“I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent Light.
What Light makes casts a shadow
and the shadow belongs to Light.”
—Louis Kahn
Is it serendipitous or just natural that so many Israel-based architects, in their own statements about their work, use the language of light and illumination to describe the expected user’s metaphysical and psychical reactions, and not just the physical, mechanical ones. And while transcendence is not something typically included or easily accomplished in the quotidian programmatic presentations architects make to their clients to justify their work, there are occasions when, by talent or fortune, the rudimentary, economic components of the construction process result in conditions disposed to make possible an ethereal experience for the “end user.” When this happens, it is often because the building blocks were the sculpted, shaped, and situated conveyances of harnessed, yet fleeting, materials of light. And then the experience is of a person.
Here are a few examples.
Old Jaffa House 4, Jaffa
Pitsou Kedem Architects
On the side of a hill in the ancient port of Jaffa, Pitsou Kedem has turned a broken jumble of 300-year-old stone buildings surrounding an almost-central, ill-defined, open transitional space into a single family apartment residence with a courtyard at its heart; whose vintage, but for a few contemporary stylistic concessions, it would be hard to guess conclusively. The project provides an object lesson in adaptive reuse. In this case, of an historic building, which, though “Ottoman” in pedigree, is not of any immediately recognizable period style. Like much Middle Eastern architecture, as like the Middle East itself, it’s a mongrel collage of influences—from Early Western European Romanesque to Late Eastern Mediterranean Byzantine, with the occasional ancient Roman or Greek salvage being put to some new ignoble purpose. In the hands of Ottoman Turks and Arabs, styles were famously further crossbred with unhesitating disregard for their individual integrity.
The building’s original materials and methods of assembly—limestone arches, vaults and corbels, plaster finishes, and blackened metal hardware—were treated with new fastidiousness and respect. The architects took a paradoxical sort of actively hands-off approach: It requires much effort and attention to seem to intervene as little as possible so as to preserve as much as possible the accidental, unaffected, and artlessly beautiful as might remain.
Where necessary infill is made to areas of stone cladding whose original configuration was legible but not intact, the faces of the new stone were not hewn to simulate the old stone, but rather it’s been allowed, even intended, to distinguish itself subtly but not unnoticeably by having a simpler (smoother) texture, lighter color, and more practical ashlar shape rather than the tumbled, darker, random-cut rubble originally used.
Where fixed lighting is wanted along the side of rooms, rather than interrupting the integrity of restored stone walls by breaking into them with armed sconces or dated track lighting, lightweight, stripped-down and geometrically minimal customized tube LED armature is hung almost invisibly from above at a continuous remove from the face of the walls.
Regarding floors, a designer of a multi-room, custom home in a tony neighborhood directly on the Mediterranean might be inclined to fuss over multiple patterns of stone tile; or to cover existing walls with deep blue and aquamarine tapestry, or other seaside platitude. But here floors are uniformly a cool polished concrete, with their only decorative detail the faint lines caused by control joints. Walls are selectively treated with crisply outlined areas of plaster, all in a single, warm yet neutral color. The result is typical for the attitude taken for the whole renovation: focused but comprehensive; understated in its intervening touch, with drama coming from the existing organic palette of materials; and with finishing touches devised to reflect the golden natural light that pours in from all directions.
Mount Herzl Memorial, Jerusalem
Kimmel Eshkolot Architects
There are numerous small and significant details in this pavilion dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers and security personnel, part of Israel’s National Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. As a hall built for modestly sized memorial events, it serves mostly as an empty space set with temporary seating.
But undergirding and overwhelming any prosaic function the building may serve, however venerable, the architecture is enacting its own tour de force performance of pure poetry, conveying our temporal-terrestrial dimensional continuum. Space: carved out of the base of a sacred mountain and shaped into a spiraling vortex of custom cast white bricks capped by the sky. And time: expressed by the infinitely divisible passage of constantly changing daylight, reflected and refracted, collected and disbursed to animate and reveal the molded space. This is a place built to experience the evanescent and the eternal at once, and it succeeds.
Midbarium: The Jack, Joseph + Morton Mandell Animal Park, Be’er Sheva
A. Lerman Architects
The Midbarium (from the Hebrew midbar, “desert”), is a protected park area on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva landscaped to present four central desert typologies (canyon, plain, oasis, savanna), and to serve diverse species of animals for teaching and building awareness about environmental conservation.
Scrims, screens, lattice, and brises soleil, configured in myriad ways and scales of perforation, are the pervading architectural device: modulating, tempering, and enhancing desert light. Rendered chiefly in cast concrete, they are particularly well-suited to this climate and geography as well as the program’s goals of effective energy use.
The multi-functional facility marking the entry to the park consists of a vast concrete spaceframe pergola spanning 1,800 square meters. By its depth, tilt, and triangular geometry, it is able to cover a large area economically and provides, along with other integrated passive air-circulation systems, yet another layer of non-mechanical shading as it shifts its boundary-setting footprint according to the sun’s movement overhead, and serves as entry porch, enclosing roof, and directional ceiling over meandering walkways between exhibits.
An interior/exterior concrete tile floor in a tegular but nonorthogonal pattern looks like the formalized geometry of a cracked mud ground plane, and presents as an extension of the surrounding landscape.
By building in neutrally hued concrete, both massive and lightweight, the structure and its expansive, monolithic, lace-like canopy work to coordinate with the tough but inviting natural context, at the same time serving as its foil. As an instrument for both purposeful study and incidental discovery, the design succeeds on multiple levels, steering, shielding, and illuminating the way.
