CULTURAL ALLEGORY.

Allegorical manipulation of space, light and figure give appropriate presence to a Jewish centre in the Ruhr.

On Kristallnacht in 1938, the synagogue of Duisburg was destroyed by the Nazis. Since then, the city and its Ruhr conurbation neighbours, Mulheim and Oberhausen, have had no focus for Jewish life, until Zvi Hecker's new building was completed. It is in a riverside park by Dani Karavan which replaces a redundant warehouse area, curiously not far from the site of the original synagogue. Hecker has always had sensitivity for figure, last displayed movingly in his Jewish school in Berlin where the plan is based on the life-celebrating form of the sunflower, which becomes an intricate curving lattice of children-scaled spaces. At Duisburg, the figure is bolder, and the scale bigger. Five pairs of double beams radiate from the southern (upper) edge of the park in a way variously compared by Hecker to the fingers of a hand or the leaves of an open book. The hand is the characteristic organ of our species, and its imprint can be found in the caves in which we began habitation. The book is of course the foundation of Jewish culture, as Hecker says 'In Jewish history text replaced territory, the Book a kingdom'.

The paired concrete beams order the complex which is formed by and around them. At their northern (park) ends, they are propped on big and complex columns from which they taper back into the irregular masses of the building proper. So they form a kind of abstracted curving arcade which articulates the building and looks down over the grassy park slope towards the river, grandly commanding the view back up from the bank with its almost archaic monumental arches against the sky.

The complex is reached from the west down a cobbled path from the street. An inner court is revealed under a strange portico formed by projecting the caretaker's flat over the entrance route in a hair-raising cantilever which stops just short of the neighbouring building. It is, as Layla Dawson has remarked (AR September 1996), like part of a realized Proun project by El Lissitzky. The device serves two functions, It allows the caretaker to oversee the entrance from his long canted bay widow (the building is under constant surveillance from here and elsewhere to ward against neo-Nazis). And the portico marks the symbolic moment of entering the Jewish Cultural Centre.

The court is a quiet and gentle urban place set between the entrance (south) side of the Centre and dull existing buildings. At first, its scale seems domestic and even confusing, for the only apparent entrance is a short flight of external stairs which turns out to be the entrance to the caretaker's flat. The public entrance to the place is round the corner to the left, where the glazed walls of a triple-height lobby unite the two main parts of the building, and offer a view of park and river between two of the organizing fingers of the plan.

To the right of the entrance is the synagogue and its anti-rooms, with a tapering corridor to the south that gives access to the offices. The synagogue is an irregular, broadly triangular space, but carefully modified to allow light to penetrate from the west, behind the congregation. A triple-height space, the synagogue has a gallery for orthodox proceedings where women have to be upstairs. Their level is reached either by lift from the lobby or up an outside stair from the park. Both men and women face the luminous corner from which the Ark containing the Scrolls dominates the space.

If you turn left in the lobby instead of right you enter the community hall which, like the synagogue is a triple-height space, this time set firmly between three of the massive radiating double portals. The central one spans the whole space and provides a light chute which by its taper directs attention to the stage at the south end.

Beyond the hall, a glass passage connects to the kosher (double) community kitchen which is needed for communal celebrations: bar-mitzvahs and so on. The kitchen is tucked under the caretaker's flat and there are two rabinnical flats on the third floor. Other uses: classrooms, a hobby room and all the usual apparatus needed in a public building, are ingeniously tucked over or beside the main functions and linked by an amazingly picturesque network of internal and (sometimes external) circulation routes. Not as convenient or obvious as they perhaps could be, they provide memorable series of events: unexpected views, sudden splashes of light, alternating containment and exposure (for instance the bridge which flies across the glazed lobby at first floor level).

Materials of the bridge, as everywhere else, are simple and rather austere, In-situ concrete is exposed where possible, in the portals for instance; there is steel in the bridge and its first floor connections. There are plaster and render over infill brick, wood-framed windows and external zinc over elements like the lift tower. Only in the lobby and synagogue is an honorific material used: warm Jerusalem limestone on the floor of the entrance lobby and on the Ark of the synagogue.

The simple palette is intended to allow the forms and spaces to speak for themselves. Each volume is different, and each is clearly expressed on the outside. Here the Organic meets Constructivism, and other things meet too: Ancient and Modern, building and Book.

Hecker suggests that the five great portals overlooking the park are abstract representations of a chapter in the history of Jewish life in Duisburg: the arrival in the twelfth century, the first Minyan in 1793, the first permanent one room prayer location, the first synagogue in 1875 (and points to the original site), and the new beginning symbolized by the portal which crosses the new synagogue. Will the text be readable? Not immediately, but it will surely be absorbed over time, for the Centre has the intimacy of an old family house, or a small quarter of a complex town. It will be learned physically and mentally over the generations by the community, and become part of it.