Words Marisa Bartolucci

Out of a former utility closet, Bonnie Roche has conjured a theater of wonder.

Bonnie Roche has renovated theaters at Lincoln Center, designed homes for the likes of Paloma Picasso and John Loring, and helped conceive such major civic projects as San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center, yet she counts among her proudest work her transformation of a storage room at New York’s Center for Jewish History into the Valentin M. Blavatnik Orientation Theater. The Center is the largest archive of Diaspora Jewry in the world, with a rarefied collection totaling more than a million documents, books, photographs, and ephemera. The Center’s director, a friend of the New York City-based architect, called on her to create a simple orientation space, equipped with state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment, where visitors could be introduced to the riches of the archive.

Roche, however, thought visitors deserved something more extraordinary. An architect with a touch of the mystic, she subscribes to the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s notion of “radical amazement”: to truly understand something, you must first be surprised by it. And so on a limited budget, she conceived a tiny, modernist “chamber of thought” that through clever lighting and design dematerializes, immersing visitors in the archival material that is projected on a large plasma screen hung on a side wall. As Roche puts it, “The room becomes a text, and, in true Talmudic tradition, a shared text. Audience becomes scholar.” The room swells with Jewish metaphors: the reflective ceiling recalls the luminescent cloud that covered the Mishkan, the holy sanctuary of the Israelites; the gentle fading and brightening of the room evokes the idea of “rolling light away from darkness, and darkness away from light,” the blessing for creation spoken during the Shabbat evening service. Visitors leave the theater not only knowledgeable about the treasures within, but imbued with a sense of cultural wonder.

With clever lighting and design, the architect Bonnie Roche made the Valentin M. Blavatnik Orientation Theater at the Center for Jewish History in New York City a tiny, modernist “chamber of thought.” Visitors sit on benches to listen to speakers at the lectern at the back corner and view archival images and documentaries projected on the plasma screen on the black-painted wall.

The original 300–square-foot storage room. Photos: Bonnie Roche

The first thing visitors see when they approach the theater is an enlargement of a fantastical engraving comparing the human body to a house. It’s taken from Tobias ben Moses Cohn’s 1707 manuscript, Ma’aseh Tobiyyah, in the archive of the CJH’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The Duratran transparency is suspended in a LED-illumined recess in the back wall. Its glowing mysterious image draws visitors inside. Photo: Lynton Gardiner

The glass doors replicate the archival image, as do all the other reflective surfaces in the austere room, immersing visitors in its archival DNA. When closed, the glass doors enable even passersby to engage with the images within.

The archival image is reflected on the cove-lit, free-floating ceiling, which is covered in an opaque vinyl, invoking a sense of spatial limitlessness.

The room’s varying hues of light animate the space, while the changing cast of light and shadow unites audience and architecture. The juxtaposition of the room’s rigorous geometries with the enigmatically lit archival enlargement merges ancient and modern realms.

Photos All photos by Ardon Bar Hama except where noted.