The City Hall

The story

The Beersheba city hall is a Brutalist building in the Civic Center of the city, next to the junction of Rager Boulevard and Shazar Boulevard, neighboring Beit Yad LaBanim and Beit Ha'am. In 1961 an architects' competition was announced for the design of the new city hall in the Civic Center that was being built north of the Old City. The competition was won by the office of Michael and Shulamit Nadler and Shmuel Bixon, which had already designed earlier another building in that very place — the Keren cinema, which stood beside the municipality plot. After delays in the construction the building was dedicated in 1972, and in that same year it entered the city's new emblem; it is considered to this day one of the symbols identified with Beersheba. The building is made of concrete, mostly exposed, and is composed of two parts. The first is a low rectangular building: two floors wrapped in a thick concrete envelope, curtain-like, perforated by narrow, tall windows that hide behind it along the whole height of the building. The two floors stand on a base floor faced with rough stone, which is set back from the line of the building and separated from the central mass by long strip windows. The second part is a narrow, tall observation tower of concrete, placed at the front. An elevator was installed in the tower, but the ascent to it is blocked today and it carries antennas only. Originally it was planned to place at its top a work by the sculptor Yehiel Shemi, with whom the architects had collaborated on the Jerusalem Theatre building, but it was cancelled for want of budget.

• Brutalism
• People
• Municipality
• Beersheba