Hello and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Kristine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Dr. Anat Geva, a registered architect in Israel and associate member of the AIA.

She's professor emerita of architecture in Texas A&M University and the 2020 College of Architecture Outstanding Alumni.

She taught in Design Studios, History and Design of Sacred architecture, history of building technology and historic preservation.

She has an extensive record of editorial work, being the coeditor of Iris, the Journal of Southeast Society, Architectural Historians, and the founder and coeditor of Preservation Education and Research.

She's the recipient of several awards and research grants, including the prestigious James Marsden Finch National Award for Innovative Research and Historic Preservation.

She's published many articles and five books, including the book we're discussing today The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s to 1960s.

Thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm so excited to talk about this book because it's such a unique topic.

It's specific, but it's also very interesting.

And there's a lot of great history captured in here.

So can you start by just introducing the book to us?

First of all, I would like to start how I got to write it.

Okay, great.

When I graduated from the Israeli Institute of Technology with my first degree in architecture and city planning, I went to work for an architect as an architect.

And my first project was to design a synagogue.

And that never was built.

But it striked my curiosity of how religion and sacredness can be expressed in the design of buildings.

That brought me to do my Ph.D., and I did a study about churches, 19th century churches in Texas that were built by immigrants coming directly from Europe to Galveston and building their churches around south central Texas.

And when I found that they they were tradition, culture and religion was more important and stronger than the accommodation to the harsh summers of of Texas.

From there, I wanted to see how a prominent architect like Frank Rhodes wife design sacred architecture.

And so that brought me to publish a book about his sacred architecture, which I called faith form and building technology.

And there I developed a conceptual model that I use in all my other books, including this this book that was talking about the relationship between building a form of building technology and faith.

And so this book came as part of this theory is that I was writing and the book is about the American model synagogues that were built between 1950s and 1960s by congregation that moved to the suburb of that period of time.

And I wanted to look into their how to express their identity after World War Two and after the horrific event of the Holocaust.

And they found it in modern architecture, which was at that time starting to be part of the movement in architecture in the United States.

So that's how I came about the book.

And this is what it's a book about.

And the book is also looking into something very important, which is on the cover, because the cover of the book is actually an archival picture of the skeleton of the synagogue in Russia, right.

Sitting in Southfield, Michigan.

And I selected to do this because it shows innovations in building technology and how these innovations pushed the architects to develop new esthetics in architecture.

You touched on this briefly and this you kind of explain this at the beginning of the book.

We wait.

There's this great Venn diagram for a visual learner and how these three overlapping concepts created what is in the book.

And there's the the reasons that kind of these three of these synagogues.

Can you go into more depth about those three kind of main concepts?

You know, you could just you could just tell us.

Okay.

So the first one is the search for Jewish identity.

As I say, the after the Holocaust, and that was pushed to to to actually depart from the history historicism and the historical examples of synagogues in Europe and eclectic in styles of synagogues in the United States, that happened to be before the 1950s.

That there was one context of the time and the other context of the time was the move of people to the suburb.

America had developed the American suburbs, the American way of life in the suburbs, and it was like a place for to build from scratch, including the houses of of of worship.

And at that time, post-World War two, there was a huge boom in America of building houses of worship, including churches and synagogues, because the nation was in this kind of religious mindset and cultural pluralism.

So even even Congress that had devoted one of the rooms in the capital for an all faiths chapel, all faiths room actually So that is another one.

And it gave an opportunity for every every congregation to build their own house of worship, including the Jews, to build their synagogues.

Then this there is the context of the time of the rise of the modern American modern movement in architecture in America.

And that started arriving at the end of the 1930, but was mainly pronounced in the 19 late 1940 and 1950 and became the main, main kind of expression of a free of freedom of religion, freedom of the culture, and of the free young nation and young people.

And so the Jews were looking for their identity, found themselves attracted to this sound, to this wonderful and their time, a movement in architecture, since it could relate to their search of their identity and to express themselves with pride, their resilience, and with pride of their institution.

And so that's the three contexts.

Now, the juxtaposition of the three is actually the synagogue.

How did you select the synagogues that were featured in the book?

Because at the time of the 1950s and 1960s, there were one thousand and eight hundred synagogues built around the nation.

So I had make a very strict selection criteria.

And the first one was that they were built in the 1950s or 1960s.

And then the second one was that they are still serving as synagogues because a lot of them turn out to to to community centers or other theaters or things like that.

So there was no way that I could look at them.

That was the other selection.

And the third selection was that criteria was that they had to be designed and built by very famous modern American architects.

So that's where the selection and I went and traveled around the nation.

That was my next question.

You did a lot of travel for this.

Can you talk about that?

Yes, I went and traveled a lot and found out many of them that did not become part of the book for different reason.

But the beauty of it was that, first of all, I met the congregations.

I met the rabbis.

I made the sacred areas that helped me to open up the buildings and visit them to document the buildings.

And then most of them had some kind of an archive.

And that was very beautiful because a lot of material happened to be there, even if the archive was very organized or not organized at all.

