The Kennedy Center Israeli Lounge Competition

The Kennedy Center Israeli Lounge Competition

Project location: Washington, DC
Client: The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Design/ Construction: shortlisted competition entry
Project Cost: $1 million

NPA was a semi-finalist on the competition for the redesign of the Israeli Lounge at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

The conceptual design of the Israeli Lounge at the Kennedy Center is centered on this simple idea of planting a tree, a ritual that has been a part of a sustained afforestation effort in Israel, an experiment that has relevance far beyond its national boundaries in the environmental rehabilitation of the planet.

The formal strategy for NPA’s design of the Israeli Lounge is predicated on:

- Abstraction, Minimalism, Materiality, inspired by the historic built environment of the old city of Jerusalem and the form of Israel’s native olive and cypress trees that have a timeless gravity about them.

- Music, Performance, Celebration, in deference to the Kennedy Center and the Concert Hall that the Israeli Lounge is a part of, that is about the lightness of being.

The design approach was to create a space architecturally inspired by certain ideas that are central to Israel and Jewish culture, expressed through its relationship with trees from Biblical times to the present. Overlaid on this conceptual framework are the materiality of the age worn stone streets and facades of Jerusalem and the knarled branches of the olive tree on the one hand; and the celebratory gilt of the Kennedy Center’s performance space on the other.

The volume of the Israeli lounge space is clad in Jerusalem stone, in bush hammered and honed finishes, proud of the existing wall to provide an additional thickness and depth, creating an architectural space, a shell, that is both rough hewn and smooth. Within this shell, the central formal intervention is a canopy, an abstract reference to the forests of Israel, that mediates the experience of the high, orthogonal volume.

The canopy is a triangulated form derived from the intertwined equilateral triangles of the Star of David, abstracted to form the trunks and branches of the metaphorical tree. The ceiling and the canopy are in gold leaf, referring to the ornate concert halls and performances spaces of the Kennedy Center, adding lightness and reflection in contrast to the gravity of the stone walls.