Buildings
Israel Expansion Moving Forward
(archrecord.construction.com - 04/20/2006)
By Esther
Hecht
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click image to view larger
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| Images courtesy
James Carpenter Design Associates |
Officials from the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem, an icon of Israeli architecture, and the country’s
premier showcase of art, archaeology and Judaica, recently
announced plans for a $50 million expansion. The project,
which is being led by New York-based designer James Carpenter,
will include four main elements: a covered entrance path,
a new main entrance hall, reorganized and expanded galleries,
and a new space for temporary exhibitions.
The 20-acre museum complex was opened
in 1965. Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad designed the Modernist,
terrain-hugging museum, which is mostly clad in Jerusalem
limestone. The campus includes a sculpture garden by Isamu
Noguchi, as well as Frederick Kiesler and Armand Bartos’s
Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“One of the complexities of the
existing campus is that it has grown significantly over the
past 40 years,” says Carpenter. “Our work is to
ease people’s sense of where they are going.”
The new elements, including the flat-roofed
entrance path and rectilinear entrance hall, will be largely
made of glass. Exterior shading, which is still being developed,
will minimize glare and solar heat gain. Carpenter says the
design, while “respecting the existing language”
of the Modernist-style museum, will better integrate the buildings
with Noguchi’s sculpture garden.
Israeli architects Zvi Efrat and Meira
Kowalsky were hired to develop the conceptual plan and to
reorganize the public and gallery spaces within the existing
museum. Lerman Architects, based in Tel Aviv, are the project
architects.
The program includes 80,000 square feet
of new construction and 140,000 square feet of renewed gallery
space. A previous expansion plan by James Freed that was seen
as violating the museum’s architectural language was
canceled in 2002. The museum will remain open throughout the
expansion, which is to begin in 2007 and be completed in 2010.
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