Lev HaIr

Lev HaIr (Means in Hebrew: City Center) is a housing project in Tel Aviv, Israel. It is located on a sloping terrain in an old residential district. The project contains 176 apartments of different sizes in a U-shaped, six-storey high building that frames the site of a twenty-two storey tower.[1]

Eclectic styled house in Mazeh street, designed by Akiva Arieh Vice

Most of the buildings in the neighborhood were built in the 1930s and 1940s, or even earlier. The buildings were built originally with three floors, but a roof-floor was later added to most of them. In many streets the style is European - the front turns to the sidewalk, without a fence or a backyard. This differs from the Israeli-style buildings of the 1950s, with the first floor on columns above the backyard or the parking. In some buildings you can still see the Shield Wall - a brick wall which covers the stairway entrance as refuge from the snipers firing from Jaffa at the Independence War, before most houses were designed with built-in shelters.

Today, new houses are built in the International style and Eclectic style. Most of the old houses are either being torn down, or preserved and reconstructed.

References

Coordinates: 32°4′6.87″N 34°46′39.54″E / 32.0685750°N 34.7776500°E