Slow Demise of Modernist Bus Building
Image by Aviad Bar Ness
Crossposted from Haaretz
Image by Aviad Bar Ness
The Egged bus company building is unlike any other office building erected in Tel Aviv during the course of the 20th century. It hunkers on a large corner lot located on Menachem Begin Road, overlooking the Ayalon Highway and the city’s eastern neighborhoods, and looks like a cross between a Histadrut labor federation building and a lab on a remote academic campus. The brown Granolite slabs that cover Beit Egged give the building an element of heaviness and roughness, but close up it’s possible to see the way the stories seem to float above one another and the delicate strips of windows adorning its facade. In the opinion of architect Shulamit Nadler, who planned the building, Beit Egged doesn’t look outdated half a century after it was built, even though, as she says, “It is neither made of metal nor of glass.”
The Egged building ceased to function as the headquarters of the bus cooperative’s management about a decade ago, when the executive offices moved to new premises in Airport City. Today the old Beit Egged is in the hands of Nitsba Holdings (the owner of most of the central bus stations in Israel), which has rented it out to the Defense Ministry.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Dive In
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.