29 Ornament of the City Since its completion in 2011, the extension of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art by Preston Scott Cohen has been the subject of a wide range of compar- isons and interpretations. In its desire to stand out from its urban setting while at the same time seeking to synthesize some of the driving forces behind that setting’s evolution, the building has often been compared to Frank Gehry’s Guggen- heim Museum in Bilbao. There has also been no shortage of comparisons with the spectacular and refined creations of Zaha Hadid, although some critics have insisted more on underlining the Co- hen project’s debt to a certain form of architectur- al modernity. Commentaries and interpretations have ranged from the formal analysis of a building that is ultimately remarkable for its determined geometric rigor, to discussion of the validity of its execution, which is often presented as typical of globalization and “star architecture.” Added to the propositions of journalists, the- oreticians and critics, the building’s architect has expressed his own approach, based on the notion of stacking, in an article in the American journal Log in 2014. 1 Few recent buildings have been the subject of so many attempts at explaining their founding assumptions and effects. It is therefore difficult not to agree with Robert Levit’s affirma- tion that the building constitutes “a meditation on architecture’s fundamental conditions.” 2 Aside from the conditions explored by these various writers, the tensions generated by the site and the surrounding buildings, the constraints re- lated to established standards for exhibiting works of art, the productive clash between exterior and interior, and that between geometric ideality and constructional techniques, another perspective can be added: that of the ornamental character of a certain segment of contemporary architecture, which goes well beyond the “return” of ornament that has been investigated by numerous theoreti- cians and practitioners. 3 What can a consideration of this ornamental character bring to the process of deciphering the Tel Aviv Museum of Art? This is the question I will seek to answer in the following pages. The Tel Aviv Museum as ornament? The prop- osition may sound odd, or even incongruous, in the sense that the building does not feature one of those colorful, textured or tessellated façades that are usually associated with the return of or- nament. Its concrete faces bear little relation to the decorative elements that have proliferated over the last decade, often in connection with an effort to establish a sort of affective system that would question the traditional distinction between per- ceiving subject and perceived architectural object. Instead, they refer to a staging of the construction- al translation of the project’s geometry, or more specifically in this case to a reduction of continu- ous surfaces to finite elements. It is ironic to note that, in an age that is dominated by the computer, and at a time when it has never been easier to work with complex surfaces, the realization of hy- perbolic paraboloids can prove even more difficult than it was in the period when Nervi and Candela were arranging scaffolds and formwork to pour their concrete shells. The contrast between using panels to create the exterior surfaces and using formwork to produce the interior “Lightfall” sur- faces emphasizes the dichotomy between exterior and interior that Sylvia Lavin has highlighted in her analysis of the building. 4 In order to understand what is ornamental about the extension of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, it is necessary to start with the overall impression that the building produces, rather than with the detail of the composition of its façades. This leads to an initial element of surprise on realizing that it is impossible to form an immediate and clear idea of its arrangement. Its triangular shape partly explains this difficulty. It is significant that, while the circle and the square immediately sprung to the mind of the eighteenth-century French archi- tect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux when he listed these simple geometric forms as, in his eyes, “the al- phabetic letters of the best authors,” the triangle, despite being just as simple, was not granted an explicit mention. 5 The triangle offers the potential for rotation and, consequently, disruption of the certainties that tend to nourish architectural prac- tice: a disruption that has not yet been fully ac- cepted, despite the current quest for architectural projects that carry the trademark of intrinsically Antoine Picon