Visitors Pavilion

The Visitors Pavilion at Ramat Hanadiv is located between the Nature Park and the Memorial Gardens. Dedicated in 2008, it was the first building in Israel to be accredited by the Israel Standards Institution as a ‘green building’, as well as receive green building accreditation from the American organisation, LEED. The building offers visitors an InfoShop, classrooms, a lecture hall, an auditorium in which a film about Rothschild and his work is screened, a kiosk, a restaurant and restrooms.

The Visitors Pavilion was designed by the architect, Ada Carmi-Melamed. Amir Bloom, the landscape architect, designed the vegetation on the roof of the Visitors Pavilion and in its surroundings. The Visitors Pavilion was built using the ‘green building’ approach, also known as ‘sustainable building’. The system-wide approach to planning, constructing and operating the building is saving energy, saving water and saving raw materials. The aim of green building is to create a healthy and comfortable internal environment while avoiding damage to the environment and consumable natural resources, as far as possible. Green building is expressed through the use of environmentally friendly materials, recycled materials and a design that allows maximum saving of energy and water.

Green building was implemented in the Visitors Pavilion from the planning stage through to the use of the building. One of the guiding principles in building the Visitors Pavilion was to minimise harm to the landscape and to re-use resources. Therefore, every amount of rocks and soil that was quarried when preparing the site for building was crushed and used as raw material for infrastructure, carparks, and footpaths around the building. The upper lay of soil was returned to the roof of the building, and after being mixed with compost it became fertile soil in which the trees and shrubs that constitute the building’s green roof were planted. The two parts of the roof were joined by a strip of glass through which daylight enters the building and saves energy. The building has a built-in geothermal air-conditioning system that saves energy and all of the wastewater is diverted to Ramat Hanadiv’s wastewater treatment facility.

Green roof
The green roof of the Visitors Pavilion acts as a ‘green blanket’ that creates a green continuum between the Nature Park and the Memorial Gardens. Covering the roof with soil creates thermal insulation, helps maintain a comfortable temperature inside the building and contributes to saving energy. The trees and shrubs planted on the roof contribute to reducing air pollution and integration of the building into its surroundings.

Lighting with daylight
The Visitors Pavilion is lit up by daylight thanks to the unique design of the building’s roof. Along the entire peak of the building’s roof we installed a glass skylight, through which daylight enters the building. The light enters through the glass, lights up the building’s long corridors with ‘soft light’ and thus saves electricity consumption for lighting.

Air conditioning
The geothermal air-conditioning system installed in the building also contributes to saving electricity. This system is based on the fact that the soil temperature at a depth of 2 m or more remains constant at 21.7 degrees Celsius. Therefore, warm water flowing to the soil’s depths cools down by 5 degrees while cold water flowing to the soil’s depths warms up. In order to cool the Visitors Pavilion, water flows out of it through pipes that descend down shafts that were drilled to a depth of 40 m. At the soil’s depths the water cools rapidly to the soil temperature and flows back up to the building, where it cools the air flowing into the internal spaces of the Visitors Pavilion.

Water
A control system installed in the Visitors Pavilion can send a warning, at any given moment, about any unexpected change in water consumption following a leak or a fault. Likewise, electronic taps were installed in the building’s restrooms to save water. Moreover, wastewater from the Visitors Pavilion is collected and diverted to a ‘biodisk’ wastewater treatment facility in the operations area of Ramat Hanadiv. The fresh water obtained from the purification process is good for irrigation and is used to irrigate the willow trees in the research plot.

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