If you drive north from downtown Tel Aviv, you will enter another world.

Across the Yarkon River, the city looks Californian.

Here, in the academic quarter near the university, is the Palmach Museum, one of the most interesting contemporary buildings in Israel.

The museum commemorates the sacrifices made by the Palmach movement to achieve the independence of the State of Israel.

The architecture, made of layers of rubble, exposed concrete and plastered surfaces, does not shy away from symbolism.

The panels of the limestone facade that were left over during the excavation were used for the facade without further ado.

The mountainous building blocks are jammed into each other like clods.

The building appears to have grown together in the ground.

It was in the spirit of the client, the veterans of the Palmach, that it seems so anchored.

In its earthiness, the museum is reminiscent of the Palmach monument in the Negev desert from 1968, with which the sculptor Dani Karavan, who died last Saturday, achieved world fame.

The architect Zvi Hecker, who designed the Palmach Museum, is 90 years old today.

After studying in Krakow and Haifa, Hecker has been able to build around a dozen interesting buildings from Canada to France to Israel since the 1970s.

The term “deconstructivism” does not adequately characterize its architecture.

Hecker's design for the Heinz Galinski School in Berlin-Grunewald has the shape of a sunflower made up of five spiral wedges. Alleys and paths cut this “House of the Book” or Beit Sefer in such a way that spatially interesting intersections and inner courtyards create an architectural topography. The school has the look of a kasbah.

When Hecker was awarded the German Critic's Prize for Architecture for building the Galinski School in 1995, he was at the zenith of his career. Hecker has been living in Berlin since this year. Despite the intricate geometries and broken volumes, Hecker's buildings appear more casual like himself. Hecker tries not to create smooth, self-referential building objects that are only useful as monuments to themselves, that “don't ask questions and don't point beyond themselves”. His architecture does not follow a model, it is rather distinctive and expressive.

As luck would have it, Hecker's second masterpiece in Germany, the Jewish Community Center in Duisburg's inner harbor, is located next to a park designed by Dani Karavan. To enter the courtyard of the facility, visitors pass a floor-to-ceiling cantilever before their gaze falls through the foyer onto the harbor and one of the ruins designed by Karavan. With its five fingers, the house looks like an outstretched hand. At the end of the fingertips there are small “doors” that form the first letters of the Hebrew alphabet in plan: from right to left they read like alef, beth, gimmel, daleth and vav. Hecker sees the built hand as a sign of “wanting to be part of society and give something special”.

It is ironic that Hecker's late work and magnum opus are, of all things, a police barracks in the no man's land of an intercontinental airport. The Koningin Máxima-Kazerne at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (designed with Eyal Weizman) from 2016 serves 1500 police officers. The zigzag of their shapes can only be seen from the window of a jet taking off.