Description

Not only because of the exceptional historical importance of the ancient scrolls found in 1947 in the caves of Qumran on the Dead Sea, but also because the date of this discovery (interpreted as constitutive of identity) coincided with the foundation of the state of Israel, it was decided that a building should be erected especially to house these scrolls and at the same time to embody their meaning aptly. Frederick Kiesler, who had countered the “superstition of the functional” with “the realities of a magical architecture” in his visionary writings, created a multi-part building complex in an elevated position designed to look monumental from a distance, one that is basically intended to be a “reliquary.” It is the dome clad in white tiles that is dominant, a round shell structure of a double parabolic form that is supposed to remind one of the cover of the vessels in which the Qumran scrolls survived for centuries. Seemingly floating above a square pool of water, it forms a stark contrast to the strict prism of the functionless black basalt wall – a contrast that the architects want to be understood as a reference to the spiritual and cultural meaning of the scrolls in the “fight of light against darkness, good against evil, knowledge against ignorance.”

The interior, programmatically staged by a varied graduation of darkness to light as a mystic spatial sequence and largely sunken below ground level, is accessed from an inner courtyard lying yet lower, characterized by different sorts of stone and accessible via a sequence of steps. Grouped around this inner courtyard are service rooms and an exhibition hall. From here the visitors proceed through a bronze gridwork of pipes, into a corridor with several changes of level by means of steps and articulated by archways leaning away from each other. The corridor leads eventually into the cupola room lighted from above. In this two-storey “shrine,” at the centre of which is an oversize Torah scroll and which holds display cases with handicrafts in ring-shaped rock caves, the most valuable scrolls are kept and put on show.

Progressive Architecture Sept.1965, pp. 126-133 • Dieter Bogner (ed.), Friedrich Kiesler, Vienna, 1988, pp. 249-255 • The Israel Museum, Jerusalem – The Shrine of the Book, Jerusalem, 1991 • Architektur & Bauforum 151/1992, pp. 72-73 (Helmut Weihsmann) • Hans Nevidal (ed.), The Book of the Shrine, Exhibition catalogue, Graz/Vienna, 1992 • Frederick Kiesler. Artiste – architecte, Exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1996, pp. 229-248 (Michael Sgan-Cohen, Bruno Zevi)

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