'Let there be light' is watchword in design of [YI of Brookline] synagogue

'Let there be light' is watchword in design of
synagogue

By ROBERT CAMPBELL, Globe Correspondent

Daylight in Boston is typically harsh in contrast, cool in color. Daylight in the cities around the Mediterranean Sea is very different: golden, often tinged with pink.

At the new Young Israel Synagogue on Green Street in Brookline, the largest Orthodox synagogue in New England, you can experience that difference simply by walking in. Somehow the architect, Graham Gund of Cambridge, has created Mediterranean light - Jerusalem light, he'd argue - in an extraordinary interior. The new synagogue replaces the one destroyed by fire in 1994.

The miracle occurs in the main sanctuary. The magic is in the windows. Working with a firm called Architectural Glass Art of Louisville, Ky., Gund created a milk-white glass that suffuses the interior with a seraphic glow. At the same time, the glass lets you see outdoors to the trees and sky, but it bleaches these familiar elements into the semblance of a pale Japanese silk screen.

Tiny prisms of clear glass, which are set into the white glass, project little rainbows into the sanctuary. The rainbows move across the pews and walls as the sun moves. The effect isn't theatrical, isn't showy. It's just a quietly joyous celebration of the biblical ``Let there be light.''

The 550-seat sanctuary is big, but it feels intimate. The ceiling is folded, like the cloth roof of a tent, thus gently hinting of an informal assembly in the desert. Materials and finishes all help the windows do their job of warming and modulating the light. The
carpet is the red-brown color of earthenware tile. The pews are warm-toned American maple, although the raw maple was shipped to a kibbutz in Israel for the actual
manufacture, in a desire to make as many connections as possible to Jerusalem. Skylights pour sunlight down. One skylight can be opened to allow weddings to take place directly beneath the blue sky.

If it isn't too cross-cultural to say so, Young Israel's sanctuary possesses a Shaker simplicity and craftsmanship. It evokes an appropriate grandeur and mystery without fuss or ostentation. It's something rare: a completely successful interior accomplished
with simple means and a modest budget. The temple's other spaces work well too, including a chapel, a big recreation hall, and especially a handsome entry lobby paved in Jerusalem stone, a common material in Israel. Here the stone helps, once again, to warm and soften the light that bounces off it. Gund, who made a special trip to Israel when he was chosen as the architect, visited many synagogues there. His temple
shows it.

You get a strong sense of community from the architecture of the synagogue. That sense expresses a social reality. As Orthodox Jews, the members can't drive on the Sabbath, so they tend to reside within walking distance of their synagogue. Being so close, they can easily use the building all week long. And they do, for many kinds of meetings, classes, and celebrations. The result is the kind of close-knit world of friends so often lacking in today's American life, in the more dispersed car-culture most of us
live in. And the temple doesn't have to scar the neighborhood with a big parking lot.

Seen from outdoors, Young Israel is less great. On the plus side, Gund succeeds in giving his temple a civic presence without upstaging the modest houses of the
neighborhood. He does that by breaking his large building into several linked pieces, then twisting one of them - the main sanctuary - slightly away from the street to aim it directly toward Jerusalem. Maybe the twisting, along with an arch over the main entrance, also creates, as Gund hopes it does, a memory of the informal bending of old buildings on narrow streets in historic cities - although that's a stagy concept at
best.

The problem is that Gund has modeled his main facade on someone's imaginary reconstruction of a long-vanished landmark, the so-called Second Temple in
Jerusalem. It's an arbitrary choice, and it creates an unintended metaphor. If you haven't seen a picture of the Second Temple, you're more likely to think Gund's facade is copied from a radio console of the 1940s. With its table-top cornice and speakerlike wall, it has the scale of furniture, not architecture. There's little here, out at the street, of the command and conviction of Young Israel's interior.

But that interior is what matters. Once you've passed the portal, Young Israel Synagogue is a very, very impressive success.

This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 08/02/97.
© Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.