Making the Restoration Project More Comprehensive and Participatory: Integrating Modernist Heritage into a Metro Station. A White City Case Study

The work investigates how the contemporary comprehensive approach to cultural heritage can be applied in the specific field of building restoration, with the aim of raising the public awareness to the importance of such process for the preservation of built heritage. The comprehensive approach in this case focuses on the insertion of public engagement as well as digital tools to the process. While public engagement reinforces the connection of the heritage to the local community, a common goal detected also in recent professional doctrines, digital heritage tools enhance the interaction between the public and the heritage, as well as making the process more efficient and profound to restoration experts. The analysis conducted in this work converges into the elaboration of an architectural project combining restoration, adaptive reuse, and transit-oriented contemporary design. The site of the project is Tel Aviv, known as the largest concentration in the world of international style buildings. The bold expression of the Bauhaus movement on the built heritage in Tel Aviv has led UNESCO to declare parts of it, called The White City, as a world heritage site for displaying modernist heritage and its unique construction culture. A critical analysis method used in this work is the case study approach, potentially giving insights to be implemented in the final project of the work. Example for such case studies were metro stations into which museal spaces were integrated, as well as Liebling Haus, a modernist building in Tel Aviv where its restoration integrated public participation through opening the building’ site during the restoration process for various public activities. Finally, the synthesis of the analysis conducted in this work is demonstrated in the project integrating Honigmann House to the future Magen David metro station. The modernist building of Honigmann House has a unique history of being part of the first expansion of the city in its early years. Formerly being designed as an eclectic style building, the building tells the story of a city changing its architectural identity. Nonetheless, the building is currently planned to be demolished to become a small open square hosting the entrance of the future Magen David metro station to be built in the next decade. The project offers an alternative for demolition, through a comprehensive project inspired by the analysis conducted throughout this work. In the proposal, Honigmann House is to be renovated through adequate degradation treatment after years of mismanagement, while the public is integrated in the process through various activities and engagement in the decision-making process for the building’s reuse. Simultaneously, the design of a new metro station in interacting with the modernist building through a partial demolition for the insertion of a new volume to function as the entrance to the new metro station. Ultimately, both structures are connected not only physically by the insertion of the new volume, but also functionally through a continuous museum on the restoration process of the building, designed in the spirit of the digital heritage approach, scattered throughout the spaces of both structures.