Temple Bat Yahm, Newport Beach 1999

The synagogue sits within a mile of the Pacific Coast on a 5.3 acre site in Newport Beach. The design improvements have transformed the prior facility from a virtually windowless, single building, into an ensemble of spaces that form a spiritual campus. The campus of new and old buildings, new landscapes and public spaces comprise the new Torah Center.
The design reflects the Rabbi's words and mandate to create buildings and landscapes that are grounded in this world, the horizontal realm, "where God's immanence is felt", and that engage the heavens, the vertical realm, where "God's transcendence is embodied."

Light is the medium that binds these realms, expressing the Rabbi's belief that Light and Spirit are synonymous.

The design employs emblematic and iconic places, processions, forms, and spaces to house this spiritual community. Many processional axes are explicitly defined places of architecture and landscape. The terrain is crossed by several patterns and paths. Color is used to emphasize the themes of the campus.

Sustainability issues featured in this project include: daylighting and its control, natural ventilation, highly efficient mechanical ventilation, watershed management and permeable surfaces, native planting, and maximizing outdoor circulation.

Parking, particularly in places like Orange County, often drives the site design. The Parking Park, for parking and play, provides a lawn with tandem parking stalls to allow that area to be used as a lawn and park the majority of the year, and as a parking lot when needed. This green parking solution virtually doubles the perceived size of the campus, setting the buildings in the middle of the park landscape, as opposed to at the edge of a large asphalt lot.

The Center is a spiritual campus of buildings and landscapes, bathed in light, located in the temperate coastal climate of Newport Beach. Its mission is summed up in the image of Jacob's ladder, embodied in the diaphanous pavilion/baldachino floating in the Chapel. The Center is rooted in the ground, in the daily activity of simply being an active, engaged community. The work of the architecture-buildings and landscapes--is to create a place for the community to dream of the divine, and become divine in the dreaming. Sustainability and beauty, then, become the rudiments of the spiritual, aesthetic life.