The most astonishing new building in Jerusalem

Jerusalem: the crossroads of three continents. The centre of three religions. Fought over by the Babylonians and the Romans, the Crusaders and the Ottomans, and still contested by the Israelis and the Palestinians. Where the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock and the Tomb of Christ are closer than a lobbed rock at one of the perennial riots.

But it’s not just the weight of history and culture that makes it a singularly inauspicious place for new architecture. Proximity to any of the holy sites brings intense scrutiny, of course, whilst the shifting politics of diverging ethnic and religious groups brings further complications and obstacles. Then there’s the building code – one of the strictest in the world – which specifies, amongst other things, that any façade has to be more than 70 per cent composed of the honey-coloured local stone. Jerusalem stone, as it’s known.

So building a vast steel and glass campus right next to the historic centre was always going to controversial: that it has been done is little short of astonishing. But here it is: the new Bezalel campus, thronged with students busy mixing and typing and learning, glazing and machining and approaching, in something approaching wonder.

The 460,000 square foot building is arguably the most significant in Jerusalem in the 21st century: it includes some 100 classrooms, 25 studio spaces and about 65 workshops and laboratories plus 80 offices (AVIAD BAR-NESS)

Taking an unpromising site overlooking Damascus Gate – land once owned by the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission behind it which became a carpark connected to the infamous detention centre next door – it was handed over about 20 years ago, and the long battle to build a new campus for Bezalel began, with an international competition to find the architects being held in 2008.

“It was a dodgy area before,” Professor Adi Stern, the president of Bezalel, says. “It started with empires building their own spaces, and in this case it was an open space used for animals by the Russians. With the British mandate [from 1923 to 1948] it was used by the police because it was in the middle of contested areas. Then it was on the dividing line between Israel and Jordan and there was no connection until 1967 [when Israel captured Jerusalem]. There were plans to turn it into a park but that was never built and it became a parking lot. In the 90s the area started to develop with pubs and nightlife until the terror attacks drove them away. Now here we are.” Like all of Jerusalem, it has had a surfeit of history.

Glass is used very deliberately to create a sense of openness, both within and without (AVIAD BAR-NESS)

And then there’s the politics. The student body is two thirds women, 10 per cent Arab/Palestinian, 20 per cent Jerusalemites by birth and has the only arts programme for the women of the Orthodox Jewish community worldwide, about 200 of whom are enrolled. “It’s more than a gesture to be here,” Stern says. “It’s a statement. In a religious city with the ultra-Orthodox and Muslims and Christians, critical thinking and an open minded and secular institution isn’t always welcome. I suspect in the future opposition might mount; some of the communities around us are very religious and might object to the nude drawing and photography you find in an art school. But we are an agent of change – that’s how we see ourselves. Time will tell. But art and design and architecture are always political – they have to happen in the world, with a specific local context, which may be challenging. It’s not London or even Tel Aviv. But the biggest problem has been finding three things: money, money and more money.” $165 million (£130 million) was eventually found, which is cheap for a building of this scale and complexity.

What’s interesting about the new Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Campus plus the Idan and Batia Ofer Arts Wing of the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design Jerusalem, designed by the Pritzker-winning Japanese practice of SANAA, who have also just finished an extension to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, is that it is simultaneously modern and reflective of this history, studiously neutral and yet, given the context, provocative. In many ways the whole design is determined by a contradictory brilliance: flat futuristic planes spill down the hillside like the rumble-tumble of an old village; pristine glass walls part to snuggle a ramshackle old police post; inside it is both crisp and industriously messy; and you’re never entirely sure if you’re inside or out. And perhaps the strangest paradox is that the campus is constantly referred to as so transparent, and Stern claims it is consequently so unobtrusive, so inoffensive in form if not aspiration, that it “disappears”.

The strict building regulations were navigated with the help of a special concrete that combines cement with Jerusalem stone aggregates, helping the building merge into the city without compromising the modernist lines (AVIAD BAR-NESS)

At least by day – at night it is like a giant lightbox and seems by far the brightest thing in Jerusalem, if not the entire Middle East.

“It’s like a gem,” Stern says. “We didn’t want to come in like a huge elephant or land like a heavy satellite – it’s a delicate lace of architecture.”

Perhaps the point is that daytime or night time, people can see what’s happening: whether it’s nocturnal fabricators on the bottom floor huddled over their machinery or mid-morning glazers working on their pots, or late afternoon fashionistas mingling in the tree-lined square behind. And then, perhaps, it’s up to them what they take away: offence or inspiration.

Of course, nothing in Jerusalem is entirely new. The Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design is actually one of the oldest and most prestigious art schools in Israel and the Middle East. Founded in 1906, it has produced many of Israel’s most celebrated creative talents, including Ron Arad, the British-Israeli designer behind the proposed Holocaust Memorial in Westminster. It will maintain its earlier campuses at Mount Scopus, with architecture in the Old Academy Building with its fortress-like tower and crenelated wall ten minutes’ walk away. But the opening of the new campus, with its 2500 students, certainly marks the start of a new era. If there’s potential for friction, then Stern says “that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The right way to educate young people is help them to understand they can have an impact. And learning here will be unique.”

It certainly will.

There is active attempt to break down barriers and foster a multidisciplinary perspective, with students able to use any of the resources present (AVIAD BAR-NESS)

If building in Jerusalem is fraught with difficulty, the opposite must be true of Tel Aviv, now just a 40 minute rail journey away. Whilst the White City – inspired by the designs of the Bauhaus and the philosophy of the Scottish planner Patrick Geddes – is universally acknowledged as successful, if not downright brilliant given there was little but desert before it (and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site), the mish-mash of badly-designed towers along the coast of the Mediterranean is a dispiriting site. What were they thinking? It’s more Cancun than captivating.

Luckily, more sympathetic designs are afoot in the old port district of Jaffa – and rightly so, given a history that takes in Jonah and Andromeda, Solomon and Saint Peter. Our own John Pawson, the designer who transformed the old Commonwealth Institute in Kensington into a wonderful new venue for the Design Museum (and the old Design Museum building in Shad Thames was actually one of the inspirations for Bezalel — especially the small public gallery on one side) has been working his magic on an old French hospice, now transformed into a rather startlingly beautiful hotel which is rather more imaginative than the name – The Jaffa Hotel – suggests. Over a ten year renovation, which included uncovering a 13th century Crusader wall and replacing all the stained glass in the chapel, “everything old was restored” (in the words of Pawson) while an annex clad in perforated aluminium was added for further rooms an apartments. If you’ve got a spare $180 million, the incredible top floor penthouse, with possibly the best views in the Levant, is still on the market.

In other good news, the Printworks in Canada Water, London, may yet escape the wrecking ball. It had a memorable closing party last weekend, as the entire area is due for redevelopment by owners British Land, but it has since emerged that the former Evening Standard and Daily Mail plant, which was converted into a sublime industrial events space in 2017, may yet reopen again in 2026. Let us hope so - if nothing else it proved that there is life after newspapers, though not, of course, in journalism.