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TYPOLOGY
JEWISH HOUSES OF WORSHIP ARE EXPERIENCING MODEST GROWTH AS CONGREGATIONS SEEK MORE SOCIAL, ADAPTABLE SPACES.
OF ALL RELIGIOUS STRUCTURES, synagogues are the great chameleons of architectural form. This has something to do with Jewish history. The First Temple, built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in the mid-ioth century B.C., was destroyed, and so was the Second Temple that replaced it. The great diaspora that followed scattered Jews across countries in which they were frequently persecuted. When synagogues were constructed, they often needed to be contextual, to do anything but call attention to themselves. Even as the Jewish faith gained acceptance, synagogues remained very much rooted in the tastes of the congregation and the community.
"One thing about synagogue architecture is that there are not a lot of rules," says Joan Soranno, FAIA, a vice president at the Minneapolis architecture firm HGA. Soranno and her partner, John Cook, FAiA, designed the B'nai Israel Synagogue in Rochester, Minn., which won an award in 2009 from the AIA Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture. "Catholic churches can be very prescriptive. In Judaism, there isn't a building typology history per se that you are enslaved to. Judaism very much embraces contemporary architecture."
As Jewish congregations in America grew after World War II, they looked to the great architects of the day to create singular houses of worship: Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Eric Mendelsohn, and Philip Johnson, to name a few. In the last 20 years, demand for new and renovated synagogues again has been strong, according to Samuel D. Gruber, an architectural historian and the author of American Synagogues: A Century of Architecture and Jewish Community. "I think we've been going through the biggest synagogue building boom since the 1960s," he says. This spurt can be attributed to the baby boomers but also to a younger generation that has sought to redefine its experience of Jewish worship.
Jay Brown, AIA, vice president of Maryland-based firm Levin/Brown & Associates, which has completed more than 150 synagogue projects, says that new construction has recently been slowing, particularly in terms of smaller commissions. "Because of declining membership [in...