A Building for Building Bridges

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When asked about my recent trip to Jerusalem my go-to response is: “It was eye-opening.” There’s no more succinct way to sum up this coveted city and its layers of culture, conflict and history. Jerusalem is full of surprises: some delightful, others harrowing. Among the former is Brigham Young University’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies.

"We could have just built a tower, but we wanted a relationship."

—FRANK FERGUSON, Principal, FFKR, Salt Lake City, UT.

The idea for The Center was born in the 1960s when BYU established a study abroad program in Jerusalem. Participants were housed on a kibbutz between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, according to Jim Kearl, who has been the Provo, Utah-based director of The Center since 1989. 

In 1979, BYU’s vice president of support services, Fred Schwendiman, approached Salt Lake City-based architecture firm FFKR about designing a facility around the program and invited founding principals Frank Ferguson and Bob Fallor to Jerusalem for a week. 

Building plans and relationships

When Ferguson and Fallor arrived, various leaders from BYU were on the ground exploring and building relationships in Jerusalem. The group looked at three potential sites, but none were exceptional and they kept looking. Soon after, the Jerusalem mayor’s office and city planning group began scrutinizing BYU’s plans. “We needed to prove to them that we could design this facility to be a part of the fabric of Jerusalem,” says Ferguson, who would ultimately become principal-in-charge of the project.

While the Jerusalem team continued networking and searching for land, Ferguson returned to Utah and began modeling a facility design for the program that would serve 200 students and faculty—without a site. When he returned to Jerusalem to present the model it was a success. “They kinda liked us,” recalls Ferguson.

With design approval in hand, full focus turned to finding an ideal site, which was finally discovered in East Jerusalem on the side of Mt. Scopus overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. The Center, which had become an Israel corporate entity, was able to negotiate a 49-year lease, renewable for 49 years, with the Israel Lands Authority, which holds the title to the property. 

“It was an idiosyncratic shape, but the topography made a lot of sense, and [the view] is just a stunning assembly of geography and history,” says Ferguson.

Meanwhile, Ferguson was interviewing potential partner architects in Jerusalem for ease of meeting local requirements, such as completing plans in Hebrew. He selected Israeli architect David Reznick (1924-2012). “We were both modernists and as soon as we started drawing, our language barrier went out the window—architecture is a universal language,” says Ferguson of the partnership that turned into a decades-long friendship.

Groundbreaking

With property, partnership and plans in place, ground broke on Mt. Scopus in 1984; five years after Schwendiman first approached FFKR. 

Building a 125,000-square-foot, eight-story structure on the side of a mountain in an ancient city wasn’t accomplished without challenges. The hillside was “flaky,” according to Kearl, so the entire facility was built on pylons for earthquake stability. “You can walk underneath the building from top to bottom and access every room.”

Also, bones were uncovered while workers were excavating for the parking garage. They were animal bones, but progress ceased until that was confirmed. “Had they been human, the project would have been shut down,” adds Ferguson. 

The Center opened for its first group of students in 1988 and was fully completed throughout the early 1990s. 

Ferguson and Reznick set out to design a facility that would blend with Jerusalem, work with the site, and meet the needs of the program. Incorporating principles of Modernism, their final design—based on simple circulation models, honest use of materials, and transparency—meets those goals ideally. 

“We wanted to convey the feeling of filtered light, to be simple, honest, direct and have a close relationship between the program, building and site. We could have just built a tower, but we wanted relationship,” says Ferguson.

The chief materials used were Jerusalem limestone, glass and teakwood. Decorations and affectations were shunned as the architects saw them as a means of avoiding accomplishing the program in a clean, straightforward way. “Stone, arches and columns can stand on their own,” implores Ferguson.  

Today, The Center’s public entrance is on the top, or eighth, floor. Visitors enter a light-filled corridor and are immediately greeted by a sweeping view of the Old City. On this floor: a multipurpose room, two theaters, a library, and The Center’s main auditorium, which has floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides and offers the same spectacular views. 

The seventh floor houses administration and The Forum, a teaching auditorium for 300. Floor six hosts classrooms, cafeteria, gym, student commons, computer lab and snack bar. Floors one through five contain 44 student and 15 faculty apartments, storage space and two laundry facilities, one of which serves as a bomb shelter. Every apartment has a balcony or courtyard access and a view of Jerusalem. 

The facility also has excellent security. There are only two entry points, which are accessed by administration-issued swipe cards, and the campus perimeter has a triple barrier of infrared security, cameras and electronic tripwires. 

The grounds surrounding the building were designed by an Israeli landscape architect, Dan Zur, and are tranquilly welcoming. “[Reznick wanted] the building to say ‘Shalom,’” says Ferguson. 

The Center says many things in many languages and is one of few organizations in Jerusalem with an integrated workforce of Jews, Muslims and Christians, according to Kearl.

He continues, “[The Center’s] principal purpose is to provide an academic home for program participants and it does so. But the building, in a modest way, has become a contributor to the city culturally and architecturally…. The building has really become a part of the community.”

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