Buki Zucker’s architecture office is a family-run business which includes Buki, the founder of the firm, his son Assaf Zucker and Nurit Zucker, his daughter-in-law. This is a winning combination consisting of two generations and genders, as well as office staff not part of the family. Each employee contributes his inspiration and vision to every design task. The office opened in 1971 and Assaf Zucker joined in 2002, the office then employed 10 designers and architects designing projects like office buildings, hotels, public areas of residential towers, luxury apartments, shopping malls and specialty stores.
Buki Zucker believes in clean, simple and straight lines – a design that conveys a sense of simplicity without adornment. He looks for ties to the past, preservation of remnants from the construction site combined with modern materials. Buki emphasizes the use of suitable materials, for example the right kind of stones in a hotel built for pilgrims in the Galilee, such as opaque or translucent glass that allows for proper lighting, thought of the durability of materials in public areas so that the buildings will remain beautiful over time. In projects such as the Carmel Forest Hotel, the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Tel Aviv or the Radisson SAS in Bucharest, there must be a correlation of all details, from the hotel’s entrance flowing throughout the lobby, continuing to the elevators and from there to every guestroom and space in the building. These are detail-oriented projects with a large number of systems and controls in the loop covering all areas. Buki loves being “hands on” and goes over all the details of the project.
For the public areas of residential towers in Tel Aviv, such as the “Meier on Rothschild”, the “Rothschild 30” located on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the “Manhattan” and the “Bronze” Towers in Park Tzameret Tel Aviv, or the “Aviv at Tzameret”, ‘Buki selects pleasant materials that give an illusion of a pleasant entry into ones home. The entrance lobby is characterized by its simplicity, yet there is always one impressive piece in it, such as a special ceiling lamp, a glass chandelier from the studio of the artist Chihuly, or a design by Buki, together with the company that created the lamp, “Lasvit”.
Assaf explains the difference between planning a hotel or planning public areas of residential towers and the planning and designing of residential apartments: when working with an entrepreneur or with a general contractor, there is a working procedure that requires approval at every stage of the project, a slow progress due to bureaucracy, therefore coordination between the final stage and the in “progress stages” of the contractor, working on the standard of finish is necessary which depends also on the capability of the contractor. In designing residential apartments, the architect can give freedom to imagination and creativity, unite special and interesting mediums and achieve a very high degree of finish. Assaf met the challenge of designing the Crowne Plaza City Hotel in Tel Aviv, which is on the top floors of the square building at the Azrieli Center. This is an urban hotel in a business location in the center of Tel Aviv. The design concept is intended to give the guest a feeling of home: wall-mounted furniture to enlarge the floor area of the room, a warm parquet covered with a luxurious carpet – these are choices of unusual finishing materials for hotel rooms, resulting from thinking ‘outside the box’.
Nurit Zucker emphasizes the importance of being attentive to the client in every project and at every stage of the project. Listening to the needs of the customer, the customer’s inspiration and what the customer loves. Zucker’s team observes the person who is going to live in the apartment and takes the budget into consideration set for the task, the customer’s priorities and the standard of finish he or she expects to achieve. Nurit calls this stage, which is the initial stage of every design project, the “stage of observation”.
The planning and design of an apartment that was purchased as a vacation apartment differs from the planning of an apartment designed for the permanent home of a family. The budget of a vacation apartment is different allowing possible savings on certain aspects. For example, if the client does not intend to cook while staying in a vacation apartment, there is no need to invest in a large kitchen equipped with expensive appliances. The confidence and the trust between the planning team and the client should be maintained throughout the process and consequently this complete frankness will meet the expectations of the client, without exceeding the budget.
In my opinion, an architect or an interior designer is an artist with creativity and imagination, on the other hand, he cannot design or create an apartment, building or office without taking into consideration the customer who commissioned the project, which is complex and requires a delicate balance and maximum flexibility.
The pictures are of projects carried out by the Buki Zucker, Architects and credit for the professional photographers who took these beautiful pictures goes to: Assaf Pinchuk photographer, Ori Ackerman photographer, Amit Gosher photographer, Itamar Greenberg photographer, Yoav Horesh photographer, Viewpoint Productions, Totem 3D Animation and 3Division.