Kimmel Eshkolot Architects unveil the Check Point Building which appears as a seemingly floating volume in the university campus

CHECK POINT BUILDING

Fact File
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Scope: 6,300 sqm
Client: Tel Aviv University
Completion: 2019
Photos: Amit Geron

CHECK POINT BUILDING

Located in the center of the campus, the technologically advanced building (donated by Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity corporation), adapts to its surroundings with an integrated pixel-glass exterior. Its interior spaces and circulation system create informal meeting places and open work areas in the common space and central atrium that integrate well with the staff rooms and laboratories.

The envelope is characterized by flowing and dynamic geometries, which create a connection between the Youth Wing and the Common Wing in the lower sections. Both wings converge towards the upper floors and meet at the Computer Science areas. In the middle of the building is the garden patio and Youth Experiment Terrace.

CHECK POINT BUILDING

The innovative envelope made of pixels of glass was designed using parametric modelling. Five types of 40 x 40 cm glass panels are anchored to the building, and the configurations offer various levels of transparency and reflectivity in the windows and garden areas and sealing in other parts. The more transparent panels can open in a parallel plane to the façade, creating windows that visually maintain the overall volume, even when open. To blur the appearance of the windows in the whole mass at dark, a lighting system illuminates specific pixels and makes the windows less visible.
Etan & Michal Kimmel Eshkolot
Technology often inspires architects and enables the realization of ideas which were not possible in the past; it no longer merely serves the architecture, but has become an essential part of the architectural idea

Etan & Michal Kimmel Eshkolot, Founders of the firm

The building comprises shaded and wind-ventilated courtyards, appropriately oriented with respect to sun and wind. Its double-skin facade permit ventilation and shading as the glass pixels create a ventilated buffer zone. The spaces of the building ‘breathe’ the fresh air that the air-conditioning system sucks from this in-between area.

The architectural language of the building strives to transcend the heavy materiality of buildings to the immaterial virtualities of computers and cloud computing. The exterior appears to be continually changing, from material to reflection, blending with the sky and clouds.

CHECK POINT BUILDING