Swiss designers Camenzind Evolution completed the project in collaboration with Israeli studios Studio Yaron Tal and Setter Architects.

The offices occupy seven floors of the Electra Tower, one of the tallest skyscrapers in the Israeli city, and were designed as a series of informal workspaces intended to encourage communication and collaboration.

Every area is themed, but each one is based on a scene found somewhere in Israel. Some of the corridors appear as narrow cobbled streets, complete with arched windows and flower boxes, while the reception area is an undulating timber landscape reminiscent of the public spaces at Tel Aviv's port.

Fake grass covers the floor and seating in one room. Another contains surfboards that reference the city's growing surfer culture.

"Each floor was designed with a different aspect of the local identity in mind, illustrating the diversity of Israel as a country and nation," say the designers.

Other unusual spaces include a meeting area surrounded by climbing plants, rooms resembling converted warehouses and space modelled on a desert landscape.

One floor is assigned as a Google Campus, a shared workplace for startup technology companies modelled on one that opened last year in London.

Google frequently works with designers to develop wacky concepts for its offices and the latest London headquarters includes Union Jack flags and vegetable allotments. The internet company also recently revealed images of its data centres, which feature primary-coloured pipework and cooling rooms that glow green. See more stories about Google.

Other offices designed for well-known technology firms include a campus for Adobe in Utah and offices for Microsoft in Vienna, which also include a slide. See more stories about technology companies or see more stories about buildings with slides.

Photography is by Itay Sikolski.

Here's some more information from Camenzind Evolution:

Amazingly inspiring new work environment for Google in Tel Aviv

At the end of December 2012, Google Israel has opened its spectacular new 8’000 m2 offices in Tel Aviv for their ever growing teams of engineers, sales and marketing.

Designed by Swiss Design Team Camenzind Evolution, in collaboration with Israeli Design Teams Setter Architects and Studio Yaron Tal, the new Google office now occupies 8 floors in the prestigious Electra Tower in Central Tel Aviv, with breath taking views across the whole city and the sea.

It is a new milestone for Google in the development of innovative work environments: nearly 50% of all areas have been allocated to create communication landscapes, giving countless opportunities to employees to collaborate and communicate with other Googler’s in a diverse environment that will serve all different requirements and needs.

There is clear separation between the employees traditional desk based work environment and those communication areas, granting privacy and focus when required for desk based individual working and spaces for collaboration and sharing ideas.

Each floor was designed with a different aspect of the local identity in mind, illustrating the diversity of Israel as a country and nation. Each of the themes were selected by a local group of Googlers, who also assisted in the interpretation of those chosen ideas.

Being in Israel, for lunch the Googlers can choose from three amazing restaurants, non-kosher, kosher dairy and kosher meat, each of the restaurants designed to it’s own style and theme.

Only 7 of the 8 rented floors in Electra Tower are actually occupied by Google. The remaining floor gives space to a new ‘Campus’, which was also opened in December by the Israeli Prime Minister. The ‘Campus Tel Aviv’, powered by Google for Entrepreneurs, is a new hub for entrepreneurs and developers, providing a base for start-up companies, and is only the second Google ‘Campus’ worldwide.

Sustainability played a vital role to Google in the development of their new Tel Aviv offices and the project is currently awaiting LEED ‘Platinum’ certification, the first of its category in Israel.

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Camenzind Evolution appeared first on Dezeen.

"A new building almost 'not present' from the outside is generated," Paola Liani and Itai Paritzki told Dezeen. "We tried to reinvent what is not present in this particular context and zone of the city - creating an intimate, rich, deep space overlooking a small garden."

The constrained site prevented the architects from giving the building many windows, so they added a long narrow skylight across the width of the roof to bring light down into both the ground and first floors.

A first floor corridor lines up with this skylight and features a gridded metal floor that lets light filter through to the open-plan kitchen, living room and dining area below.

The metal floor also allows residents on the ground floor to see others coming in and out of bedrooms on the level above.

A staircase with cantilevered iron treads connects the two floors and climbs up the side of one of two exposed brick walls. "We invested in this material because it moves the walls and the light, in a codified, almost historical way," said the architects.

