Founded in 1965 by Teddy Kollek, the long-serving Jerusalem mayor, to ensure that Israel would have a national museum of world rank, the Israel Museum was a vital symbol of the new nation.
Kollek wanted, and got, "a modernist temple to culture" surrounded by other symbols of Israel's modern statehood, like the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the National Library, said the museum's director, James Snyder.
From ancient artifacts to contemporary art, the museum seeks to anchor the archaeology, material culture and ethnography of the world's Jews within a broader global context, both Western and non-Western. It boasts a dominant site at the entrance to Jerusalem, a widely admired sculpture garden and, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Yet its entrance is an uninspiring parking lot and ugly ticket building, and the portal to the actual exhibits is 247m away, requiring a hike up a hill, often in the blistering sun. It's also hard to find your way from one collection to the next.
Much of that is about to change as the museum embarks on an US$80 million expansion and renovation that will transform the way a visitor navigates and experiences the museum.
Snyder, who took over as director in 1997, sees the project as the solution to deep irritation over how the Israel Museum's rich and varied collections - from the earliest known fragment of biblical text on a tiny silver amulet (seventh century BC) and sarcophagy to Islamic jewelry, major Impressionists and photography - seem almost to be hidden in a maze of different entryways. Yet the original architecture is itself an admired work of art that no one wanted to mar. As sketched out by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad in the late 1950s, the museum was intended to resemble a low Arab village on the commanding hill that it occupies over Jerusalem.
In a fiercely Modernist mode, Mansfeld created a mathematical system in which low, square, flat-topped buildings, clad in Jerusalem limestone, sprawled in modules over the Hill of Tranquillity in much the way an Arab village grows around a set of courtyards.
The design is a classic of postwar Modernist structuralism, said Zvi Efrat, who is head of the School of Architecture at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and whose firm worked on the current project. "Mansfeld created an organic, vernacular architecture that sits beautifully in the landscape but allowed growth without changing character," he said.
The buildings, like the very idea of the museum itself, were part of the new country's radical ambition of socialist humanism, a symbol of what Efrat calls "the heroic period" of Israeli architecture in the 1950's and 1960s, when new public structures were forged for a new Zionist state.
But Mansfeld, who died in 2004, also had the somewhat pretentious idea of an Acropolis, with a hilltop entry reached only after a long, hot march up a central promenade of uneven stones, pavement and steps that rise nearly four stories to the summit. To find the galleries you must first negotiate a plaza and discern the entrance at the top. Even then you have to walk down a level.
It's a lot of labor before you hit the art.
And then when you do, it's easy to get lost. The current configuration confuses large numbers of the half-million or so people who visit the museum every year - down from nearly 1 million in 2000, before the violence of the latest Palestinian intifada. Back then about a third of the visitors were from Jerusalem, a third from the rest of Israel and a third foreign. Today foreigners still make up a third of the visitors, but more of the Israelis are from Jerusalem, since the city is still considered to be dangerous by other Israelis.
Museum officials are hoping that the renovation, to be completed by the end of 2009, will rationalize and simplify the experience for visitors. It might also help boost attendance.
The project involves about 7,432 square meters of new buildings and about 18,581m2 of renovation and renewal, mostly in the galleries. The new buildings, airy but modest glass structures with ceramic louvers to deflect and tame the sun, are designed to respect the Mansfeld grid and aesthetic. But they will also provide a sense of transparency and illumination, especially at night, making the museum more welcoming.
The new entrance will fit neatly into a block of the existing sprawl, about two-thirds of the way up the promenade. It not only will shorten the hike but will guide visitors to a central concourse from which all the main galleries can be reached, providing a clear sense of geography. The renovation incorporates a flat, climate-controlled path for those who cannot or choose not to take the old steep promenade.
Created by a partnership of James Carpenter Design Associates of New York and the Israeli firms of Efrat-Kowalsky Architects and Lerman Architects and Town Planners, the new design streamlines and unifies the museum without distorting or undermining the existing architecture. The new construction harnesses unused or underused spaces within the existing grid or tunnels beneath them.
The result is elegance without grandiosity, addressing what the museum lacked and needed.
In Snyder's view, Mansfeld's original concept, that "the museum would expand organically through the extension of these modular buildings around courtyards," has essentially worked. The museum is 10 times larger than when it began, now covering some 46,412m2 on a site of some 8 hectares. "But it's a challenge for the ordinary visitor trying to make his or her way through the campus," Snyder said.
The task for the architects, he said, was "to order it differently and renew it and improve it - and recast the presentation of all the galleries, which are the heart of the museum."
"It's about the journey and the arrival," he said, "about architecture that clarifies how you move through a space."
Carpenter, who designed the buildings, said he set out to make arrival, circulation and orientation clearer while respecting the architecture that was already there.
"One of the confounding aspects of the original museum is the long walk up to the entry, and then when you're in it, it's confusing about where to go," he said. "And then when you're in an exhibit, how do you get out and into the next one?"
So he provided a "hierarchy" for the original sprawling design.
The architects also extended the promenade out to the street, Carpenter said, "so people would understand it as a route of invitation," even from the parking lot. "Before, they were stuck with a closed campus and no obvious route of entry," he said.
The new central concourse also allows museumgoers to make more logical connections, progressing historically, for example, from the ancient archaeology of the region through the Ottoman period, then to the Judaica and Ethnography collection describing Jewish life dispersed from the Holy Land.
Early regional art, beginning with biblical artifacts, will flow into the beginnings of Israeli art, which will feed into European works and then into the modern and contemporary galleries. New galleries will also allow the museum to double space for the display of 20th-century art, another strength of the collection. (A current show at the museum, Surrealism and Beyond, includes 300 works drawn solely from the museum's collection, from Duchamp to Man Ray to Magritte and Picasso.)
Much of the museum will remain open during the construction, which has just begun. Some permanent galleries will be shut for renovation, but highlights of the collection will be shown at the museum's off-site locations like the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum and the Anna Ticho House.
For Efrat the new project enhances what he sees as "one of the best postwar buildings anywhere" without losing its main achievement: "an indigenous vernacular for the new Jewish state."
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