Research Highlights
Honors & Awards
What We Are Doing About:
Benefiting Humanity
History
Visiting the Institute
.JPG)
The Daniel Wolf Building
The Daniel Wolf Building
Architect: Erich Mendelsohn
The Daniel Wolf Building, designed by the architect Erich Mendelsohn in 1939, was for many years neglected and divided up into numerous partitions, until in 1998 a decision was taken for its conservation. Architect Dagan Mochly had all the partitions removed to expose the building’s reverse-parabola inner space. This is one of the most interesting structures built by Mendelsohn in Israel – or anywhere else – and it is unique in every respect as a research/industrial building. Its tiled, pointed-arch roof is one of a kind at the Weizmann Institute and among Mendelsohn’s works. It resembles the barns and factories that were widespread in Europe in the early twentieth century. One such is Peter Behrens’s 1910 AEG turbine factory, famous for its simple shape and barrelvaulted roof, which has become an icon and a harbinger of Modernism in its early German version, the Jugendstil (“youth style”).
In designing the Wolf Building 30 years after Behrens’s turbine factory, Mendelsohn gave a new meaning, in the spirit of the International Style, to the vaults familiar to him from Germany. As in the Weizmann House, whose round windows were nautically inspired, Mendelsohn turned this entire building into a large upside-down ship; its hull serves as the roof while its portholes appear on the façade.
The uppermost windows of the building are not part of the ship motif; they have a practical purpose: to release hot air accumulating in the upper part of the vaulted ceiling. An air-conditioning conduit was added there in the 1998 renovations to improve ventilation. Additional square windows in precast concrete frames are set directly between the prominent arches that build up and support the vault. While the central space, with a high vaulted ceiling, is intended for scientific installations, additional low-ceilinged areas on the sides, whose straight roof protrudes from the walls of the ship, provide office space.
The central space today contains advanced magnetic resonance imaging machinery; its installation required that the amount of iron in the vicinity be significantly reduced so as not to interfere with the functioning of the magnetic equipment. For this reason, the floor was cast anew with stainless steel rather than iron rods, and the original iron doors replaced with aluminum ones.
