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Foreign donors give the lion’s share of the $50m needed for renovation and remodelling

By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger | Posted 25 May 2006, The Art Newspaper

JERUSALEM. The 41-year-old Israel Museum, an encyclopedic national museum holding around 500,000 works from prehistory to contemporary art, will undergo a $50m redesign and expansion starting in mid-2007, officials announced last month.

The museum buildings, which sit on a 20 acre site, have grown from 5,000 to 50,000 sq. m since the museum opened in 1965. Plans are being drawn up to reorganise, expand and update the various museum buildings and create new buildings to improve entry, services and circulation for the visitors, which vary between 500,000 and one million a year.

According to James Snyder, the museum’s director, the plans will build sympathetically upon the campus’ original grid and modern design by Alfred Mansfeld. “Part of Mansfeld’s original concept was a modernist interpretation of a Mediterranean village on a hill that could grow organically,” explains Mr Snyder. “Our goal was to find an architect who could create connections between the landscape and architecture that would resonate with the existing architecture, while introducing a new language of transparency and translucency,” he adds.

The New York-based architect James Carpenter is designing 8,000 sq. m of new structures, including a cluster of entry and service pavilions, a two-storey central entry hall connecting to the gallery wings, and a translucent passage linking the various buildings.

Visitors to the museum currently enter the site at one side, passing exhibition pavilions, the landmark Shrine of the Book museum, designed by Frederick Kiesler and Armand Bartos to house the Dead Sea scrolls, and a six-acre sculpture park designed by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi. The main building is up a hill and stairs, though there is an optional shuttle-bus.

The new entry hall will be centrally placed on the site, and the new passage to the galleries will be level, barrier-free, and climate-controlled, with a translucent façade.

The Israeli firm Efrat-Kowalsky Architects, which specialises in early Israeli modernist architecture, are working on the interior exhibition spaces. Its work will include reorganising and redesigning 14,000 sq. m of existing gallery space and adding 3,000 sq. m of exhibition space. Lerman Architects of Tel Aviv is coordinating the project overall.

The museum has raised $50m from private donors including $30m from the US and $15m from Europe. Judy and Michael Steinhardt, from New York, and the estate of Dorothea Gould in Zurich have pledged $10m each, while donations of $5m have been given by Herta and Paul Amir, Los Angeles; the Nash Family Foundation, New York; the Marc Rich Foundation, Lucerne; the Charles and

Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Oklahoma; and the Bella and Harry Wexner Philanthropies of The Legacy Heritage Fund, New York and Jerusalem.

About $5m is being donated by Israeli families and $7m by the Israeli government. The total is $57m, of which $7m will be used to pay Israel’s value added tax.

The donors will be collectively recognised at the entrance to the campus, says Mr Snyder. He confirmed the name of the museum will not be changed.

The museum site will remain open for the two to three-year construction period, although parts will be closed temporarily as they are renovated. The museum is also in the midst of an $11.5m renewal of its archaeology wing, designed by Pentagram Design Limited in London.

The design of the original campus and museums by Alfred Mansfeld, and interior design by Dora Gad, won Israel’s highest honour, the Israel Prize, in 1966. Though the museum has expanded its installations a number of times in the last decades, this is the most extensive renovation and expansion since the museum was inaugurated in 1965.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=282