Horn private collection.
Figure 10. Tel Aviv Central Bus Station opening event, Aug. 17, 1993. Via YouTube.
The nearly completed concrete skeleton stood abandoned for sixteen years and came to be known as the White Elephant of Tel Aviv. The station’s basements became home to a large and noisy colony of bats, which still live there today. Media and government repeatedly questioned the need for such a large station in such a small country. But no amount of doubt could stop this private snowball from rolling. In the late 1980s, another developer, Mordechai Yona, resumed construction, and upon opening, in 1993, the building was the largest bus station in the world (Figures 9 and 10).
Figure 11. The abandoned first floor of the Central Bus Station. Photograph by Tal Yam, 2014.
Figure 12. The light ramp, Central Bus Station. Photograph by Tal Yam, 2014.
While many now call for demolition, careful consideration of the complex’s architectural, urban, and social values, and the way it’s actually used today, charts a path toward redemption. Architecturally, the construction of this complicated structure, with its unusual design, was a remarkable achievement. And whatever their limitations, its interior spaces contrast starkly with the standardized shopping and commercial centers of today, serving as a tangible reminder of a bygone era characterized by creativity and liberty (Figures 11 through 15).
From an urban standpoint, given the central location and high land values, demolishing the station would likely result in its replacement by skyscrapers. These would disrupt the neighborhood’s low-rise, communal fabric of three to five-story buildings. They’re also unnecessary given that the station’s existing floors, if renovated and reconfigured, would have the capacity to accommodate the volume of several towers.
Figure 13. Escalators, Central Bus Station. Photograph by Meged Gozani, 2013.
Figure 14. Pathway ramps, Central Bus Station. Photograph by Meged Gozani, 2013.
Figure 15. The third floor, Central Bus Station. Photograph by Elad Horn, 2018.
Finally, the station serves as a vital site for diverse communities, including Filipino migrant workers, African war refugees, and a diverse array of artists and cultural institutions, that would otherwise struggle to find suitable accommodation. Not only is the rent cheap, but the station provides them an inclusive and secure environment. Each community has established a network of social and communal facilities, gathering spots, clinics, kindergartens, and businesses. Such spaces are scarce and fragile in cities today, and there is great benefit to safeguarding them.
Preservation and transformation of megastructures is not without precedent. Around the world, projects like Montreal’s Place Bonaventure and Scotland’s Cumbernauld Town Centre, in the postwar New Town, have been successfully adapted to suit contemporary contexts or have been considered for preservation, and it is worth learning from them. Closer to home, an outstanding example of repurposing transportation infrastructure sits just west of the Central Bus Station. This is where the Tel Aviv municipality recently revitalized a neglected late nineteenth-century railway path, transforming it into a thriving public space: the Track Park. This park combines a linear green area with intricate historical features related to transportation and commerce. Undertaken in partnership between the private and public sectors, the project preserved longstanding uses (and users) while also diversifying the area's social fabric.
“While many call for demolition, the complex’s architectural, urban, and social values chart a path toward redemption.”
One precondition for preservation, redevelopment, and the safeguarding of current communities is, without question, the removal of the actual bus facilities — a move that has already gained support from the relevant government entities, albeit with constant challenges. It is also imperative to remedy the building’s organizing concept, which will require making new connections with the surrounding urban fabric, especially at the ground floor, and a design approach that embraces flexibility and future change. Given past mistakes, it also seems important to vest control with government, safeguarding public interests through partial or complete expropriation, if necessary.
Although it is widely reviled and deeply flawed, the answer to the Central Bus Station’s problems is not demolition. The complex is a significant part of Tel Aviv’s architectural, urban, and social heritage. More important, although it was born of expropriation (and misbegotten financing), razing it would conceal the evidence without erasing the original sin of the land while perpetuating the cycle of dispossession and displacement. Contrary to popular sentiment, it is imperative to preserve this urban artifact, with creativity and determination.
Citation
Elad Horn, “The Three Sins of the Central Station and the Future of Big Concrete Buildings,” PLATFORM, Aug. 21, 2023
