Area: ~15,000 sqm

Year: 2011

Type: Competition Entry, Public Building.

In our vision, a museum of nature as a building, acts as the spatial container in which the open environment and the built environment meet. As a building it must show the interactions between the two systems, and the various expressions which are common to each.

As a museum dealing with nature and human effect on it, an environmental sustainable approach was at the core of the design process. The suggested museum is hidden in the existing forest and under artificial landscape, conserving existing woodland. It is founded on the principles of solar passive design, fortified with supporting “green” systems, intended to complete the environmental outlook, strengthen it and even publicize the environmental context of the building and present it to the public.

The museum consists of a hierarchy of open spaces with varying degree of openness: Outdoor spaces open the public, outdoor spaces for museum visitors, internal courtyards and open atria letting natural light into the depth of the structure: Eight prisms acting as landmarks and references in the museum, both in the internal route and the external route over the topography and as viewable points. They are used to introduce natural lighting, to provide vertical circulations, and allow for full shading during the summer and infiltration of sun during the winter towards passive heating; they are used as a controlled open space allowing full monitoring of the quantity of light and heat (energy) entering or exiting the building. In between the prism over the topography a tour path open to all allows a peek into events inside the museum.

Architecture: Itai Peleg + Tammy Yaniv

Landscape: Marina Parhomowski

Environmental consultant: Gal Spanier