Construction has been completed on the new Ari Kushner Building at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Designed by Tel Aviv-based HQ Architects and New York's HWKN Architecture, the scheme is housed in what the team calls an “elegant, playful, stone facade” to bring a “sense of unity and a contemporary, welcoming identity” to the academy’s campus.

The 27,000-square-foot cultural building houses new choreography, jazz studios, vocal and opera studios as well as a 115-seat music recital hall, equipping the campus with a central performance venue that it previously lacked. Externally, the development is defined by a “curiosity-generating” facade that extends in front of both the existing building and the new addition, constructed of unfinished Jerusalem stone blocks turned 45 degrees on their side.

“It balances the geometric order, natural materiality, and intentional imperfection all in a playful fashion,” HWKN’s Matthias Hollwich said about the facade. “It ends up making the building unique, lovable, progressive, yet traditional, altering our expectations of what a new building should look like.”

The stone motif is continued on the building’s interior, where it appears in the communal atrium space. The interior palette also features exposed concrete across the atrium, stairs, and bridges. A central staircase serves as the anchoring element in the atrium, casting what the team calls a “sculptural feel.”

The classes and multipurpose rooms each hold their own distinct character and materiality, including acoustic carpets in different colors for each floor and special acoustic stretched fabric on the walls. All acoustic and dance rooms were designed as a “box in a box” structure to maximize acoustic separation and performance, while the center’s dance hall strikes a dramatic, dark atmosphere complete with black acoustic wooden floors.

“It was important to us to design dynamic shared environments that enhance and promote the interaction and cross-fertilization between different disciplines, a combination that is critical for the academy’s student development,” said Erez Ella, Founding Partner of HQ Architects. “This sequence of spaces creates a sense of creativity happening all around you.”