ABSTRACT
The buildings that Louis I. Kahn (1901–74) designed relatively late in his career were of a power and spirituality rarely equaled in the twentieth century. In a courageous repudiation of the pervasive ahistorical dogma of modernism, he took a long look backward – to his early Beaux-Arts training, to historical antecedents in architecture and, ultimately, to the very origins of the human impulse to create architectural form. Kahn’s proposal for the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem, commissioned by the Israeli government in 1967, synthesized the universal, humanistic concepts that he had previously developed for both religious and secular institutions. This chapter examines the many visual and metaphorical sources – from the temples of ancient Israel and Egypt to myriad religious symbols, including Egyptian hieroglyphics and Kabbalistic iconography – embodied in Kahn’s project for a synagogue of monumental physical and symbolic proportions evoking the roots and essence of Judaism.
