Frank Lloyd Wright's Synagogue

Frank Lloyd Wright's Synagogue

Picking a single structure out of a list of five hundred that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is no easy task. For other assignments, I have direct access to the building that I am supposed to study, and can view it, inside and out, from every possible angle. For this essay, I was forced to rely entirely upon grainy moire-patterned reproductions and pixelated, color-indexed thumbnails. I agree with the philosophy espoused by Steen Eiler Rasmussen in Experiencing Architecture, namely, that it is not enough to see architecture; that one must experience it. As such, I decided to study Frank Lloyd Wright's Beth Sholom Synagogue, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, since it is the only one of Wright's works that I have ever physically experienced myself.
Wright designed the Beth Sholom Synagogue in 1953, during the last and most prolific decade of his illustrious seventy-two-year career, in which he literally doubled the amount of buildings he was responsible for. For the better part of ten years, he produced architecture at an astronomical rate of one building every two weeks!
He was able to keep up this frenetic pace of construction by the division of labour: Wright was personally responsible for the mental activity of design, and to subcontractors, such as Haskell Colwell in the case of Beth Sholom, he delegated the physical activity of the construction itself. Construction on the Beth Sholom began in 1954 and was completed in 1959, the year of Wright's passing.
Wright had, over the course of his career, designed several edifices designated to be places of worship for Christians of various denominations. Ostensibly, Beth Sholom was not the only temple for members of the Jewish faith that Wright designed, but it is certainly the most memorable: it is one of the seventeen buildings that Wright designed to be accoladed by the American Institute of Architects as an example of Wright's contribution to American culture. Of these seventeen, Beth Sholom would have been the final jewel in Wright's crown, but for the delays in the construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, due to building code bureaucracy.

In front of the entrance to the synagogue, at a distance of seven-and-a-half metres from it, Wright constructed a laver, a water fountain. The laver harkens back to the biblical purity laws, which required Hebrew worshippers to wash themselves before entering an area that was defined as holy. Today, even Orthodox Jews do not follow this injunction, although their Semitic cousins, the Muslims, do perform "wudhu" ablutions by washing themselves with water before entering their mosques. In the context of the Conservative Beth Sholom Synagogue, the fountain's function is purely symbolic.
Rabbi Mortimer J. Cohen, who commissioned the design of the synagogue on behalf of his congregation, asked for a temple that would suggest Mount Sinai, where, according to scripture, the Israelites received the word of God, and became a nation in their own right. The high hexagonal structure does, in fact, resemble a mountain rising above the landscape. At night, when the sanctuary is lit from within, the glass walls of the synagogue appear from without to be perforated by hole emanations of light, analogous to the Biblical account of the lawgiving at Mount Sinai in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.
In the daytime, rays of sunlight pierce the glass walls and penetrate the inner sanctum, as if God is extending God's fingers from above and imbuing the temple with God's own divine essence. Wright created dazzling light effects in countless of his works, and the Beth Sholom Synagogue was no exception.
The ramps that lead from the entrance of the synagogue to the sanctuary are inclined, to suggest the pilgrimage made by the Hebrew leader Moses to the top of Mount Sinai in order to receive the law from God. The ramps lead to a pulpit, and behind the pulpit is a huge fourteen-and-a-half-metre-high stone rectangular mass that is supposed to represent the two stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. This backdrop is actually cavernous, and houses within it the synagogue's holy Torah's, the Five Books of Moses painstakingly transcribed by hand on scrolls of cow hide. That it evokes the Ten Commandments is not remarkable in and of itself, as this is a common theme in the synagogues of Eastern European Jews. But in the context of the building's mountainous shape, penetrating light, and inclined ramps, it is the climax of the building's narrative.

