Preston Scott Cohen, architect of the recently opened expansion to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, refers to the addition’s exterior as “the urban version” of the building’s Lightfall—the spiraling skylit atrium and circulation space that vertically connects the new galleries.

The atrium, or Lightfall, inside the just-completed Amir Building addition to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art serves much the same purpose as the space at the heart of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Seen from the flat plaza that wraps around it on two sides, Preston Scott Cohen's radical addition to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art strikes a geometrically independent pose.