More gridded metal is mounted into rectangular frames to act as a semi-transparent screen for the staircase, taking the place of a balustrade.

Paola Liani and Itai Paritzki founded their studio in 2001 and have also designed a house beside the face of a cliff and an apartment with a PVC ceiling.

See more architecture in Israel »

Photography is by Amit Geron.

Here's some more information from the architects:

ZBL House | Paritzki & Liani Architects

The house is inserted in a series of row houses, not far from the university area in Tel Aviv. It is a pedestrian oasis composed of attached houses, only one story high, and filled with green areas. The building restrictions for that specific zone permit utmost a height of 4.5 m for the façade and 6.5 m for the roof top.

The idea of this residential volume situated between two walls and two strips of green is to design the space with the natural light, excluding any full-height subdivision or typological hierarchy; only by inserting two voids that trace the movements of the inhabitants.

Two shifted rectangular cutouts of light: the first, located in the center of the volume directs the light from the roof level to the ground level, which is lifted 90 cm above the pathway (kitchen, dining, living area). The second, located on the external border between the house, the pool and the garden, consents the creation of a second naturally illuminated court, on underground level.

Once entering the house, one perceives the visual depth between the different levels and micro gardens of Sambucus on ground floor.

The suspended passage (bridge) that leads to the night area on the first floor is a diaphragm made of metal net grid only 2 cm thick that assumes the value of a lightweight veil that refines the zenithal light while extending the silhouettes of who walks through it, "in order to see nothing but the sky".

Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Total site area: 198 m2
Total floor area: 300 m²
Number of stories: 3
Status: Completed, 2012

Above: ground floor plan - click above for larger image and key

Above: first floor plan - click above for larger image and key

Above: long section

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Paritzki & Liani Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

The tiled menu board above the kitchen and counter is made from oak and bent tin.

With only 35 square metres of space to be utilised, Studio OPA solved the problem of storage by placing items from the kitchen on display shelves in the dining area.

Green, grey and black patterned tiles decorate the wall near the window.

The glazed facade provides continuity with the green and white seating outdoors.

We previously featured another Tel Aviv restaurant by Studio OPA - a pop-art pizzeria with soup cans covering the walls.

See all our stories about restaurants »
See all our stories about Israel »

Photographs are by Yoav Gurin.

Here's some more information from Studio OPA:

Avanti – fast food pasta

Located in the centre of Tel Aviv, Avanti is an extra-small space of only 35 sq. m. including the kitchen, the counter and the dining area.

The lack of storage space resulted in us having to display the kitchen products to all. The display was made of a bent 4 mm tin.

Made of oak tree and bent tin, the menu board is a tribute to Scrabble and was built with the idea of having the flexibility to change every day according to the chef's wishes.

A square wall made of coloured tiles is a homage to a classic Italian restaurant.

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by Studio OPA appeared first on Dezeen.

The Loveat Jaffa cafe fits into the corner of a former hangar, with three louvred glass facades providing a view of the port.

Inspired by the building's history, the designers divided the cafe into small boxes of different sizes, stacked like crates.

The kitchen has been placed inside a steel cargo container while the toilet is hidden inside a box of timber planks.

A staircase made from diamond-plate steel decking leads to the upper level of seating, which has a timber-clad wall and a wire mesh balcony.

Heavy twill work shirts in navy blue have been used to upholster the sofa upstairs.

The tables and chairs are made from chipboard or grey steel, while the yellow aluminium bar stools have all been cast from a 1930s tractor seat.

See all our stories about cafes »

Photographs are by Yoav Gurin.

Here's some more information from the designers:

Studio Ronen Levin in collaboration with Eran Chehanowitz, who have already designed together three coffee shops for Loveat in Tel-Aviv, have recently designed a fourth spot in Tel-Aviv's old Jaffa port, in the preserved and restored hangar that used to be the packing and shipping plant of the legendary Jaffa oranges in early 20th century.

While strict preservation rules did not allow tampering with any of the existing walls/facades, health regulations and business licensing issues demanded that nearly two thirds of the 70 sq m space was assigned to "back-stage" facilities (such as kitchen, dish-washing zone, storage, employees changing room, toilet, etc.).