Still, there was a lot of material there and it was very helpful for the research of the book.

And all these people welcomed me and helped me and helped me also sometimes to and brought me even physically to another another firm of architects that were the architects of residence of the of these famous architects that were designing it.

And so they really helped.

And I have to say that commonly in all of the congregations who were involved, apparently in the design process, they were very much involved in the selection of the architects.

They were involved in the selection of the designs, and they were involved in all the decisions that were made in the process.

And that's a very beautiful process of design.

It sounds like.

So that sense of community was there when they built them because they all got to be involved in helping build their synagogue.

But then it sounds like that sense of community is still there to continuously to this day, to welcome an author who wants to potentially write about that must have been just so fun meeting all these people, looking at their beautiful spaces and learning about their history.

It was not just fun, it was exciting.

And also because they still have this pride in their in their buildings and in the architects to build it.

And that's another chapter in the book that is called Changes and of the Station and that that's gone about the preservation beyond brick and mortar, how in the years they preserve the integrity of the modernism in their synagogue through the years and could accommodate the necessity of changes in demography, changes in liturgy and changes in energy, energy, utility bills and so forth.

So that was very interesting.

You gave me a terminology for something I didn't know, which is sacred architecture, and I think that's what's so special about houses of worship is that the congregants of any almost any house of worship I've ever been to, they love their building that way.

We don't necessarily love our office buildings or maybe our homes, but a house of worship is a place that the people who go there and congregate there, they love their space.

They know their history.

They're proud of their history.

I think that's true for many churches across Texas.

And it sounds like true for synagogues and cultures just across the country.

Such a special a special place that we don't maybe feel that way about our other places.

True, True.

There are many design features that actually create it, and that's what triggered me to study it, because what are these design features that creates this spirituality and the sacredness of the building?

So the first thing that I want to say that synagogues are how is this of gathering?

They are not houses of God.

I, like many churches, and the house of God was only the temple in Jerusalem that was destroyed many, many years ago.

So the house of gathering so that the house of the people.

And that's why they are so in love, because they are involved in it and they love it, but also because there is something poetic in designing a sacred place, especially when you treat light, when you treat some of the holy light, and when you treat them holy music or the sound or the silence something, or you treat the the the wonderful portion of the the sanctuary and how you deal with if you have to have 2000 people or 600 people, the flexibility of of the possibilities to accommodate the different kind of services.

I also want to make sure we mentioned that there are a lot of beautiful photographs throughout the book that you took when you went on these visits to all these.

Me and my husband, who sometimes came with me.

So he took over and he took it also.

Yes, some of them are from archives that a lot of them are from my own photographing.

And I have to say that there was most of them were in synagogues that I was not aware of them from the literature because there were not enough literature about it.

And when I came in, some of them took my breath away.

The beauty of the building, not necessarily that it was just a synagogue specifically for one faith, but this spirituality and the sacredness of the space was like one and one example I want to give that I came to a synagogue in Glencoe, Illinois, which is an hour north of Chicago, and there is a synagogue that was designed by Menorah, Magnus Yamasaki, the one who designed the Twin Towers in New York City.

And when I came into the building, it was pouring it was raining, it was gray.

And I came in and suddenly there was light, not artificial light, natural light.

That was all painted in gilded colors.

And it looks like I am almost in heaven.

It looks so special and so different, So that the poetry behind this design.

I want to talk about one of the reasons they were able to innovate in design at this time is that for people who may not know, there are some things with synagogues that are required to be part of the architecture, but a lot is is not necessarily written that you have to do it this way.

So that gives a little more freedom to architects when they're designing.

Can you talk about what must be and what and then what's open to interpretation?

So not like other faith, less faith.

Judaism is not dictating anything to how to design and build the outside the exterior of a synagogue.

And it comes from different different reasons, mainly because of persecution before it.

So that was a wonderful way to hide it in a way.

But so that was faith for any architect to do whatever they want inside.

They were there are very specific dictation of of the faith on how it should the relationship between different parts of the synagogue should be.

For example, there is an ark.

The ark has to be on a podium and there is a relationship between the podium and the other podium where the rabbi or other people from the congregation read the Torah.

So this sound, this access between them actually create different kind of seating arrangement if the access is not at all and they are one in front of the other is.

So you can have like a theater seating arrangement which is usually most of the modern American synagogue you using.

If it's more a long access, then you can sit people on the sides facing one another.

And this is usually in different, different synagogues of different nation of is sporadic Jews Jews.

So that these are the things that need to be there the ark, the podium, the bima, what we call the podium for reading the the Torah.

And then there is a lamp that is the eternal light, which is the eternal light of the spiritual life of Judaism.

And then there is the menorah, which is a candle light of seven candle holders that is also a symbol of freedom and in light.

So these are the main major thing that's supposed to be there.

And of course, the architect is free to accompany me and to wear light on different acoustics.

The need to be there and in the ambiance is up to the architect.

But these are the things that the faith is dictating.

