As anyone living in Israel knows, the show must go on. Despite the outbreak of war, Jerusalem recently opened the doors of its newest and long-anticipated cultural beacon: the National Library of Israel (NLI). Designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, the eleven-floor, 495,000-square-foot structure has something to say about the historical development and future of Jerusalem’s cultural and urban fabric.
After the topic of a Jewish homeland was broached at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, European Jewry began sending books to Jerusalem. Herzog & de Meuron’s new building replaces the older National Library, a brutalist block on piers built in the 1960s. It was innovative for its time—essentially enlarging the mobility and spatial concepts of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye at Poissy to a monumental scale for public use—but now looks tired and outdated.
The new NLI sits between the Knesset and the Israel Museum, a symbolic link between civics and culture. The building can be envisioned as two elements: a rectangular base with glassy vitrine-like elements, supporting a long, cantilevered stone volume with a swooping upward roofline. Decorative extracts are carved linearly across the upper stone façade. From the exterior, these carvings give the visual impression of cryptic hieroglyphs, as if the façade itself were an unfurled ancient parchment.
The Swiss firm boasted of the building’s originality, but not without crediting Jerusalem’s historical heritage as inspiration. The NLI is clad in the heavenly Jerusalem stone—the local white and pink limestone that, by law, must cover every municipal building. The ordinance was enacted during the early days of the British Mandate (1922–48) when Governor Sir Ronald Storrs, advised by his town planners—the engineer Sir William McLean and the Arts and Crafts architect C. R. Ashbee—required buildings to be faced with local limestone to preserve Jerusalem’s homogeneous fabric. While many buildings today get by with mere patches of stone between glass-and-steel facades, the NLI, with its large upper volume of limestone, honors this exclusive tradition.
Herzog & de Meuron’s presence in Jerusalem speaks directly to the city’s ongoing transformation. Since the 1990s, Jerusalem has embarked on urban and architectural campaigns intended to stimulate economic activity and heighten its international status. Previous entrepreneurial mayors such as Ehud Olmert (1993–2003) and Nir Barkat (2008–18) reversed long-standing height restrictions with bold assertions for Jerusalem to “become a city like Manhattan” and to “stand proudly in the front line with the world’s prosperous capitals.”
Today, sporadic glassy highrises, tower cranes, and Santiago Calatrava’s iconic Chords Bridge (2008) have redefined the ancient skyline. Most construction is concentrated on the Jerusalem Gateway—an expansive skyscraper business district at the northwestern entrance dubbed “Jerusalem’s La Défense” in reference to Paris’s commercial high-rise district.
If dramatic verticality defined the first phase of rebranding, Herzog & de Meuron’s commission ignites the next phase with a focus on high-profile “starchitects” as urban boosters. It is the library and the municipality’s hope that the weight of Herzog & de Meuron’s celebrity reputation alone will ignite a “Bilbao Effect”—as when Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao added cultural, economic, and political prestige to the once provincial Spanish city. And it’s worth noting that the Swiss duo is only the first (the guinea pigs, perhaps) in a batch of celebrity architects (Studio Fuksas, SANAA, and Daniel Libeskind, to name a few) tasked with undertaking major projects in Jerusalem over the next several years.
The commission alone is evidence of the urgent desire for a Bilbao Effect. Forgoing the typical two-stage design competition among local Israeli firms, the NLI construction committee blindly awarded the commission to Herzog & de Meuron in 2014 based on its international reputation alone, without even seeing a design proposal.
Many artists and architects in recent decades have boycotted Israel, and the Swiss firm thus received criticism from the global architecture community. The Helsinki-based architect Pedro Aibéo published an open letter to the duo questioning its moral justification for building a “highly political” project for a state that uses “unlawful and apartheid use of force.” It has long been Herzog & de Mueron’s mantra to put a “moralistic standpoint” aside and “make things so that they work, they are sustainable and they are beautiful,” as was the case when it designed the AstraZeneca headquarters in Cambridge, England, or the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing, causing the critic Rowen Moore to note that the duo has “a knack for building in highly charged locations.”
Although it denies having moralistic motivation, the Swiss firm’s willingness to accept the commission got it right (unlike Pedro Aibéo and his anti-Israel chatter). Herzog & de Meuron undertook the project in support of the library’s mission to become “not just a Jewish institution,” in Jacques Herzog’s words, but a cultural beacon inclusive of all people. And while the Palestinian Authority often denies basic living needs to its people, not to mention cultural amenities, the doors to the new NLI, like its predecessor, are open to all eager to use its vast resources.
Standing in the presence of the library as sunlight shimmers off its limestone façade, or in the atrium as light cascades down the discoidal skylight or seeps through the hieroglyphic extracts, one is reminded of Jorge Louis Borges’s adage that “Paradise will be a kind of library.” Only time will tell if the NLI, while living up to its cultural obligation to preserve the written word will also help propel Jerusalem into yet another chapter in its endless history.