Temple Bat Yahm Torah Center

Newport Beach, California

Architecture Firm   Lehrer Architects                                        

Cost & Scope   $6.2 Million USD; 2,044 square meters; 21,448 square meters campus 

Completed 1999

The synagogue sits within a mile of the Pacific Coast on a 21,448 square meter site in Newport Beach.  The design improvements have transformed the pre-existing facility from a virtually windowless, single building, into an ensemble of spaces that come together to form a spiritual campus of new and old buildings, new landscapes, and public spaces.  

The campus’s design employs a varied collage of 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, and color is used to emphasize the themes of the campus.

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.” In the Torah Center, light is treated as the medium that binds these realms, thereby expressing the Rabbi’s belief that Light and Spirit are synonymous.