Scholastic sunflower - architect Zvi Hecker designs Jewish school in Berlin, Germany

Architectural Review, The, June, 1996

In the first Jewish school built in Berlin since the Nazi times, Zvi Hecker has used his obsession with geometry to generate a network of memorable particular places to act as a humane backdrop to education.

The borders of Wilmersdorf and Grunewald offer that calm, leafy background of loose-fit into which villas, highways, a bombastic Olympic Stadium or a metal-sheathed congress hall can be dropped without disturbance: only just an identifiable context, if you exclude the trees. The site of Hecker's last major building, the Spiral in Ramat Gan, on the edge of Tel Aviv (AR October 1990) might be similarly described as an absorptive condition in which to sit a powerful gyrating body.

Both the earlier building and the new school have a gyratory system as an a priori. The Israeli building is jagged, wild, deliberately attracting a surface of bricolage and punctuated by sharp metal slashes. The German building rests the gyrations on the ground and articulates the flanks with a controlled system: all straight walls are white, all curved walls are grey, all 'snakes' are metal, all evacuated spaces can be walked on or planted in. The metal slashes are here too, but as a controlled reference to the system of organisation, accompanied by other frame elements. The openings in the building are calm, firm and consistent.

Yet the new building is in every way the more extraordinary of the two. It is full of incident and exploitation of a local occurrence, full of nooks and crannies, full of subtle variations of shape and size: yet it is highly controlled. The 'Sunflower' which is the generating idea is always traceable but not overbearing.

The clue lies in Hecker's process of working. He makes a continual series of drawings: endlessly, right up to the last minute of detail construction. He 'sits' as much as possible on the site. He takes fully-worked and dimensioned drawings and still scribbles away over them, modifying - nay - honing them: rarely satisfied, yet, in this building, too intelligent to proliferate elements but too ambitious to standardise spaces. Such a procedure (which may derive from the spiritual mannerism of Israelis to endlessly discuss and negotiate) was bound to be difficult in a culture that thrives upon prearranged procedures. The role of Inken Bailer (who also guided ourselves and Herman Hertzberger so deftly through the IBA minefields: AR April 1987) was critical. She somehow devised a procedural method in which Zvi could track over the layout, caress the apertures and hone the surfaces while the builders and bureaucrats could feel assured that the building would be on time and on budget.

Yet Hacker himself was clearly affected by both process and culture. He continues now to work in Berlin and more and more assertively points to the influences from Europe upon his work. He was already a second year student at Cracow when his family emigrated to Israel. Moreover, he became the protege and eventual partner of Alfred Neumann who had himself worked for Behrens and Perret. The process of defining the trajectory and rationalising the elements - as well as continuously having to walk members of your peer group (whether Gehry, Hejduk or Libeskind) around your building site puts on a special pressure. Almost like being at architecture school, with a series of ongoing crits. A far cry from the Israeli scene where jibes of 'eccentric' and 'show-off' serve as the critical base.

A conscious evaluation of light and the role of the window emerges - less as ventilator more as picture-plane. Of the balcony as exotic and precious transition from the winter chamber into the spring breezes. Of shelter as necessity rather than form. Essentially Northern issues. And in parallel, an inevitable response to the construction process in a country where labour is expensive and material is cheap, time is money and dimensions are precise. Hacker becomes procedurally Northern (if his building is to happen) but retains his character as long as he can hone on. Thus the jagged elements become far more deliberate and sharp-edged than at Ramat Gan. The interior spaces far more celebratory.

Yet in the process of walking around the building, the Mediterranean experience is remembered. The left-hand side (seen from the street) is a knife cut through the sunflower system. Exposing a series of re-entrants and crevices, pieces jutting viciously and delving insidiously. As you move down, this very rich offering suggests the idea of density and a sure expectancy of much going on inside. Turning round into the rear playground the sheer range of the parts and the 'knitted' quality of the whole add to this. Of course, it is a town. What else could it be? And the total system reinforces the analogy. The radiating sweeps define 'quartiers' and their streets, the 'snakes', are a counter-movement, somewhat like a stream, the edges of the town have different physiognomies dependent upon circumstance: one tight, one heroic, one secret and one casually falling away.