Lots of arches

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An evening view out the windows of a new building going up in Meitar.

Meitar was founded in 1984 here in the northern Negev as a yeshuv kehilati, what I like to translate as a planned community.
Over the years,  five neighborhoods have been built, one after another.
Now Number six is in progress.
See this aerial orthophoto from 2014 to grasp the layout.

I'm so curious what this will be.
A public building, I'm assuming.
The architecture looks almost like a mosque, but we have only a small percentage of Bedouin families living in Meitar, probably not enough to warrant a mosque. 

Maybe this sloping hole in the ground will become a big mikva, and the building is really a synagogue?
Time will tell.
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Meanwhile, for ABC Wednesday, W is for wonderfully weird windows and walls.
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New life for a Brutalist building

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Here is the arts complex/hotel that houses the new organ we saw in the last two posts.
It hugs the slope of Mt. Carmel, in the town of Zichron Yaakov.
Under the clouds you see the Mediterranean Sea. 

Our rooms were nice even though the hotel is not yet officially opened.
Tomorrow I'll show you the view from the balconies, wow! 
It may be hard concrete on the outside, but inside is the soft life.  : )

Elma is a total renovation of the Mivtachim building which originally was meant for members of  the big HMO Kupat Holim as a yearly vacation place, a "rest home." 

Built in the 1960s at the height of Brutalist architecture's popularity in Israel, there is lots of raw concrete inside and out.
The term Brutalism was coined in 1953 from the French béton brut, "raw concrete," a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings.
 (So far in this blog we have talked about architectural examples in the "Brutalism capital of Israel," Beer Sheva.)

Lily's Terrace is named for Lily Elstein, the wonderful lady who is pouring all her heart and fortune into building this unique place where artists can live and create or perform and where hotel guests can freely mingle with them.
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday and  Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors memes.)

A SWISS institute for DRYLAND research??

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 If you liked the architecture of the building in my previous post, you will love today's.
It too is on Sde Boker campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The Swiss Institute for Dryland Environmental and Energy Research was dedicated in May 2013.

At the ceremony  Prof. Daniel Guggenheim, President of the Bona Terra Foundation, said 

There is a parallel between Switzerland and Israel. Both had to face difficult land conditions. Both made a success of these existential conditions. Let us hope that other countries will be able to overcome their challenges through the Swiss Institute.

 

You can see a short video about it.

SIDEER's webpages are here.

Or you can read a pdf brochure about the exciting research going on there.
Wish them luck for good discoveries!
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday and  Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)
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Animals, wait outside

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Midreshet Sde Boker or Midreshet Ben-Gurion is a wonderful place down south in the Negev desert.
There is a high school, desert research institutes, a campus of Ben-Gurion University, and lots more.
I get the impression it is a pretty laid-back place.
People come there to live or teach or study or do research because they care about nature and ecology, animals and people.

And that's why I smiled when I saw this sign on a campus classroom building --  I guess people there  have to be reminded not to come in with their pets.
Actually, the Hebrew version says "No entry to animals."
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(Linking to Camera Critters,  even though there is no critter in the photo.)
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Reflections on the development of Beer Sheva

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Reflected in the century-old Turkish train station's window  are modern buildings of Beer Sheva. 

 And on the other side of the street, more high-rise residential buildings.
I'm sure the Ottoman Turks who started to build Beer Sheva towards the end of the 19th century never dreamed it would grow into Israel's second largest city (in terms of area).
Today it spreads across more than 117 square kilometers.

At least some of the apartments still have balconies.
I wonder what a unit costs here.
In Israel most people own their own residence; renting is less common.

Wedged in between the two rows of modern buildings is the Train Yard.
Here from the station balcony (where the first three photos were taken) you can see some of the authentic train cars and two more of the original structures that have been beautifully restored.
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(Linking to Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors and to  James' Weekend Reflections .)
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Out on a limb

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You may have to enlarge this to see it is a bird. 

At the Artist's House of the Negev in the old part of Beer Sheva,  each of a handful of artists was given a dead tree and asked to give it life with art.
Now the trees are exhibited in the gallery's yard.

Ingrid Neuman called hers "Inyan shorshi," which could mean a matter of roots (or, of rootedness).
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(Linking to Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors  and to OurWorld Tuesday .)
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A bird in the hand

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A bird in the hand is worth two in the Golden Age Club.

As we were learning Tai Chi, a little hummingbird flew in through the open side door and then got confused with all those glass walls.
Couldn't find her way out.

So our teacher, Eyal, gently caught the bird, stepped outside, opened his hand.
The bird rested a minute, got her bearings, and finally flew away back to freedom.
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(Linking to  Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors and to  Camera Critters.)
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A moon on the window pane

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In the previous post we watched how the big moon set, with the rising sun following on its heels.
As I stood outside the room where I stayed last night,  taking pictures of the celestial events, I glanced back and saw the moon reflected in my window.  
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What are they thinking?

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OK, just one more grandkid picture and then I'll stop.
This photo, taken by my daughter, Naomi, is too touching not to share.

After leaving Israel late Tuesday night and flying for 12 hours, the family arrived in Korea for a welcome 24-hour stay in Seoul.
Looking out their hotel window, are the kids gazing westward and missing Meitar in the Negev?
Or are they facing southward, thinking of the second 12-hour flight that will take them back to their other home in Australia?
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(Linking to Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)

Today's drill

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Here's one of the shelters in one of the schools in town (Meitar).

It is adjoining the classrooms, as you can see.
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 The Education Ministry, in cooperation with the army's  Home Front Command, rescue services, and local councils, held a drill in Israel’s schools and kindergartens this morning. 