Since the space is on the corner of the hangar, and enjoys three glass-louver facades overlooking the old port, the challenge addressed was of allocating such a big portion of the space to areas that by nature need to be hidden, while relying only on one back wall, so as not to hide the special view, nor to block the space with a gigantic disproportionate monolith, estranged to the light materials and fragmented nature of the envelope.

The solution proposed derived from the history of the site as a packing and shipping plant, located in a port - breaking the mass to smaller fragments, by "boxing" each function in a different shape, size and material and "stacking" the various boxes, horizontally and vertically along the back wall, like crates in a shipping yard.

Accordingly, the materials assigned, echo the imagery of packing plants and shipping yards – exposed steel beams, diamond steel decking plate stairs, crimped wire mesh railings, exposed in-situ cast concrete, wire mesh reinforced glass. The kitchen was fitted into a discarded steel cargo container and the toilet was boxed in the timber planks used as casting-form for the concrete.

The furniture design too, was inspired by warehouse and fork-lifts imagery – spruce timber, grey steel, exposed threaded rods and bolts. The bar stools were cast in aluminum from a 1930s tractor iron seat and painted yellow, the dining chairs made of OSB, and a sofa was created with white painted wire mesh upholstered with 25 XL navy colored heavy twill work shirts sewn together, the pocket flaps, white stitching and white buttons of which providing a graphic pattern that breaks the 360cm long surface.

The design, choice of materials and colour scheme were manipulated carefully to echo the site's narrative while maintaining Loveat's branding strategy as a young and trendy, frivolous and playful company, in spite of the inherent "heaviness" associated with the visual language of packing plants and shipping yards.

Project: Loveat Jaffa
Client: Loveat Ltd
Design: Studio Ronen Levin
Project designers: Ronen Levin, Eran Chehanowitz, Revital Yariv

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and Eran Chehanowitz appeared first on Dezeen.

The family apartment is located on the twenty-first floor of a tower block in the south of the city.

Glazed walls surround the open-plan living room and spotlights stretch out like spiders' legs from its shiny white ceiling.

Each room in the apartment features wooden floors and walls in the bathroom are clad with roughly cut layers of stone.

Another interesting project by Paritzki & Liani Architects is a house beside a cliff in Jerusalem.

See more projects in Israel »

Photography is by Amit Geron.

Here's a description from Paola Liani and Itai Paritzki:

R1T Apartment | Paritzki & Liani Architects

An angle. An "L" shaped volume positioned slightly higher than ground level about 80 meters above in a tower facing south-west of Tel Aviv, visually reaching like a proof of joint the sinuous coastline of the Jaffa port, only a few km away.

The design idea was to create a natural appendix to this visual correspondence in a territorial scale, and to obtain an ornamental integration of the city in the interior.

There are three routes traced on the inner perimeter of the "L" shaped volume: first is an entrance route that is internally duplicated by a second parallel passage covered with wood, leading to the night area, terminating and replicating itself along with the sea through the presence of a mirror / glass wall.

A third route, hidden and shorter, leads from the kitchen and dining area to the dark service zone shifting towards obscurity.

In this scheme for the sky, the main attraction is a place that "flies away from the world" in order to belong to the illusory of the blue that surrounds it.

Through the ceiling, a thin reflecting membrane, the city enters again the habitat, it appears, it gets lost; the streets, the buildings, find new boundaries between the atmospheric layers and miniatures signs of the carpets.

In this constant projection, the objects, everyday furniture pieces assume different layouts according to the mood, atmosphere and events of the house.

The night area transfers the projective references of the reflective ceiling but this time in a vertical way, along with partitions of mirror and transparent glass that allow a glimpse to the rough wall of stone of the bathroom.

A plan for the sky.

The nocturnal passage, the urban sky filled with artificial lights, stars, and paths form on the reflective ceiling and glass walls, weaved polygons, arches of circle, speedy rays of light, a dense arabesque that leaves the rest for the imagination.

The inhabitants observe.

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& Liani Architects appeared first on Dezeen.