There are a lot of different architects featured, and I think what what is fascinating to learn is some of the architects have designed only synagogues, some designed synagogues and other sacred houses of worship, of sacred architecture.

Some did commercial.

Like you mentioned, he designed the Twin Towers.

So there's there's a lot of different types of architects.

Can you maybe highlight just a couple of them?

Okay.

The major ones that I think influence all the rest of the architects where Frank Lloyd Wright and he designed three houses of worship and among them one synagogue in Elkin Park, Pennsylvania, there is Mendelssohn Erik Mendelssohn, which designed only synagogues, and he designed six synagogue, I think, before he died.

But not all of them were built in.

I select it the one that was completed and did not convert to something else, which is the Park Synagogue in Cleveland.

Some people ask me why I didn't choose the first one that he designed, which is the synagogue in St Louis, but it was converted to an art center.

So and I say I looked on the building that still service synagogue.

In the third one I was saying Menorah Yamasaki.

He built two synagogue, one I did not include in the book because he built it in the 1970s.

So it's beyond the scope of the period of the book.

And I because three of them contributed special attributes that other architects followed.

So Mendelssohn contributed to Manifest that talked about departing from Historicism.

Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to build the the American synagogue.

And so to combine the synagogue with the landscape and with motifs of the Native American that used to lead to occupy this area and know I am asking, introduce the Cathedral synagogue, which is a grand institution institution.

And I was add to it also another one that maybe is not so known to architects and which is President Goodman, who was from New York.

And he because he built he designed more than 50 synagogues in the time and he introduced art into synagogue and the integration of designers and artists to work together in this ceremony.

I was going to add that was one of my next question about the art integrating the art inside and then also having art on the outside.

And you mentioned, you know, in all previous times they were hidden, They weren't maybe advertised as synagogues, but now in America, that search for identity, that freedom of religion, they are able to put their personality, put their faith all around, inside and outside.

Can you tell us more about that?

So, first of all, Goodman was the first one to introduce Art into the synagogues, and he also worked very closely with the artists.

So there was an integration of design and artistic work.

So not the architecture would frame the art, but the art would frame the architecture.

So it was a combination of the two.

And with respect to both, both the two people that were involved, but also both profession.

And when he started to to do it, most of the architects followed and because of the freedom of religion in America and Jews started to feel more safe and then they can introduce the features of different sculptures of different art on on the exterior of the building.

And because there are no guidelines, you can put whatever you want.

But it has to be, you know, in the framework of the symbolism.

Okay.

And and inside of the synagogue, most of the art were abstract.

In art because of the second commandment, it's said that you cannot put a face of God or anything that will imitate like God.

So the freedom of religion also was part of the reform of some of the very strict laws of Judaism that, because of the second commandment, did not allow art in the synagogue inside and outside.

They were because of persecution.

But inside it was because they were not allowed.

So as much as they were more strict there about the interpretation of this commandment, then they it was kind of more strict of accepting art into it.

But slowly in America, it became the into the open up and the freedom of religion allowed them to open it up.

And it's there are many, many beautiful artwork beyond a Judaica, which indicated the art, a functional art for religious purposes.

And this is these was art for artistic purposes.

And it could be based on verses from the Bible, or it can be telling a story from the Bible.

But still it was an abstract way.

These are all as you've mentioned, they're all still functional synagogues.

Are they available to visit if somebody wants to see the beauty?

And and because some of these pictures that you talk about the way and it's I'm sure the pictures don't do it justice, but they are beautiful, amazing looking spaces.

As I said, some of them, my breath was taken away.

Yes, you can visit, but because of now the times now the safety concern, you have maybe to call Chic an appointment.

For, of course.

So the door is not open like before that you could just come, but it's definitely worth going because people don't know about these places and most people don't know do not know that these famous architect that they people study built synagogues.

I'm sure for architecture buffs, I would think these would be some some missing, some is some blind spots maybe some things they need to to check out.

Well, we are unfortunately running short on time.

So in our final maybe 2 minutes, can you just tell us what you want people take away from this book?

And is this project two things?

One, that I want them to see the resilience and the pride of the Jewish people in their institution and in their culture, in their faith, and how these institutions express them so that the second one, how architecture can express the sacredness of any faith.

And that's the beauty of of these buildings.

Well, I I'm going to have to say I think you succeeded because this is a wonderful, important piece of history, but it's also beautiful.

And I learned a lot.

I don't I'm not an architect.

I didn't know a lot, but it made me want to learn more and to seek out more sacred architecture and maybe learn about the ones here in my backyard.

It's it's really it's really a wonderful and important book that you've put together.

And I'm.

Thank you.

And I would like to thank also Texas A&M Press because they work with me and they were wonderful and they were patient and I was patient with it.

So it was a great collaboration.

Well, we're very proud to have this on our list and as part of our collection.

So thank you and thank you for being here.

Thank you for inviting me again.

That is all the time we've got for today.

Thank you so much for joining us.

The book again is The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s and 1960s.

We will see you again soon.