Designs for a new facility for the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem earned Corgan Associates of Dallas a 2007 design award in the unbuilt category from the American Institute of Architects Dallas Chapter. The design, created as Corgan’s entry in an international design competition, provided for the relocation of Bezalel’s current campus on Mount Scopus to a unique site in downtown Jerusalem’s Russian Compound.
Corgan’s design approach established a connection to the proposed site as an intermediary between geological and archeological realities. The design was inspired by an image of a quarry where raw material of urban form are first revealed and reconfigured by the hand of man. This identity, the designers suggested, was appropriate for an art academy where ordinary raw material of the earth and experience are transmuted through education as experiments into expressions of culture.
The project team, headed by David Zatopek, AIA (TAMU Œ85), included Alan Richards, AIA, RIBA; Cletus Pippin, Isabel Mandujano (TAMU ‘02), Michael Hemme, and Wes Mao. Additionally, LA Fuess Partners from Dallas, served as the structural engineers on the project and Studio LR of Edinburgh was the graphic design consultant.
Anat Geva, associate professor of architecture at Texas A&M University, served as a consulting architect. She introduced an academic approach into the firm’s practice environment, which propelled the competition team’s design thinking both at a conceptual and pragmatic level.
For more details on the project please see the 2007 November/December Texas Architect issue (page 16).
