The starting point for the Museum of Tolerance work is the building of the Museum of Tolerance which is still under construction and is located in the center of Jerusalem. The building's physical and economic characteristics, its relationship to the environment and the land, constitute a point of reference for a story that extends to California, golfing greens, Italian paving stones, but it also remains domestic through the story of Moshe Barzani and Meir Feinstein and the Jaffa orange. Using architectural tools, these histories and stories are melted, interwoven and contradict each other.
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Last summer, the museum was supposed to open up to the public. After years of planning, and then many more years of construction, during which the building stood—a white, angular, origami-like mass, heavy and seemingly an eternal construction site. As of today, the museum is still closed and is only scheduled to open next year. Entry to the museum is subject to advanced coordination. The project developers released several images of the building online, illuminated at dusk with a yellow-orange light.
The Shamouti orange was first created as a mutation in the orchard of an Arab farmer from Jaffa. Not long after, this mutation began to be marketed by the State of Israel as a national brand under the name 'Jaffa Oranges.' On October 7, 1964, a tract of land containing a detention center in the middle of Jerusalem was purchased by Israel from the Soviet Union as part of the 'orange deal.' The young State of Israel had no money to pay for the ruined buildings in the Land of Israel except with its vast inventory of citrus fruits. Seventeen years earlier, at that same detention center, then under British control, Irgun members Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein committed suicide after a failed suicide bombing attempt against the British. They did so with a bomb they smuggled into the detention center inside an orange peel.
The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles was established in 1993 as the educational arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famous Nazi hunter. The museum's mission is to discuss the horrors of the Holocaust and promote tolerance toward the Jewish minority. The museum and center sit at the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Roxbury Drive. Further down the block, not far away, is the Rancho Park golf course. Golf has always been a tool for creating social and economic relationships among its participants. Often, players engage in conversation during the game, sometimes drink, sometimes gamble, and sometimes conduct business.
Ehud Olmert and Rabbi Marvin Hier, the initiator of the museum’s establishment, met in Jerusalem in the late 1990s. Olmert offered Hier the land, which was then a parking lot in the city center, to establish a museum similar to the one in Los Angeles: the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. "The Museum of Tolerance will promote tolerance just as gyms promote health," said Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Governor of California, at the cornerstone-laying ceremony, where the future Tikkun Olam Garden would be located near Independence Park.
"The goal: to carry out infrastructure work and remove nuisances within the project's area." This is what was written on the website of Moriah, the development company of the Jerusalem Municipality, under the tab "preparation and infrastructure work for the Museum of Tolerance." After the preparatory and infrastructure work was completed, construction began. In June 2005, the foundation was excavated for the building as designed by Frank Gehry, a Jewish architect from California. Gehry left the project due to budgetary issues, and Bracha Chyutin was appointed to continue the design. Chyutin designed the form of the building, adapted to Gehry’s building foundation. She, too, left the project for similar reasons, and the Yigal Levy architectural firm was appointed to design the building’s details based on Chyutin's form. Out of a desire to integrate into the architectural history of the building, and since it is currently closed to visitors, standing unfinished and empty, I took it upon myself as part of this project to propose another iteration of intervention in the building.
I decided to perform an artistic action by identifying the structural weak points within the museum’s construction plans. These points indicate where the structure is weakest and most vulnerable. But they are also a foundation for an intervention by a hypothetical fifth architect who could propose a new system of beams and columns to reinforce the identified weak points.
To mark the weak points in the museum, I requested the construction plans from the YSS engineering firm. In the body of the email, I explained that I was requesting the plans for an art project. I received the plans. I modeled the building on the computer according to them; it consists of two central movement cores and includes an auditorium, classrooms, and several exhibition spaces, supported by a constructive grid made of concrete. With the help of the Grasshopper software, which maps the weights and forces of beams and columns in relation to varying loads, I marked three possible weak points in the museum.
The first is near the auditorium at the western end of the third floor. The second is in the center of the museum, on the second floor, near the diagonal staircase, and the third is near the reading rooms, adjacent to the building’s eastern core. To mark these points for possible future intervention, I chose to enter the building and mark each point using an orange.
In order to enter the closed museum and mark its weak points, I wrote to the institution's management. In the letter, I described my desire to integrate into the building's historical continuum and the action I wished to carry out. I made sure to use an abundance of adjectives, flowery expressions, and personal experiences from Jerusalem. I mentioned the word 'orange' only once in the text. I sent it. I consulted with a good friend, who is a lawyer, regarding the potential risks that could arise from revealing such an action to the institution. We decided not to send the letter for the time being. I filed it under the "Bills and Property Tax" folder on my desktop.
Meanwhile, I tried to explore new angles for the museum's façade that could result from carrying out such an action. I calculated vectors of material movement, pressure diffusion, and focused on the geometry of the shard. Why does every fragment of brittle material diligently break into sharp triangular angles?
I tried to simulate the changes in the museum’s shape after the intervention, illuminated at dusk with a yellow-orange light. I created a physical paper model of the museum and lit it from within with six yellow incandescent bulbs. In 2013, on Arlozorov Street in Tel Aviv, one such bulb, placed too close to a mattress, caused an entire apartment to catch fire.
I rearranged the objects in my room. I placed a small stage in the center, under which two electrical cables run, each connected to three yellow incandescent bulbs on both wings of the museum. You can clearly see in the photograph the line of the ground, what lies beneath it, and the museum itself, like a prism transmitting light and projecting it upward through the paper triangles. I documented the burning for several hours into the night.