TLV CBS is a virtual documentary project inspired by Tel Aviv's central bus station. It is comprised of short videos documenting scenes from the various stores and spaces within the station, exhibiting a fascinating, somewhat surreal, tapestry of human connections.

 

 

All texts appear on the site, except this page, were written by Ram Karmi, station's architect, And were taken from the special festive edition for the opening of the new central bus station

About the station: “A nice Labyrinth" – thus described by its architect, Ram Karmi, who created a building so tangled it missed its primary function from the start, and continues to do so. Instead of making it an oriented-friendly passing point, he didin fact create a "labyrinth": 8 levels in the station, equal the size of 6 football fields, 17 entrances, 12 elevators connecting endless hallways, plazas and staircases. Most of the surface was never used for public transportation and some of it was never used at all.

Twenty years after the opening ceremony, it is safe to say that Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station is a failure of epic standards. It is an extreme and dysfunctional place which influences its entire urban area to this very day. The station's current state is shaggy and complex, as are the circumstances which led to it. and is often described as "Tel Aviv's black hole", a place that attracts all of Israeli society's ills, its abandoned spaces being a perfect venue for crime, drug trafficking and prostitution. Outcasts, junkies, refugees and foreign-workers all wind up here, in this land of the underprivileged.

This work attempts to explore a place that has become almost pathologically infamous, not through its illness but through its versatility and richness.