25/12/2025
Office: RD&A
Client: BIG & Africa Israel Offices
Area: 6,000 SF
Year: 2025
Location: Allied Cities Tower, Glilot, Israel
The new headquarters for BIG Shopping Centers and Africa Israel is less an office than a spatial narrative, unfolding gradually through light, material shifts, and carefully calibrated movement. Designed as a shared home for two of Israel’s most influential real-estate groups, the project reflects a moment of convergence between scale and subtlety, corporate presence and architectural restraint.
Rather than defaulting to efficiency, the interior treats the workplace as a sequence of experiences. Spaces are revealed in stages, encouraging orientation through movement rather than signage, and positioning architecture as a quiet mediator between people, disciplines, and the city beyond.
Arrival is the project’s defining gesture. Conceived as the symbolic and functional heart of the headquarters, the entrance opens into a generous connective volume that dissolves boundaries between departments and hierarchies. A long visual axis extends toward the Mediterranean horizon, drawing the landscape into the interior and grounding the workspace in its wider geographic setting.
Materiality does much of the narrative work. A deliberate interplay of light and dark surfaces runs throughout the scheme, lending depth and tonal variation to the public zones. The contrasts feel measured rather than theatrical, echoing the dual character of the two companies: long-established players in the regional real estate market, yet agile enough to remain responsive to change. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the monumental entrance spaces and adjoining gathering areas, where scale and texture combine to convey a sense of permanence without excess.
Beyond the primary circulation routes, the atmosphere shifts. A series of embedded lounge areas punctuates the plan, offering moments of intimacy within the otherwise open workplace. These spaces act as informal thresholds, places to pause, meet, or retreat- softening the overall tempo and foregrounding human interaction.
The result is a workplace that resists spectacle in favour of balance: between openness and enclosure, monumentality and comfort. Here, architecture operates not as branding, but as cultural infrastructure, quietly reflecting the ambitions, confidence, and evolving identity of two forces that have long shaped Israel’s built environment.
Photography: Itay Benit Photography
Project Management: Task PM
Contractor: Tidhar Group קבוצת תדהר
Vendors:
Carpentry: כפיר נילסן - Nielsen Design
Framework & Staircase: Sapir
Architectural Lighting: TZC by Tzach Cohen
Lighting: GLOW- Light Gallery
Floors: Lyma | בזלת | Sarbian
Partitions: Innovate - אינובייט
Ceilings: יהודה יצוא יבוא | Judea Export Import
Finishes: בזלת | GENEZ | Badyan
Furniture: Basic Collection | גלובל - Global, Teknion, Tzora, Magenli
