Slow Demise of Modernist Bus Building
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Crossposted from Haaretz
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 In the opinion of architect Shulamit Nadler, who planned the building, Beit Egged doesn’t look outdated half a century after it was built, even though, as she says, “It is neither made of metal nor of glass.”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.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