Here is my video of the air raid siren.
You see a big public bomb shelter next to the municipal pre-kindergarten in my neighborhood, but the kids have there own fortified room inside their own building.  Which is a good thing since here we have only one minute to take cover from any in-coming rockets from Gaza.
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More Beer Sheva Brutalism: Yad LaBanim

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Here is Beit Yad Labanim, another of Beer Sheva's many examples of Brutalist architecture.

(We saw in the post about BGU's library  that the term Brutalism was coined in 1953 from the French béton brut, "raw concrete," a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings.)

Originally designed to be Beer Sheva's main synagogue, the money ran out before its completion,  and the strange building stood deserted for years.
In the late 1970s a group of bereaved parents came together to try to have the building's designation changed.
By 1983 they succeeded in completing it as a memorial hall to their soldier sons and daughters who had fallen in Israel's wars.  

See more about the concept of Yad Labanim houses throughout Israel here.
Or see my photos of Jerusalem's Yad Labanim, which also has unusual architecture. 

I have not ventured in yet, but I read that inside are art exhibitions, cultural activities from time to time, and a 300-seat theater. 

Enlarge this photo 2x and see some interesting details!

Pigeons on the roof are kept out by metal grating stretched over the openings.
And that bare patch--is it just the plaster falling off the wall  or  could it be a deliberate "window" into the brutalist reinforced concrete? 
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Haaretz has an entertaining article about Beer Sheva's love-hate affair with Brutalism.
(It is behind a paywall but the newspaper offers ten free articles per month after a simple registration.)

It says this, for instance:

Brutalism and its varied concrete features were seen as an allegory for the young, Israeli-born Jew − rough, direct, aggressive, just like cement itself. 

The architects of Brutalism were themselves native-born, young contemporaries of the state. Their character and vision overlapped with the allegory to a remarkable extent. 

The great irony is that their buildings were constructed mostly for newly arrived immigrants whom the state was sending to the country’s far geographical periphery to live in its Israeli-conceived concrete works. The architects themselves, of course, didn’t follow.

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(Linking to Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)
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The Vittorio Veneto Synagogue

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From inside, looking out.

From outside, looking in.

Enough desert and Beer Sheva Brutalism; let's see some Italian Baroque style beauty!
This 17th century interior of a small synagogue in the town of Vittorio Veneto near Venice was transferred to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1965 and was faithfully reconstructed.
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(Linking to Toby's meme  Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)
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Beer Sheva's Government Compound

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 An older man stopped to ask me directions in Beer Sheva today.
He asked in Russian and was not happy that I could answer only in Hebrew.
A large percentage of Beer Sheva's 211,000 residents are Russians who came in the big immigration wave of the 1990s.

He needed the Ministry of the Interior.
I pointed and told him it must be somewhere in this string of similar buildings that are called Kiryat Hamemshala, meaning the Government Compound.

You can see at least four of them in the photo above, but there are even more to the left.

It seems like such a hodgepodge of architectural elements, no? 
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(Linking to OurWorld Tuesday and Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)
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יום הזיכרון הבינלאומי לשואה

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The entrance into the Holocaust History Museum at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem.

The triangular building is cantilevered at its beginning and at the end.
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In 2005 the United Nations designated January 27 as an annual International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

At the very first U.N. Holocaust Memorial Day in 2006, Israel's Prof. Yehuda Bauer delivered the "Remembrance and Beyond" keynote address at the United Nations.
He concluded his speech thus:

I come from a people that gave the Ten Commandments to the world.
Let us agree that we need three more, and they are these:
thou shalt not be a perpetrator;
thou shalt not be a victim;
and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.

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(Linking to Our World Tuesday and  Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)
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Béton brut --> Brutalism at Ben-Gurion University

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For better or for worse,  Beer Sheva is called our capital of Brutalism.*
And the city's Ben-Gurion University is full of Brutalist architecture. 
BGU's main library, for instance, whose cornerstone was laid in 1971.

 From the Aranne Library website:

In designing the library building, the architects wanted to bring several ideas to life:
The building was planned to be washed in natural light – present in abundance in the Negev - which,  diffused from the North (to eliminate the direct rays of the sun),  floods the library's reading areas. . . .
The combination of concrete, dark in appearance and representing durability in desert conditions,  and gleaming cupolas made of glass mosaic, expresses the blending of material with light.

Here is the back of the library. 

* From Wikipedia:

The English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1953, from the French béton brut, or "raw concrete", a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings.
. . .
Brutalist architecture is a style of architecture that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, spawned from the modernist architectural movement. Examples are typically very linear, fortresslike and blockish, often with a predominance of concrete construction. Initially the style came about for government buildings, low-rent housing and shopping centres to create functional structures at a low cost, but eventually designers adopted the look for other uses such as college buildings.

UPDATE: Here is a nice new article about the beauty of Brutalism.
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(Linking to ABC Wednesday, Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors, and Our World Tuesday.)
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Synagogue with a view!

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This is one of the dozen synagogues in Meitar.
It is the closest one to my place but I have never been inside it.
It's at the end of a street, on the edge of town. 

The windows in the sanctuary look out and down on the desert! 
If I went to services I'd probably be gazing out at nature instead of focusing on the prayerbook or the sermon. 
Maybe I should try sometime.
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(Linking to Toby's meme, Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)
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We three kings

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We three kings of Orient are . . . 

bearing gifts we traverse afar . . .
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Happy Dreikönigstag or Feast of Epiphany or Twelfth Day to all the Western Christians celebrating it today. 
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(More Epiphany posts from previous years are here. )
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And to the Eastern Orthodox Christians, happy Christmas Eve! 
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UPDATE: A video of the Epiphany and Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem on Jan. 6.
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