Congregation Beth Sholom Synagogue

To walk, blinking, out of a ceremonial space and straight onto the footpath is a sure sign of architectural carelessness. The old Beth Sholom temple, built in the 1930s in the Richmond district of San Francisco, was a big offender on this count. It had twenty-three entry points; many, with the subtlety of a fire exit, opening straight to the street, with others leading the visitor into a maddening catacomb of alleyways linking the internal functions of the sanctuary. It was a difficult structure to feel sentimental about, and recently it was almost totally demolished and replaced with a new design by architect Stanley Saitowitz, who has clearly learned the lessons left by its predecessor. The new temple won an award even before it was built; now after a meticulous construction process, it has been named the best new building in San Francisco and was shortlisted for a World Architecture Festival Award.

The two opposing forms of the Congregation Beth Sholom Synagogue – a windowless, bowllike half-cylinder and a zinc and glass-clad cube – make an audacious pair on a street lined with Victorian and faux-Victorian homes and dotted with old religious buildings. But the synagogue was designed, Saitowitz says, from the inside out, focused on creating private, shared and interstitial spaces, carefully sequenced, that would promote a fuller sense of communality.

The twenty-three entrances are reduced to one to form a central vein of passage. Visitors pass through a set of glass doors into an openair courtyard, cutting between the bowl and the cube. Protected while also visible from the street, the space draws the visitor under the looming, shadow-throwing curve of the bowl, hinting at the sanctuary offered inside. A set of stairs leads up to a second courtyard – this one invisible from the street, and connected to every function of the complex. The architects describe this as a passage toward the sacred, a “circular journey of turning and rising and turning”.

Lifted atop a single-storey podium containing the daily chapel, a library, offices and meeting rooms, the sanctuary is a small marvel of design and construction. It was salivated over by skaters as curved wooden formwork wedges were shifted into place, only to be disappointed as post-tensioned and regular steel reinforcing was erected and concrete was poured. The concrete shell, half a metre thick and pigmented with a sandstone tint, is left exposed inside and out. Indeed, with Saitowitz following conservative Judaism’s prohibition against ornament and iconography, colour and life is brought to the interiors largely through the interplay of light against this raw surface. All light enters from above, with slices cut into the ceiling throwing a dramatic shaft over the Ark on the sanctuary’s eastern side, and casting a “shadow menorah” that traces the day’s progress against the walls. The walls and ceiling floating above are connected with light, and the only outlook is a view of the sky.

For sentimental reasons, an exception to the rule against ornamentation was made for the stained glass windows from the old Beth Sholom temple, which were recovered and incorporated into a small ground-floor chapel.

The essential aspect of conservative Judaism is that women and men participate equally in the liturgy. Saitowitz embraces the idea, and it frees up his design. There is no need for the balconies and curtains that fragment and stratify Orthodox religious space. Gone too is the church-like configuration of the old Beth Sholom temple with worshipers seated facing the front – a configuration that has dominated synagogue design since the early 20th century. Rather, Saitowitz creates a space in the round, focussed on the central Bimah from where the services are conducted. By placing the main entrance at the base of the sanctuary bowl, Saitowitz ensures the congregation swells naturally around the Bimah, like a cup being filled. He looked back to premodern models of religious communality for his inspiration – to the 1st century Masada fortress in the Judean Desert, a source that also figures in the colour and robustness of the sanctuary’s form.

A generation ago, San Francisco “was steeped in the image of itself as a Victorian city”, Saitowitz told the New York Times. But a new culture washed through the city with the technology boom, and a new generation of architects began juxtaposing the city’s Beaux- Arts heritage with aggressively new forms. Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum is a crystalline shard beside the solid red-brick façade of St Patrick’s Church; Herzog & de Meuron’s sprouting M.H. de Young Museum and Renzo Piano’s bulbous, grass-topped California Academy of Sciences give new life to the genteel Golden Gate Park. Saitowitz’s designs have contributed to this culture for decades, and his bowl and cube – an uncanny and unstable mix of old and new – have brought a little of the city’s design renaissance to the suburbs. +

1 While the windowless bowl-like concrete half cylinder and the zinc and glass-clad cube adjoining it have a definite sculptural quality, Saitowitz says they were designed from the inside out, with a focus on creating a sense of communality. 2 The bold contrast between Saitowitz’s modern forms and the pseudo-Victorian architecture of its neighbours is not an unusual site in San Francisco, a city which is home of many examples of postmodern and other brave contemporary architectures aggressively juxtaposed against the Beaux-Arts and historical fabric of the city. 3 For sentimental reasons, an exception to the rule against ornamentation was made for the stained glass windows from the old Beth Sholom temple, which were recovered and incorporated into a small ground-floor chapel. 4 The only light which enters the synagogue’s heart, focused on the Bimah, enters from above. 5 A set of stairs leads up to a second courtyard – this one invisible from the street, and connected to every function of the complex. The architects describe this as a passage toward the sacred, a “circular journey of turning and rising and turning”.

IMAGES courtesy of Stanley Saitowitz, Natoma Architects