ARCH_500-600 Comprehensive Options Studio: ‘Sun Without and Shadows Within: An Archive of Ancient Religions An Addition to Louis I. Kahn’s (Unbuilt) Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, Israel’

“That which is not built is not really lost. Once its value is established, its demand for presence is undeniable. It is merely waiting for the right circumstances.”

—Louis I. Kahn (Louis I. Kahn, Robert McCarter, p. 391)

In this studio, students were asked to design an “Archive of Ancient Religions,” sited as an “addition” to Louis Kahn’s Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem. For the purposes of this project, it was assumed that Kahn’s design, on which he worked from 1967 until his death in 1974, was built in 1976. The Synagogue, called Hurva (“ruin” in Hebrew), occupies a prominent hilltop site to the west of the Temple Mount and its Jewish holy site of the Western Wall. On the Temple Mount is the Islamic Dome of the Rock mosque. To the north of the project site is the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Construction of Kahn’s design for the Hurva Synagogue would have afforded Jerusalem a major Jewish sanctuary, joining the existing Islamic and Christian sanctuaries.

Students engaged five fundamental pedagogical conceptions in this studio: 1) The unbuilt works of the best architects and landscape architects should be studied by students and architects along with the built works; 2) Architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design are aspects of a single integrated discipline, and their legal definition as separate sub-disciplines is not sustainable; 3) What matters in architecture is not what a building looks like, but what a building is like to be in, to live in; 4) As we begin the 21st century, every architectural project should be understood as an addition to a pre-existing inhabited context; and 5) A graduate studio project should offer individual students an opportunity to begin again. As a comprehensive options studio, particular emphasis was placed on design process, degree of development of interior space, and exploration of experiential qualities.

Three sketch projects were employed. CUBE: Room(s)—Chapel / Threshold / Meeting Room, wherein students proposed intimate sacred and secular spaces within strictly defined volumetric limits: a chapel for one person to meditate and contemplate, a meeting room for two people to meet and gather, and the threshold or transition space between the two rooms. DATUM: Plan(e)s—Embossings of the Sky / Etchings in the Earth, wherein students proposed an integrated building-landscape room-garden to house the program of spaces for the “Archives of Ancient World Religions.” At the end of the semester, SECTION: Tectonic—Making Place Between Earth and Sky, wherein a section of each student’s individual designs connecting earth (foundation) to sky (roof) was explored at large scale. In addition, students undertook disciplinary research by reconstructing Kahn’s Hurva Synagogue design, building a site model, and making drawings.

As an integral part of this studio, McCarter led a field trip to Philadelphia, New York, and New Haven during which students studied Kahn’s original drawings and models for the Hurva Synagogue at the Louis Kahn Archives at the University of Pennsylvania. Other sites visited include Kahn’s University of Pennsylvania medical laboratories, Bryn Mawr dormitory, Esherick House, Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial (Four Freedoms Park), Yale Art Museum, and Yale Museum of British Art.