All in the Family

In 1992, a two-day symposium on “the architecture of the public building” was held in Jerusalem, the timing and location which served to celebrate the opening of the Supreme Court of Israel. The building was designed by Ram Karmi and Ada Karmi-Melamede—brother and sister, and son and daughter of Dov Karmi, considered Israel's most important modern architect—after they beat Richard Meier, I. M. Pei, Moshe Safdie, and other big names in a competition held in 1986. Even before New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger called it, in 1995, “Israel's finest public building,” the building was getting a fair amount of international attention. The two-day symposium, the first of a few biennial Jerusalem Seminars in Architecture, was held in November 1992. It found Charles Correa, Herman Hertzberger, Rafael Moneo, Richard Rogers, and other architects presenting alongside Ram and Ada, celebrating the siblings' singular accomplishment but also using the building—the only one they would create together—as a means to explore how public buildings could impact societies.

The Supreme Court of Israel occupies the heart of Ada – My Mother the Architect. Literally. Ada's explanation of the building to her daughter, director Yael Melamede, and their visit to the building itself, happens in “Heart,” the third of the film's five chapters. This chapter follows “Roots” and “The Route” and precedes “Light” and “Time”—all terms that are both architectural and metaphorical, applicable to stories of buildings but also to the people behind them and the people in their lives. For Ada, life started in Tel Aviv, took her to London and New York City, but then brought her back to Israel, where she has devoted herself to her architectural practice for four decades, estranged from the family she helped create. It is an arc reminiscent of other architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who both put architecture above family, or Louis I. Kahn, whose dramatic family ties were revealed on the big screen by one of his children. It's hard not to immediately have Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect: A Son's Journey in mind in the first frames of Ada, but those thoughts fall quickly as Ada tells her story—reluctantly and tersely, but ultimately fully—and as images of Ada's buildings make us wonder: why she has been overlooked for so long?

One answer is sexism—the most obvious and most appropriate answer to nearly any question about women in architecture. One reason Ada returned to Israel from the United States was being denied tenure at Columbia University, where she had been teaching for more than a dozen years. While Kenneth Frampton, speaking with Yael in his Columbia office, does not explicitly reveal or seem to know why she was passed over, the subtext is clear. Frank Gehry, who has nothing but good things to say about Ada and her buildings, says he “respected her” but admits it was “way harder” for women practitioners back then, in the 1970s, than now—when it is still difficult. There are even hints of male advantage in the family, like when Ada was chastised for having straight A's but Ram was praised for a couple bright spots among a predominantly poor report card. You should learn from Ram, their father told Ada, “What you love, you should invest in. All the rest is unimportant.” Ada saw Ram take after their father, but initially she thought architecture was just for men. Nevertheless, she pursued it, and she took to it: like her brother and father before her, she received the Israel Prize, the state's highest cultural honor, in 2007.

By the time viewers see inside the Supreme Court of Israel—after learning about Ada's roots and her route into architecture and back to Israel—they have learned a considerable amount about how Ada thinks about architecture. Most of Yael's questions are about family, life events, feelings, and other things outside of architecture, but clearly Ada would rather speak about buildings. There is an impatience and unsettledness in Ada's replies to personal questions, but the opposite comes across when she speaks about design—about the stone “wall of kisses” at the courthouse, the ways to direct the harsh sunlight in Israel, how windows frame views but curtain walls show too much and are therefore “boring.” Still, there are parts that stand out because they merge architecture and family. The polished stone floor of the Supreme Court, for example, is unlike anything Ada or her brother would have normally done; it was a result of their mother convincing them shiny and clean-looking would be better than their usual matte finishes. “Wow, it look like water,” Ada and Ram later said to each other, fully convinced of the end result, “like people are walking on water.”

One reason Ada is more comfortable discussing architecture than family is circumstantial: the fact she left Yael and her two brothers with their father to pursue the Supreme Court project, a commission that came with restrictions on travel for the near-decade it took to design and build. Another reason evident in the film is drawing. When Ada speaks about architecture, her soft pencil is always in hand, tip to trace paper, the lines matching her words. Drawing grounds Ada, much like the way the buildings she designs are rooted in the soil, not just built atop it. But when Ada speaks about family and other things outside of architecture, she seems untethered. She bounces between English and Hebrew to explain herself, but her frustration is palpable; she would rather be in the office working—still, at the age of 88.

Ada and Yael visit a few other buildings designed by Ada over the course of the film, all of them public buildings and beautifully designed: the Neot Hovav Museum and City Council, in various stages of construction; the Ramat Hanadiv Visitors Pavilion, as much a landform as a building; and the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, a building literally sitting upon antiquities. Still, the Supreme Court of Israel rises above the rest, certainly because of its design—it is described as “one of the finest buildings of the second half of the 20th century in this region” in the World Architecture: A Critical Mosaic series, edited by Kenneth Frampton—but also because it is a literally political building and therefore directly confronts Israel's shifting politics. Ram and Adi strove to give the building a sense of “political order and permanence,” but Israel today is not the same as it was in 1992; this much is clear to anyone who pays attention to world news, though it is also explicit in the film. The government's plans to weaken the Supreme Court, which played out during the tail end of making of the film, raise the specter that the hoped-for permanence would be short-lived and the democratic ideals embodied by the design would be forgotten. Ada – My Mother the Architect spurs viewers to ponder such heavy themes, while at the same time enjoying the rapport of a mother and daughter who have weathered their own trying times.