Working between walls

The Israel Museum, with some fascinating European art and Dead Sea scrolls, goes for a $100 million makeover.

The Israel Museum, with a collection that includes Picasso sculptures, Chagall paintings and the Dead Sea Scrolls, is barely visible behind a jumble of cranes dotting its campus on Jerusalem’s Hill of Tranquility. The 20 acres (0.08 square kilometer) of galleries, sculpture gardens and research facilities are having a $100 million facelift to make the museum’s collection more accessible to visitors. Built in 1965 as a modernist rendering of a sprawling Arab village, the museum’s renovation will free up an extra 100,000 square feet and double the existing gallery space.

“The idea was that it would grow like a village and it did, times 10,” said director James Snyder, who became curator in 1996 after serving as deputy director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The renovation, taking place within the museum’s original envelope, adds an extra piece to the modular modernist complex that, under the guiding vision of founding architect Alfred Mansfeld, transformed the dusty Jerusalem hill into a Cubist work of art. The renewal moves the information and ticketing offices outside of the original area, doubling existing gallery space by freeing up 100,000 square feet. A hall for special events will be open to the Valley of the Cross, where, according to tradition, the tree grew from which Jesus’s cross was made.

Logic and Beauty
“The challenge is to keep the beauty of the architecture while at the same time creating logical circulation for visitors,” Snyder said. The museum was the brainchild of Teddy Kollek, who later went on to become mayor of the city for 28 years. Its home, across from the Knesset and on the Hill of Tranquility overlooking the Valley of the Cross, was carefully chosen.

“There was this idea of a place of peace with a reference to the circular monotheistic heritage of the region on the hill at the entrance to Jerusalem,” said Synder. Mansfeld’s original architecture created a “temple of culture, an acropolis on a hill,” he added. That image of the museum as a Greek city was emphasized by its promenade, a 360- meter climb up to the main galleries, which in Jerusalem’s hot summer sun was no minor feat for some visitors.

That hike has been cut in half and much of it enclosed in an indoor on-grade hallway over which the original promenade will be reconstructed for those who still prefer the more strenuous feeling of ascent, Synder said.

Scheduled to be completed by May 2010, the new design is the joint initiative of James Carpenter Design Associates Inc. in New York and Efrat-Kowalsky Architects in Tel Aviv.

Funding
Snyder said he secured financial commitments, $60 million of them, from private contributors before going ahead with the project. “It would be wrong, foolhardy, and overly confident to say we have no worries,” said Snyder when asked about the global economic crisis and possible fallout from the alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme at Bernard Madoff’s New York-based firm.

“We still have to raise a little money but essentially the core project was all funded before we started,” Snyder said.

Erel Margalit, founding partner of Jerusalem Venture Partners, a venture-capital fund with $780 million under management, is a donor to the project and the museum.

“Located in the heart of Israel’s capital, the Israel Museum reminds us that culture is of utmost importance to the city,” Margalit said.

Until the renovation is complete, new, original exhibitions in the 10 per cent of the campus still open drew record attendance: more than half a million people in 2008, Snyder said. “We are seeing the strongest attendance since the year 2000,” he said.