Page 67 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

style. He too felt that a structure that was built in Jerusalem upon a religious Christian initiative requires leaning on the past. The bell tower competed with the sounds of the muezzin and with the other towers along the Jerusalem skyline. Across the YMCA Building, Swiss architects Emil Vogt and interior architect G.A. Hufschmid, built the King David Hotel and incorporated rosettes in its façades, inspired by the motif found in the nearby sarcophagi, attributed to King Herod period. The lobby was built as an homage to the period of King David and King Solomon with Assyrian and Phoenician inspiration added in.
The National Institutions Building is not bereft of historical memories, as we could see, but the general spirit that guided its design was clearly modern and emphasizes simplicity, modesty, restraint in the inclusion of decorative elements and rational and functional planning.
The importance of the central building to the "emerging state" is in stationing a modern, high quality alternative to a monumental building16 of public importance, which is combined stylistically with a residential neighborhood, where most of the buildings were built after the competition, in the International Style, with high quality, by the best architects who operated in Jerusalem.
16 When generally speaking about monumentality, we first think about a building with large dimensions. Yet the truth of the matter is that the sense of size is created in relation to the environment. [...] there is also great importance to content and the expression of content in the structure" as well as "there is danger in an uncontrolled leaning on the past. One cannot achieve monumentality in Jerusalem with size or use of faded or meaningless patterns. It is important not to damage the rhythm, to try to create a hierarchy with interactions between structures in complexes of buildings, to take the topography of Jerusalem into account. To build correct proportions and provide absolutely modern shapes to monuments, while taking into account the unique properties of the city: Material, color, size, rhythm and "genius loci" (spirit of the place). Michael Levin. Monumental Modern Architecture: Between Jerusalem and the capitals of the world. In Ora Ahimeir and Michal Levin (editors), Monumental Architecture in Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Carta and the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1984, pp. 48-81.
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