Architecture

During the past few years, discussions of masterpieces of contemporary architecture have frequently focused on two great new museums: the Getty Center in Los Angeles County, a billion dollar campus of stark white modernist structures, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a radical titanium-clad edifice of thrusting curves and convex walls. While critics have usually explored the differences between these monumental works by architects Richard Meier and Frank Gehry, respectively, they sometimes overlook something the two have in common - both Meier and Gehry are Jewish. The most celebrated new concert hall in the world, the Disney Music Center in Los Angeles, was also designed by Gehry.
Getty Museum

A major piece in The New York Times recently suggested that we are in the midst of the golden age of Jewish architecture, noting the achievements of Meier and Gehry, as well as the work of Peter Eisenman, Louis Kahn, Moshe Safdie, Daniel Liebeskind and James Ingo Freed. (Freed and Safdie recently received Jewish Cultural Achievement Awards from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture).

The National Museum of the Jewish People will display pictures and models of the works of numerous important Jewish architects, and invite them to give series of lectures at the museum.

But the architect will be without work without those who create the projects that the architects design — primarily the real estate developers and builders. Jews have played important roles in these fields in America during the past century.

What would the skyline of New York be without the creations of individuals like William Zeckendorf and Daniel Tishman? Where would the mass housing be to fulfill the American dream without the innovations of William Levitt in developing Levittowns in the early years following the Second World War? Where would Californians live and shop without the exciting creations of Richard Zinman, Jona Goldrich, Bram Goldsmith, Nathan Shappel, Stanley Black and many other Jewish developers and builders working on the West Coast? Visitors to the National Museum of the Jewish People, from arriving into Washington to entering the portals of the Museum, are surrounded by countless properties designed and built by major Jewish developers: from Bob Smith and Bob Kogod of the Charles Smith Company, to Abe Pollin, Howard Bender, the Lerner family, and Leo Bernstein.

The Museum will recognize and celebrate the vision, energy and acumen of these and other titans of the world of bricks and mortar, glass and marble.