Bezalel Academy Jack, Joseph & Morton Mandel Campus featured in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
We are excited to be featured in the @Frankfurter Algemmeine Zeitung's article presenting the newly launched Bezalel Academy's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Campus designed by SANAA in collaboration with HQ Architects as the local architects. The 42,000 m² building is now ready to welcome its students and faculty in the new premises, which include among others various workshop spaces, an auditorium, a library, as well as public spaces such as cafeteria and 4 galleries spaces.
English translated excerpts below:
'...Sanaa's Pritzker Prize winners led by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who designed the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Campus, named after the main patrons, in collaboration with the Israeli firm HQ Architects...They have attempted a topology that is intended to show the openness of the liberal institution in the midst of the tense environment and to invite dialogue between the city, the public space and the institution. The 42,000 square meter building for a good 2,500 students in eight faculties is so transparent that the six floors, two of which are underground, are almost flooded with daylight; the arrangement of the terraces, together with pergolas and sun visors, ensure that this happens in a user-friendly manner, regardless of the position of the sun.
...The new campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in central West Jerusalem, with its asymmetrically layered terraces, mimics the surrounding hilly landscape with its olive groves.....If the huge glass building with the pastel-yellow ceilings made of Jerusalem natural stone and concrete weren't surrounded by the historic buildings of the Russian Quarter and the massive modern town hall, the boundaries between the building and the landscape would be fluid. But the building remains a solitaire, which is quite characteristic of one of the oldest art academies in the region to date secluded on Mount Scopus. The new art college campus juts out of the old city like a futuristic, almost ethereal alien body; in its nested silhouette, which at the same time appears light, it forms a contrast to the austerity of the surroundings...'
The full article in German is on the FAZ digital edition here https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst-und-architektur/kunstakademie-in-jerusalem-freier-blick-in-die-konfliktzone-18512194.html