The triangular chandelier that hovers above the pulpit is an intriguing fixture. The official explanation for the chandelier, which has no precedent in Jewish architecture, is that its primary colours represent the "emanations of God." According to Kabalah, Jewish mysticism, God cannot be understood visually by human beings, only conceptualized as pure white light, the totality of all that is. Only when this totality is broken up in to shards can it be grasped by the human mind. Only when white is divided into its component colours can it be seen by the human eye. The colours of the chandelier represent the kabalistic colour designations of the attributes of God: blue for wisdom, green for understanding, yellow for beauty, red for strength.
Despite enjoying a renaissance today, these esoteric interpretations were hardly popular fifty years ago with Jews of Beth Sholom's Conservative Movement, firmly rooted in the post-Enlightenment rationalist trend in Judaism. But a return to pre-modern, pre-industrial symbolism is very apropos for Wright, who made a career out of infusing architecture with a yearning for the time when man was one with nature. Though, the chandelier's true meaning may not be pre-modern at all, but post-modern. It the chandelier looks like anything at all, it most closely resembles popular abductee accounts of an Unidentified Flying Object.

Some have theorized that the pyrotechnic revelation on Mount Sinai, codified into mythological language, could be evidence of contact, not with a single higher being, but with a whole race of them. Indeed, a group known as the Raelians, with scantily-clad prosletyzing adherents all over the world, have made a religion out of this belief. The 1950s were a time of intense speculation about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life forms. It's no secret that Wright held many fiercely independent views, and it's quite possible that his chandelier, is, in fact, meant to allude to an interdimensional portal.
Vincent Scully claims in Frank Lloyd Wright that the outer shape of the Beth Sholom Synagogue is conical, and that Wright sampled its conical shape from the ancient pagan temple known as the "Cone of Astarte". Though this theory cannot be discounted, in light of the sanctuary's chandelier and its stated kabalistic symbology, it's likelier that Wright, with an eternal fondness for geometric shapes, actually had a different shape in mind: the tetrahedron. The tetrahedron is the shape formed by stacking two four-sided pyramids bottom-to-bottom. The Star of David encompassed by a circle, the traditional symbol of the Jewish religion, is actually a two dimensional representation of the three-dimensional tetrahedron. This shape is also the basis of the centrepiece of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Merkava. The Kabalistic Merkava, Hebrew for "chariot," has alternately been described as a method for meditation and a vehicle for traversing spiritual realms. Both interpretations find their expression in Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Beth Sholom Synagogue.

On the synagogue's own website, the seating in the Beth Sholom sanctuary is described as being arranged in a circular manner around the pulpit. The expressed purpose of this arrangement is that it would allow worshippers on all sides to be able to see each other, and thus convey the feeling of a congregation praying in unison, as one. Perhaps the seating plan does differ somewhat the traditional Northern European model, in the sense that the two main seating sections are each offset by approximately twenty-five degrees towards the central axis, as can be seen in the building plan. But it is an immense exaggeration to claim that this arrangement is the optimum one for creating a sense of unity in prayer.
The traditional architectural style of the synagogues of Southern Europe and the Middle East instill a greater sense of congregational unity. In these synagogues, the raised pulpit is pulled all the way back into the epicenter of the sanctuary, and four seating sections face the pulpit, from each of the cardinal directions, so that the worshippers sit in relation to one another at angles of ninety degrees.
Contrast this with temples of the Baha'I faith, whose sanctuaries are completely circular, and lack anything resembling a pulpit: if a choir adds its voice to that of the congregation, it does so from behind the perimeter of the seats, in recessed alcoves, so as not to draw the attention of the worshippers, whose spiritual energies are concentrated in a mass at the centre of the room. So while the Beth Sholom Synagogue's seating arrangement may have meant the democratization of prayer to the North European Jewish emigre community of Elkins Park, it is hardly the harbinger of an umacentric devotional experience.
The legacy of Beth Sholom, Frank Lloyd Wright's synagogue, lasts until this day: no synagogue in all of North America can touch it, in terms of its radical and majestic vision. The only competitor, Beth El of Minneapolis, Minnesota, built in 1968 in the shape of a shofar, the Jewish ceremonial ram's horn, pales in comparison. Wright will be remembered throughout the world largely for his Prairie period, or his Usonian homes, but his work on the Beth Sholom Synagogue is formidable and definitely deserves mention among the list of his many achievements in the field of architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Synagogue
Picking a single structure out of a list of five hundred that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is no easy task. For other assignments, I have direct access to the building that I am supposed to study, and can view it, inside and out, from every possible angle. For this essay, I was forced to rely entirely upon grainy moire-patterned reproductions and pixelated, color-indexed thumbnails. I agree with the philosophy espoused by Steen Eiler Rasmussen in Experiencing Architecture, namely, that it is not enough to see architecture; that one must experience it. As such, I decided to study Frank Lloyd Wright's Beth Sholom Synagogue, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, since it is the only one of Wright's works that I have ever physically experienced myself. Wright designed the Beth Sholom Synagogue in 1953, during the last and most prolific decade of his illustrious seventy-two-year career, in which he literally doubled the amount of buildings he was responsible for. For the better part of ten years, he produced architecture at an astronomical rate of one building every two weeks!	He was able to keep up this frenetic pace of construction by the division of labour: Wright was personally responsible for the mental activity of design, and to subcontractors, such as Haskell Colwell in the case of Beth Sholom, he delegated the physical activity of the construction itself. Construction on the Beth Sholom began in 1954 and was completed in 1959, the year of Wright's passing. Wright had, over the course of his career, designed several edifices designated to be places of worship for Christians of various denominations. Ostensibly, Beth Sholom was not the only temple for members of the Jewish faith that Wright designed, but it is certainly the most memorable: it is one of the seventeen buildings that Wright designed to be accoladed by the American Institute of Architects as an example of Wright's contribution to American culture. Of these seventeen, Beth Sholom would have been the final jewel in Wright's crown, but for the delays in the construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, due to building code bureaucracy.