The Friends of Zion Museum (Yedidi Tziyon), Jerusalem
Ollech + Tol Architects
For a museum dedicated to telling the story of the modern State of Israel’s founding, and the aid offered by non-Jews to that end, architects Ollech and Tol created a 3-dimensional story-board: a physical path through four floors of exhibits telling four chapters through the personages of key Christian Zionist protagonists and their contributions.
As FOZ occupies an existing structure previously built in this historic neighborhood for other purposes, the primary mode of space-making is interior, by way of elaborately crafted, uniquely configured displays for multi-sensory, interactive exposition of the storyline. High-definition LED projection touch screens, backlighted artwork, holographic and 3-D cinematic projection, as well as sound and music are integrated to focus the visitors’ attention in discreet yet immersive mini-environments.
While the visitor’s trajectory begins at lobby level with an account of the modern State of Israel, the narrative itself, interestingly—especially given recent provocations by Israel’s detractors to make such statements controversial—begins on the 2nd floor with the “theoretical foundations of Zionism,” as the ancient homeland is revived, and the birth of the state is explained.
That a multi-thousand-year-old story of true events lived by real people according to universal philosophical ideas and particular religious convictions can be told by way of projected light is an apt metaphor for a scrappy, ancient people’s journey through time to become a tech giant, self-sovereign in the same land where they began.
Dead Sea Desert Hotel
Bar Orian Architects / Lambs + Lions Studio
A joint effort of Bar Orian Architects with Lambs & Lions Studio’s luxury resort Dead Sea Desert Hotel will open its 109-suite doors overlooking five acres of its monumental namesake terrain in 2025.
In a country for whose indigenous culture the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea are such defining, intrinsic, constitutive features, any new permanent structure of such a scale begs to be both timeless and contextual, which the renderings promise to do.
Its exterior envelope is low-slung, hugging the earth; and unassuming, which suits its solitary siting. Nobody is coming to this building to see the building. It’s from within the building, looking out, that the architecture confidently yet unobtrusively asserts itself. With subtle nods to the ancient “resting place” conventions of desert nomads and conscious borrowing of the austere primordial stagings imagined by Stanley Kubrick (and some unconscious ones from the biomorphic bachelor-pad eccentricities of John Lautner), the designs show centralized spaces for gathering; cool, clean, but sand-mottled surfaces at once in tune with the dominating, expansive dune site, yet luxurious in their refined details.
Skylights, ceiling monitors, and an oculus here and there puncture concrete slabs that deftly seem to defy their mass by being cantilevered or deeply overhung beyond their slim supports. Softly graded or sharply raked the abundant natural light is shaped and thrown, diffused and washed in all its infinite degrees and colors. The strongest feature though is the orchestration of all this silent infrastructure to make sweeping, horizontally framed views to sand, sea, and sky: the real attraction of this resort.
Iron Swords Monument, Jerusalem
Ollech + Tol Architects
To commemorate victims of Hamas’s October 7 attack and the soldiers who fell in the defensive Iron Swords war that followed, this powerful monument was, as the Friends of Zion Museum, designed by Ollech and Tol and erected across from the new National Library in Jerusalem.
Freestanding, large-scale iron shards, each with a distinct organic geometry of its own, peel up from the ground in gently bending postures that belie the sturdy material from which they are made. Though shaped like fallen leaves or slivers of fire, their seemingly casual configuration in a loose circle around unseen, recessed uplights within gives them the slightly anthropomorphic appearance of a clutch of figures leaning on each other shoulder-to-shoulder. The lighted space in their midst forms an impromptu outdoor room, at once enclosed for contemplation of names and other text inscribed on the vertical surfaces, yet also open to the sky above and between the six bowing walls to unite with the urban capital beyond.
The architects created a place that is sober in its mood yet warm in its materials; symbolic in its expressive purpose of honoring the dead but commodious in its practical, physical function as a place to be; abstract in its formal references, and viscerally quiet in the rites it makes available to visitors. It is serious in its memorial mission, yet not stiffly ceremonial in its effects.
Cleared for publication
הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
Cleared for publication
That our hearts are broken
And in hidden places
In empty rooms
Thousands of sobs
Are silently choking.
Cleared for publication:
That open season was declared on us
We were plundered in the dark
Of the most precious of the precious
It is already cleared for publication:
That the magical shining light
Of our beloved’s face has been extinguished.
However, beneath the same soil
A stubborn plant is sprouting
Sending roots without end
Tightly grasped with love.
הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
.כִּי לִבֵּנוּ נִשְׁבַּר
וּבַמִּסְתָּרִים
בַּחֲדָרִים רֵיקִים
רִבְבוֹת יְבָבוֹת
.נֶחְנָקוֹת לְלֹא קוֹל
הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
.כִּי דָּמֵנוּ הֻתַּר
וְנִבְזַזְנוּ בָּאֲפֵלָה
.מִן הַיָּקָר מִכָּל יָקָר
כְּבָר הֻתַּר לְפִרְסוּם
כִּי זִיווֹ הַקָּסוּם הַמַּבְהִיק
.מִפְּנֵי זֶה שֶׁאָהַבְנוּ, כָּבָה
אֲבָל תַּחַת אוֹתָהּ אֲדָמָה
כְּבָר מֵנֵץ צֶמַח עַקְשָׁן
מַשְׁרִישׁ עַד אֵין קֵץ
.וְנִלְפָּת אַהֲבָה
Poem by Dael Rodríguez Garcia engraved on the monument.
Originally published in Shiva Poems of October 7
The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, August 13, 2024
