Habima Square

Habima Square (Hebrew: כיכר הבימה‎, lit. The Stage's Square), (also known as The Orchestra Plaza) is a public major space in the center of Tel Aviv, Israel, which is home to a number of cultural institutions such as the Habima Theatre, the Culture Palace and the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art. The square is located at the intersection of Rothschild Boulevard, Hen Boulevard, Dizengoff Street and Ben Zion Boulevard.

The idea to establish a cultural center was originally proposed in the Geddes Plan, the first master plan of Tel Aviv planned by Patrick Geddes in the late 1920s. Geddes envisioned a kind of a modern "Acropolis". In the Geddes plan, this would be the cultural core of Tel Aviv, while Dizengoff Square nearby would be a commercial center of a different character.

The cornerstone of Habima Theater was laid in 1935. The building was planned by architect Oscar Kaufman in the International style and finished in 1945. The square was inaugurated next to the theatre, additional buildings being added only two decades later. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, the area housed an educational farm and urban nursery, with a grove of Sycamore trees. Most of the trees were eventually uprooted (causing public outrage) but two of the trees were integrated into the Ya'akov Garden.

On June 28, 1948, seven weeks after the Israeli Declaration of Independence, Tel Aviv was the temporarily national capital of Israel while Jerusalem was under siege. On this day, the IDF was declared the national army, in the presence of the mayor Israel Rokach and the foreign minister Moshe Sharett at a ceremony that took place in the square.

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