Architecture Here and There

The day I wrote last week's column I was urged to write about the dangers facing the old Shaare Zedek temple on Broad Street. I slid into the column on the Providence archives a paragraph noting concerns about the synagogue's fate, and spent much of the next week researching this Thursday's column. I hope it will have some impact.

Religion's interest in architecture should be intense because, in the realm of the unknowable, symobolism reaches its apogee of importance. Traditional churches do not reach upward for nothing. Judaism, which has a more complicated relationship with the idea of a Supreme Being, offers architects a greater challenge. Historically, the challenge has been met often through designs that mix local culture with ecclesiastical symbolism.

The temple on Broad Street, once the second home of Temple Beth-El, makes one kind of statement. Its third home on Orchard Avenue, on the East Side, makes another kind of statement. Although the primary focus of Thursday's column is a history of and prospects for the Broad Street temple, the fate of Providence's Jewish community might be affected by the style of the synagogue on Orchard, designed in the early 1950s by Percival Goodman, an architect who went on to become a well-known creator of modernist synagogues.

So what of it? Well, read Thursday's column.

 Tags  Architecture Congregation Shaare Zedek David Brussat Judaism Providence RI Religion Temple Beth-El

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Justus said:

Toucohdwn! That's a really cool way of putting it!

Link | December 31, 2011 3:53 AM
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