In front of the entrance to the synagogue, at a distance of seven-and-a-half metres from it, Wright constructed a laver, a water fountain. The laver harkens back to the biblical purity laws, which required Hebrew worshippers to wash themselves before entering an area that was defined as holy. Today, even Orthodox Jews do not follow this injunction, although their Semitic cousins, the Muslims, do perform "wudhu" ablutions by washing themselves with water before entering their mosques. In the context of the Conservative Beth Sholom Synagogue, the fountain's function is purely symbolic. Rabbi Mortimer J. Cohen, who commissioned the design of the synagogue on behalf of his congregation, asked for a temple that would suggest Mount Sinai, where, according to scripture, the Israelites received the word of God, and became a nation in their own right. The high hexagonal structure does, in fact, resemble a mountain rising above the landscape. At night, when the sanctuary is lit from within, the glass walls of the synagogue appear from without to be perforated by hole emanations of light, analogous to the Biblical account of the lawgiving at Mount Sinai in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.	In the daytime, rays of sunlight pierce the glass walls and penetrate the inner sanctum, as if God is extending God's fingers from above and imbuing the temple with God's own divine essence. Wright created dazzling light effects in countless of his works, and the Beth Sholom Synagogue was no exception. The ramps that lead from the entrance of the synagogue to the sanctuary are inclined, to suggest the pilgrimage made by the Hebrew leader Moses to the top of Mount Sinai in order to receive the law from God. The ramps lead to a pulpit, and behind the pulpit is a huge fourteen-and-a-half-metre-high stone rectangular mass that is supposed to represent the two stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. This backdrop is actually cavernous, and houses within it the synagogue's holy Torah's, the Five Books of Moses painstakingly transcribed by hand on scrolls of cow hide. That it evokes the Ten Commandments is not remarkable in and of itself, as this is a common theme in the synagogues of Eastern European Jews. But in the context of the building's mountainous shape, penetrating light, and inclined ramps, it is the climax of the building's narrative.

