Walking up the grand promenade of the refreshed and expanded, $100 million, 20-acre campus of the Israel Museum is exhilarating, even exalting. Approximately five years in the planning and execution, the museum’s 45th-anniversary building project is the most ambitious cultural development enterprise in Israel’s history. The slowly cadenced ascent of the long, stepped runway toward the main plaza feels like a symbolic pilgrimage in a city that is nothing if not symbolic. The trek leads to Anish Kapoor’s striking new commission, Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem, a clean, mirror-finished stainless steel hourglass that reflects and inverts sky and museum grounds, in synch with nearby works by Picasso, Henry Moore, and James Turrell. Much more adventurous, however, was the selection of New York designer James Carpenter to lead the project. According to James S. Snyder, the museum’s debonair, indefatigable director and canny mastermind of its destiny since 1996, Carpenter, who is known for his imaginative use of light and glass and his sensitive collaborations, had never built anything entirely his own. …see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
