Description

Although the building was programmatically intended as a multicultural facility with a theatre and a youth centre, etc., it is primarily a museum, commemorating Palmach, the Jewish underground organization (long since become a legend) that fought against British rule in Palestine and eventually, after the creation of the new sovereign state, was assimilated into the Israeli army. The expressive form of the museum, considered by architects to be a “portrait of Palmach,” is developed as much out of the topographic conditions as it is out of the desire to make a symbolic statement. The different alignments of the ground plan figure, which consists of two extended parallel volumes, the one behind being diagonally cut through by a third, reacts to the immediate surroundings, while the elevation with its rising terraces and walls mirrors the character of the graduated site. Grouped around the approximately triangular inner courtyard containing a stand of old pines, which it was also a requirement to preserve, a system of concrete walls defines not only the three overlapping volumes, but also the exterior spaces. By partially cladding the mostly slanted and occasionally tilted walls (interrupted by cutouts and oriels) with kurkar, a crumbly, brownish stone quarried from the building site itself and pressed into the wet mortar in thin layers not only is the age-old idea of an oriental fortress evoked, but also a living image, which in Israel is strongly bound up with the Palmach myth. The Palmach pioneers see themselves as being rooted in the foundation of Israel in the same way as the building is tied into the topography. In this way, the topos of architecture as landscape also takes on a significant historical dimension.

The tour through the museum – whose main entrance is at the end of a long ramp leading upwards – begins as a descent, because the majority of the exhibition rooms are located on the lower floor. Their fluid design structured only by columns at the intersections of the alignments marking the ground plan is, however, barely perceptible, because the underground circuit in these artificially lighted rooms is staged as a multimedia show, for which the architects have no responsibility.

Architecture 10/1998, pp. 118-123 (Peter Cook) • architektur aktuell 232/1999, pp. 44-65 (Matthias Boeckl) • Bauwelt 22/ 1999, pp. 1196-1197 (Ulf Meyer) • Blueprint 165/1999, pp. 34-37 (David Baß) • Baumeister 5/2001, pp. 62-69 (Falk Jaeger)

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.