Designing for place and space

Rafi Segal Image: Bryce Vickmark - Associate professor of architecture Rafi Segal creates projects meant to enhance a sense of community. What makes a building great? To Rafi Segal, it is never just the form of a structure that counts. What matters is the way a building fits its surroundings and responds to its social and cultural environment. Segal, an associate professor of architecture at MIT, has gained note as a practitioner whose refined contemporary designs interact extensively with their settings - often featuring open spaces, irregular shapes, and creative multilevel configurations on sloping sites. From museums to homes, Segal is always trying to ensure that a building's formal space and its chosen place respond to each other. "Architecture seeks a balance between creating its internal world and making you realize the qualities of the place you're in," Segal says, "whether it's in a city, a landscape, or the places in between." For Segal, those places often are cities. One of his designs, the Palmach History Museum in Tel Aviv (designed with architect Zvi Hecker), which focuses on modern Israeli history, features a series of retaining walls creating courtyard space on a sloping, elevated site - while much of the museum's display space sits underground.