The triangular chandelier that hovers above the pulpit is an intriguing fixture. The official explanation for the chandelier, which has no precedent in Jewish architecture, is that its primary colours represent the "emanations of God." According to Kabalah, Jewish mysticism, God cannot be understood visually by human beings, only conceptualized as pure white light, the totality of all that is. Only when this totality is broken up in to shards can it be grasped by the human mind. Only when white is divided into its component colours can it be seen by the human eye. The colours of the chandelier represent the kabalistic colour designations of the attributes of God: blue for wisdom, green for understanding, yellow for beauty, red for strength. Despite enjoying a renaissance today, these esoteric interpretations were hardly popular fifty years ago with Jews of Beth Sholom's Conservative Movement, firmly rooted in the post-Enlightenment rationalist trend in Judaism. But a return to pre-modern, pre-industrial symbolism is very apropos for Wright, who made a career out of infusing architecture with a yearning for the time when man was one with nature. Though, the chandelier's true meaning may not be pre-modern at all, but post-modern. It the chandelier looks like anything at all, it most closely resembles popular abductee accounts of an Unidentified Flying Object.	Some have theorized that the pyrotechnic revelation on Mount Sinai, codified into mythological language, could be evidence of contact, not with a single higher being, but with a whole race of them. Indeed, a group known as the Raelians, with scantily-clad prosletyzing adherents all over the world, have made a religion out of this belief. The 1950s were a time of intense speculation about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life forms. It's no secret that Wright held many fiercely independent views, and it's quite possible that his chandelier, is, in fact, meant to allude to an interdimensional portal. Vincent Scully claims in Frank Lloyd Wright that the outer shape of the Beth Sholom Synagogue is conical, and that Wright sampled its conical shape from the ancient pagan temple known as the "Cone of Astarte". Though this theory cannot be discounted, in light of the sanctuary's chandelier and its stated kabalistic symbology, it's likelier that Wright, with an eternal fondness for geometric shapes, actually had a different shape in mind: the tetrahedron. The tetrahedron is the shape formed by stacking two four-sided pyramids bottom-to-bottom. The Star of David encompassed by a circle, the traditional symbol of the Jewish religion, is actually a two dimensional representation of the three-dimensional tetrahedron. This shape is also the basis of the centrepiece of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Merkava. The Kabalistic Merkava, Hebrew for "chariot," has alternately been described as a method for meditation and a vehicle for traversing spiritual realms. Both interpretations find their expression in Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Beth Sholom Synagogue.

On the synagogue's own website, the seating in the Beth Sholom sanctuary is described as being arranged in a circular manner around the pulpit. The expressed purpose of this arrangement is that it would allow worshippers on all sides to be able to see each other, and thus convey the feeling of a congregation praying in unison, as one. Perhaps the seating plan does differ somewhat the traditional Northern European model, in the sense that the two main seating sections are each offset by approximately twenty-five degrees towards the central axis, as can be seen in the building plan. But it is an immense exaggeration to claim that this arrangement is the optimum one for creating a sense of unity in prayer. The traditional architectural style of the synagogues of Southern Europe and the Middle East instill a greater sense of congregational unity. In these synagogues, the raised pulpit is pulled all the way back into the epicenter of the sanctuary, and four seating sections face the pulpit, from each of the cardinal directions, so that the worshippers sit in relation to one another at angles of ninety degrees.	Contrast this with temples of the Baha'I faith, whose sanctuaries are completely circular, and lack anything resembling a pulpit: if a choir adds its voice to that of the congregation, it does so from behind the perimeter of the seats, in recessed alcoves, so as not to draw the attention of the worshippers, whose spiritual energies are concentrated in a mass at the centre of the room. So while the Beth Sholom Synagogue's seating arrangement may have meant the democratization of prayer to the North European Jewish emigre community of Elkins Park, it is hardly the harbinger of an umacentric devotional experience. The legacy of Beth Sholom, Frank Lloyd Wright's synagogue, lasts until this day: no synagogue in all of North America can touch it, in terms of its radical and majestic vision. The only competitor, Beth El of Minneapolis, Minnesota, built in 1968 in the shape of a shofar, the Jewish ceremonial ram's horn, pales in comparison. Wright will be remembered throughout the world largely for his Prairie period, or his Usonian homes, but his work on the Beth Sholom Synagogue is formidable and definitely deserves mention among the list of his many achievements in the field of architecture.