First International Bank Tower (FIBI Tower)

In the 1990s Tel Aviv's planning for its city centre set two goals that seemed to pull against each other: to keep the form and street scale of the historic business district while preserving its function. The head office built for the First International Bank of Israel (FIBI) meets both goals at once. Completed in 2009, the tower was designed by Ian Bader of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners with the local architect Arie Kutz of Nir-Kutz; Amnon Bar Or was the conservation architect. It was the first project Pei Cobb Freed saw through to completion in Israel.

The lot, about 0.3 hectares, holds two low 1920s buildings of plastered brick in the eclectic style, whose restoration was part of the brief. The first, Beit Va'ad Hakehila (the community committee's house), faces Rothschild Boulevard and has always been a public place; the second, the Rifka Greenwald House, began life as a home tucked away in its own courtyard. Basements were dug under the whole plot while the two old buildings hung from steel beams.

The tower rises 132 metres over 32 floors. It was designed to evoke an ice cube: it tapers as it climbs, in a crisp, asymmetrical shape based on equilateral triangles. The team drew a diagonal from the north-east corner of the committee's house to the south-west corner of the building known as the Russian Embassy, across the street, and built nothing beyond that line, which opens a view of that building's facade to people walking along the boulevard; the triangle gave rise to the idea of a tower made of triangular prisms of different heights. The prism nearest the committee's house is the lowest, and up to the seventh floor the tower has no frontage on the boulevard; on that side the facade steps back for a broad landscaped plaza that runs on beneath the tower as a sheltered space.

The committee's house stays in view from the boulevard and the tower's lobby connects to it; the Greenwald House is wrapped by the tower, which gives it a private space of its own. A double curtain wall of aluminium and glass with computer-controlled blinds answers the hot, humid climate: it is Tel Aviv's first "active" curtain wall. Cooled air circulates between the two skins before it is exhausted.

The tower was planned as the bank's head office, with a banking hall, an auditorium, trading rooms and offices. The bank placed part of its main branch in the committee's house on the boulevard.

This is an office and bank building: it is seen from Rothschild Boulevard and from the landscaped plaza beneath the tower.