By Gavriel Rosenfeld
Pan Pacific Park has long been an oasis in Los Angeles’s bustling, heavily Jewish Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood. Basketball courts, baseball diamonds, picnic areas and playgrounds predominate in the park’s hilly setting. It may strike certain visitors as somewhat incongruous, therefore, that the latest addition to the park is an institution that appears to run counter to its carefree spirit: the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
Read More
By Gavriel Rosenfeld
The construction of a new synagogue is always an occasion for celebration, so it was with particular pomp that the Rhineland city of Mainz recently dedicated its new synagogue and Jewish community center. The dedication ceremonies, held September 3, featured an array of German politicians, including German President Christian Wulff. Many of them blessed the new building and underscored its symbolic significance. Yet, while the synagogue received its share of blessings, it also gave physical expression to them in its architectural form. Designed by the German-Jewish architect Manuel Herz, Mainz’s striking new synagogue complex traces its inspiration back to the third “blessing” in the Amidah — the
Kedusha. The connection between the word and the synagogue’s appearance is not immediately obvious. But Herz’s drawings for the building reveal that its sawtooth form partly derives from the jagged pattern produced by the word’s five Hebrew letters:
kuf, daled, vav, shin and
hay.Read More
By Gavriel Rosenfeld
The High Holy Days might incline most Jews to think of fish as a traditional food served on deli trays after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. But the Jewish Museum’s new exhibition, “Fish Forms: Lamps by Frank Gehry,” asks us to think more deeply about how fish have influenced the work of one of the world’s most celebrated architects.
Read More
By Gavriel Rosenfeld
Answer: when it houses Philadelphia’s new National Museum of American Jewish History. Scheduled to open in November, the museum is dominated by a massive glass facade and does not, at first glance, appear that different from other modernist glass and steel edifices in the United States. But looking behind the museum’s glass “veil” reveals a host of fascinating and often competing symbolic meanings that testify to the complexities of contemporary American Jewish life.
Read More
By Gavriel Rosenfeld
Long regarded as one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, Louis Kahn has become the focus of renewed popular attention. The Oscar-nominated documentary film “My Architect” (directed by his son, Nathaniel Kahn, in 2003) earned applause for its gripping portrayal of the family tensions caused by Kahn’s extramarital affairs, and recent monographs by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Carter Wiseman have earned scholarly praise for their investigations of Kahn’s architecture. Now comes Susan Solomon’s welcome new book, which takes yet a different approach to the work of one of the modern movement’s undisputed masters.
Read More
