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1955 –71 Beit Uri and Rami
Nehostan Museum,
Kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov
1955-58; extension: 1962-71
Perspective drawing, 1955 A few months after Rami Nehostan’s fatal snakebite in
1955 ,פרספקטיבה early 1955, and to commemorate his brother Uri, killed
in the Lod battles during the War of Independence, the
p. 248: Exhibition in the first architects were asked to plan a “memorial and cultural
wing (standing on the left: Meir house” at Kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov Meuhad, today Beit Uri
Nehostan, founding director of the and Rami Nehostan Museum. The design continues the
museum), 1960s planning concepts that guided the Nadlers at the time: a
מראה תערוכה באגף הראשון:248 'עמ building comprising two wings of differing volumes with a
מייסד,(עומד משמאל מאיר נחושתן rural-modernist appearance. Both units were designed as
60 שנות ה־,)המוזיאון ומנהלו הראשון elongated blocks with horizontal and slanted roofs. A lot
of attention was given to the link between the building’s
interior spaces and the outside. The entrances on the
eastern façade of the first wing, which was the only one
built by the time the museum opened in 1958, were
decorated with metalwork grating depicting the local
scenery, made by Benny Rosen, a member of Kibbutz
Afikim (the grating was removed in 2009, when these
entrances were blocked).
In 1962, a time when the architects were gradually
abandoning rural-modernism, the firm was asked to plan
an extension for the building. The new plan relied on
the older one from a decade earlier, to bring the second
wing to completion, but also to give the entire building a
sculptural aspect with the slanted roof from the original
plan expanded and set like a pair of wings floating above
the building. Two rows of horizontal windows stretched
across the northern and southern facades, allowing the
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