This morning I worked in the deep underground levels of a luxury mall in Tel Aviv, trying to discover and map its "secret" pipings and hydraulic connections. The people in the mall had thought that it was only natural that the water came out of the faucet on the wall, and they completely forgot the existence of an infrastructure, which was not maintained for years. There were no plans and drawings, and no one could answer technical questions. So I had to descend to Hades and investigate by myself. It was about five days ago that I ate my last 200 gram boiled fish meal, and after two hours in the dark corridors twelve meters underground, I almost fainted. Incredibly, my blood pressure is normal. My mother survived 9 months in Auschwitz and my father the Nazi campaign in Ukraine, so I must have been selected for hunger and exhaustion. Anyway, my senses are now very sharp and they automatically drove me towards food. In the pic, an Israeli ethnic food stand in Tel Aviv, which means an Arab woman baking pita (flat tasteless bread) with goat sour cream dressing called labane. We are assimilating into the Middle East environment, soon some Israeli will be exporting the idea to Manhattan, with the Arab woman, the goats and all.
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The other day I was listening to the radio and there was an Israeli cookbook author on and she was talking about how she likes to make cheesecakes using "soft cheese" (Gvina Levana) and I thought to myself - "what an ignorant woman - doesn't she know that this product is completely unknown in American - she might as well be telling us how to bake using cheese from the moon." Then the next week I went to the supermarket (admittedly in a neighborhood with many Orthodox Jews) and there was soft cheese, imported from Israel on the shelf.
Jewish food and other culture always borrows liberally from the local surroundings (with modifications for kashrut if necessary). There is no distinctive "Jewish" cuisine - Moroccan Jewish food is more like Moroccan Arab food than it is like Polish Jewish food, etc. The Jews of Israel will become more Arab like in their culture, food, dress, etc. the longer they remain in the Middle East although given the interconnectedness of the modern world this will not be total. Keep in mind that even Assad wears Western business suits and not robes nowadays.
K
Many of the newer shopping malls in AZ do not appear to have lower levels. As far as I can tell Arizona Mills does not have lower levels, and it is huge. From outside appearances most malls are simply built on concrete pads with all utilities either in the ceiling, in the walls or buried in the ground below the floor.
If you needed to find the sewer lines at a place like AZ mills you would probably need a pipe detector. Needless to say maps are required of everything, although even with the best intentions they can still be horribly wrong.
Ronduck, Land in Israel is in very short supply and expensive, so we always build underground parking (several underground levels) and then we have a pumping room below for the sewage and the rainwater drainage. Many buildings have two or more undeclared underground storerooms which are not in the plans, so they dont pay municipal taxes (which are calculated on the basis of covered surface). This is one of the most densely populated country in the world, land is very expensive.
If municipal taxes are calculated on the amount of covered surface, dos that mean that taxes are not calculated based on the buildings value?
The idea of undeclared basements is just mindboggling.
Yes, municipal taxes are calculated on covered surface. The tax varies according to the use given to the surface: a flower shop pays different from a butcher shop or a warehouse.
I want to clarify something about design in AZ. You stated that most buildings here are built without basements due to the abundance of land, and you are partly correct. But newer buildings seem to be constructed without basements as part of a general design philosophy. My mother used to work at the AZ industrial commission building, which you can see here on Google maps, and which has a lower level and an associated parking garage. My mother said the building is old enough that there are part of the building reserved for protection from radioactive fallout. According to her some of the newer multistory buildings that were going up in downtown Phoenix may have been built without basements. Such structures may have had pilings to stabilize the them, but no subsurface rooms. Really tall buildings will always have lower levels, but the general philosophy seems to be that they should be avoided whenever possible since they are an engineering hassle.
I mentioned AZ Mills Mall as an example of a building without lower levels, but let me give you an example of an older mall. At the corner of Dobson and Main here in Mesa there used to be a mall from the early 1960's named Tri-City Mall. TCM, had a lower level for all of its department stores and even some shops, and it had an upper level for its food court and movie theater.
The reason for the change in building design is the change in the people who are commissioning these structures. Land was plentiful sixty years ago, but since most of the people here in the valley were from the Midwest, they ordered buildings that followed the same conventions as back home. As the engineering trade has matured here engineers have taken to using designs more suited to this region instead of copying what is common elsewhere.
Ronduck,
Historically in the northern US it was necessary (especially in the days before poured concrete foundations) to dig a basement in order to get below the frost line (the deepest level to which the ground freezes in winter). Any structure (even a light wood framed house) that does not have a foundation below the frost line will heave up out of the earth when the ground freezes. Of course in frost free areas this is not a consideration. If you are talking about a large structure, it is preferable to connect the structure to bedrock. If the bedrock level is not far below ground level (as in Manhattan) then the easiest way to do this is to scrape away the overburden, expose the bedrock and build your footings directly on the rock. This usually leaves you well below grade level by the time you have removed all the loose dirt on top of the bedrock and you end up with several levels of basement and sub-basement (as in the WTC). The basement was also a convenient place for boilers and other mechanical facilities and sometimes parking. In the buildings on Park Avenue in NY near Grand Central Terminal, underground railroad tunnels occupy the basement level and this leads to difficulties - for example elevators need pits below the bottom level of the cars. So some buildings have escalators at the ground level which take you up to the elevator lobby on the 2nd level.
K
In the case of the WTC the concrete curtain surrounding the basement also served as a permanent water barrier. The water table in Manhattan is very close to the surface and as such any building that has more than one underground level is prone to flooding.
In fact, I remember reading an article in Popular Mechanics(?) that showed the NY PATH tunnels running under the WTC complex, but not through the foundations of one of the two major towers.
Ronduck - the WTC was a special case because it was built partly on the former Hudson River bed (in a landfill - Manhattan today is much larger than it was in Dutch times). They built something called "the bathtub" around the western 1/2 of the site to keep the river water out.. They used a special Italian mining technique. They dug a slit trench, which they kept filling with a slurry as it was dug (to keep it from collapsing. Then then pumped in concrete which displaced the slurry. When the concrete set they dug out the inside of the "bathtub" and exposed the wall that had been cast into the earth.
K
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