The Palestinian MuseumHeneghan Peng Architects A museum of Palestinian history, culture, and identity, the largest in the West Bank, is under construction following the cornerstone laying in April. The Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects, who also designed the Grand Egyptian Museum, were chosen in an international competition. They drew inspiration from the West Bank’s landscape and are embedding the museum in a series of cascading fieldstone terraces. Clad in local limestone, a traditional building material, the structure consists of sleek, wedge-shaped sections. The Palestinian Museum is sited on a nearly 10-acre hilltop plot donated by the adjacent Birzeit University, near Ramallah,
Israel’s High Court of Justice has allowed construction to proceed on Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance, designed by Frank Gehry and backed by the Los Angeles–based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
On June 8, the Daniel Libeskind-designed Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco, opened its doors after two years of construction. While the building failed to impress a critic for The New York Times, it mostly has garnered favorable reviews.
Construction of Santiago Calatrava’s elegant, lyre-shaped suspension bridge at the entrance to Jerusalem is due to be finished at the end of May, despite a history of opposition from residents, environmental groups, and others—and an apparent lack of purpose in the short term.
The Azrieli Center’s sleek silver-and-blue towers, designed by Eli Atia and Yaski Sivan Architects and completed between 1999 and 2006, symbolize modern Tel Aviv, the commercial and cultural hub of Israel. But with the proliferation of these and other skyscrapers has come a new appreciation for the city’s historic buildings.