OLD WESTBURY HEBREW CONGRETATION TEMPLE, OLD WESTBURY, NY - This is the final addition to a facility whose life began nearly fifty years before as a modest single story slab on grade classroom building with multi-purpose space. As the community has grown in size and diversity in age and culture – some of its members being Holocaust survivors and some the fully assimilated Americans – the Temple is the center of numerous social, intellectual and spiritual lives. The building that we created is modeled on the temple at Capernaum and the biblical descriptions of the Temple of Solomon. The form of its interior evokes the image of a tent, its ceiling planes sloping downward to the center in the manner of a fabric shroud. Our goal throughout was to avoid the objectification of building – so much a part of other religious cultures – and instead to concentrate on the phenomenon of gathering. Light from skylights encircling the space reaffirms the Temple as a locus of people gathered. The seating, though structured in pews, is organized to encourage interaction among the community which, by virtue of its arrangement of two groups facing one another around the Bema, bears witness to its presence. The material of the walls and columns is Jerusalem stone, a cream colored limestone quarried in Israel.
