Shalom Meir Tower, Office skyscraper in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Shalom Meir Tower is a 34-storey office tower, 129 metres tall, clad in beige Italian mosaic tiles. Its rectangular plan has horizontal window rows on the wide front and a vertical window column on each narrow side. Hebrew lettering sits near the top, above a recessed upper section with glass balconies and a flat roof. It rests on a two-storey podium, and the lobby is reached by escalator from an intermediate level.
Shalom Meir Tower was built on the site of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, demolished in 1962; the outcry led to the founding of the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites, which adopted the school's contour as its emblem. Construction by Resco used a Swedish method relying on the tower's two concrete cores instead of scaffolding. The tower opened in 1965 at 123 metres, the tallest building in Asia and the Middle East until 1968 and 1979 respectively.
The western entrance hall holds two large mosaics: Nachum Gutman's "Mosaic in Memory of Herzliya Gymnasium", made when the tower opened, and David Sharir's "Jaffa-Tel Aviv: Second Generation" from the 1990s. Facing them stands Tel Aviv's first street lamp. The lower two floors hold an exhibition on the city's history, with Shimon Korbman photographs from the 1920s and 1930s and a 1999 model of Tel Aviv.
The tower stands at the end of Herzl Street, and the street passes beneath it through the two-storey podium. The main lobby is not at street level but on a mezzanine reached by escalator, with separate east and west entrances matching the two concrete cores. The Tel Aviv Center exhibition occupies the two lower floors.
The tower's designers left a space for a Tel Aviv subway station beneath the building, but tracks were never laid and the station remains empty and disconnected from any rail system. The tower also had a two-lane road passing underneath it.
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