Cosentino: a fantastical facade for Tel Aviv’s Toha Tower

‘You don’t need a passport to go from one discipline to another’ says Ron Arad, the London-based, Israeli-born industrial designer, architect and artist, who is perhaps best known for his effortlessly sculptural furniture design. The comment relates to his most acclaimed work of recent years: the design, in collaboration with Avner Yashar, of the ToHa Tower in Tel Aviv – a piece of exquisitely sculptural architecture. ‘Architecture is architecture. Does it have sculptural elements? Yes. I do both.’

For Arad, designing a tower was little different from imagining an object – it started with a sketch that made a sculpture of a building – or was it a building of a sculpture? One way or another, even he expresses wonder that something so whimsical on paper – a form imitating the geometries of an iceberg – has become the living, breathing ToHa Tower today. 

It is not in small part thanks to Cosentino and its high-performing and infinitely flexible surface material, Dekton, that helped create some of the sculptural impact of the building. A visit to Cosentino's factory by Arad was, in fact, key to realising the design without compromise. Large-format slabs of Dekton shape the innovative ventilated facade of the lower floors. Formed slats of the compacted material inclined inwards and outwards alternately around each tier, forming a criss-cross pattern that allows air to circulate. 

The collaboration also led to a personalised palette of colours for these lower tiers, that grades the colour from dark to light as the tower ascends. In the end, 30,000 square metres of Dekton – in four thicknesses and seven colours, including custom colours – went into the floors and facades of this new icon of Tel Aviv’s skyline, making for an incredible feat of functional sculpture.

© Architonic

Head to the Architonic Magazine for more insights on the latest products, trends and practices in architecture and design.