IAA Unveils Plans for a Grand Headquarters

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With pride tempered at first by a reluctance to tip his hand, Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), made BAR the first publication to receive the IAA’s stunning booklet introducing the ambitious plans for its National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel.

Though still six or seven years—and $40-45 million—away from realization, the new IAA campus will rise next to the expanded Bible Lands Museum of Jerusalem and within a short walk of the Israel Museum and the Shrine of the Book, which houses the seven large Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947. Designed by world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie, the architectural signature of the campus will be a huge glass canopy supported by metal cables, shaped to resemble the drape of the open tents that provide shade over archaeological digs. The canopy will slope down toward a circular ring at its center that will permit rain to cascade into a pool in the courtyard beneath. All indoor space will be below entrance-level because the building will be constructed (as was the Bible Lands Museum) on a steep slope so that the view across the valley will remain unobstructed.

Currently housed in numerous locations around Jerusalem and elsewhere, the IAA plans to consolidate its offices at the new campus. Included will be conservation and preservation labs, a 100,000-volume archaeological library and reading room, and the archives of all excavations and surveys since 1917 (including maps, drawings, photographs, site plans and object lists). Also at the campus will be the Dead Sea Scroll Center, where the more-than-15,000 scroll fragments and objects from the Qumran excavations will be conserved and stored under optimal conditions and exhibited in study galleries.

Dorfman envisions an enlarged educational relationship between the IAA and the public. Visitors will watch conservators at work on glass, coins, pottery, stone, metal, mosaics and frescoes. They will walk above the open stacks of huge storage areas, part of what is being called “The National Center for State Treasures,” which will house 600,000 items. The center will include the largest numismatic collection in Israel, containing more than 150,000 coins, as well as ancient glass, textiles, mosaics, architectural fragments and ancient artifacts rescued from the sea.

Another element of Safdie’s design, clearly in response to the tension between the public’s eagerness to see new finds and the slowness of scholars to publish, will be a 5,000-square-foot gallery of “Archaeological News from the Holy Land.” It will feature—fresh from the ground, before publication and conservation—some of the 15,000 objects excavated each year.

Rounding out the campus will be a 200-seat auditorium for public lectures, including monthly talks in English. A roof garden will offer space for large finds, such as sarcophagi and column capitals that have often gone unseen to all but IAA employees in the corridors and out-of-the-way courtyards of the IAA’s current headquarters, the Rockefeller Museum, in east Jerusalem.

But all this new space is years down the 017road. Meanwhile, Dorfman says the IAA is lending artifacts on permanent or temporary loan within Israel and around the world. Gold coins are presently on display at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and there is a small Herodian architecture exhibit in Chicago. Three ancient mosaics will be hung at the new Safdie-designed terminal at Ben-Gurion airport, near Tel Aviv. Items from a Byzantine village are on view in a mall in Haifa, and an archaeological garden now greets visitors to the president’s house in Jerusalem.

The IAA’s exquisite booklet on the new campus does have some glaring omissions, however. Nowhere does it mention other museums in Israel—the IAA’s future neighbor, the Bible Lands Museum, which it doesn’t even identify on the site map; the Israel Museum, with its great collection of the outstanding archaeological discoveries since 1967; the IAA’s present home—the Rockefeller Museum—with immensely significant finds from the decades before 1967 (Dorfman says that the Rockefeller Museum—the east Jerusalem branch of the Israel Museum—will retain its collections and will continue to house the IAA office of the Jerusalem region); the Shrine of the Book, now undergoing its own renovation; or the Haaretz Museum complex in Tel Aviv, with galleries that display ancient glass and numismatics. With the Israel Museum but a stroll away, it is disturbing that the IAA would declare itself the repository of “State Treasures.” Moreover, it seems a trifle misleading to establish a “National Center for the Exhibition, Study and Conservation of Dead Sea Scrolls” and to speak of the 15,000 “scrolls” (all fragments) in the IAA collection in the shadow of the Shrine of the Book, where the great Isaiah scroll and the 27-foot-long Temple Scroll are housed along with the other largely intact scrolls from Qumran. And how can not a word be said of the Bible Lands Museum collection, amassed by antiquities collector Elie Borowski and given to the State of Israel, which illuminates the larger world from which the Bible emerged—something absent from all the other museums?

The IAA has a brilliant vision and a superb architectural plan with which to fulfill it. Why must it present its mission as though the great museums of Israel did not exist?

With pride tempered at first by a reluctance to tip his hand, Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), made BAR the first publication to receive the IAA’s stunning booklet introducing the ambitious plans for its National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel.