Ada Karmi-Melamede

Ada Karmi-Melamede was born in Tel Aviv on December 24, 1936, into an architectural family.[1] Her father was the architect Dov Karmi, and her older brother was Ram Karmi; both later received the Israel Prize in Architecture.[1] Her mother, Haya Maklev, had a strong aesthetic sense and critical eye despite having no formal architectural education.[3] As a child, Karmi-Melamede enjoyed drawing and designing decorations. She recalled growing up in a cultured home with many books, where work was treated as a central value.[3]

After serving in the Nahal at Kibbutz HaOn, she studied at the artists' village of Ein Hod while weighing a career in art or architecture.[3] On Ram's advice, she traveled to London in 1956 to study at the Architectural Association. She later studied at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa and received her bachelor's degree in architecture in 1963.[1][3]

Early in her career, Karmi-Melamede worked with Ram in Dov Karmi Associates; in 1964 the siblings opened their own firm.[1][3] The broader Karmi practice produced the Hadar Dafna offices (1964–1968) and the Lady Davies Amal Technical School (1970–1974), both in Tel Aviv. The buildings display the influence of Brutalism associated with Ram Karmi's studies in London.[4]

In 1967 Karmi-Melamede traveled with her husband, Amos Melamede, first to Paris and then to New York, where the family lived for many years.[3] She worked successively in the offices of architects Romaldo Giurgola and Richard Meier and opened her own practice, focusing chiefly on interior design and urban planning.[3] Giurgola invited her to teach at Columbia University, where she taught from 1969 to 1982; she later taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.[1][3] She also received National Endowment for the Arts support for studies of Second Avenue in New York, development in Long Island City, and architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate.[1]

By the mid-1980s, Karmi-Melamede had resumed work in Israel. During a 1983 visit, she and Ram were invited to compete for the Supreme Court commission, and the siblings won the architectural competition in 1986.[5][2] Their commission included the building's exterior and interior, custom furniture, and landscaping.[1][6] In 1992 she established her own architecture office in Israel.[6]

The Israel Supreme Court Building in Jerusalem, designed by Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi, was inaugurated in 1992 and stands on a hilltop above the Knesset.[5][7] The Jewish Virtual Library calls it “the finest achievement in contemporary Israeli architecture.”[7] It houses both the Supreme Court and the High Court of Justice, which hears petitions against government bodies, and its facilities include five courtrooms, chambers, and a library.[7]

The building is constructed of local limestone and is characterized as postmodern, with historical references intended to reflect continuity in Jewish legal history and tradition.[7] Its walls are pierced by rectangular and arched openings, and water features recall historical precedents including the Alhambra in Granada and Schinkel's Charlottenhof in Potsdam.[4] The courtroom entrances use monumental limestone blocks in reference to gateways to the Royal Stoa; the courtrooms themselves evoke Roman basilicas with columns and vaulted ceilings, and a narrow water channel bisects the inner courtyard.[7] Architectural elements associated with Herodian, Crusader, Greek, and British buildings in Jerusalem's Old City are also woven into the design.[8]

The design process involved creative disagreements between the siblings. Karmi-Melamede later recalled that working on the building was the first time she understood that architecture “does not have to be harmonious,” and that differences of opinion could create interest in a building.[2] Ram drew on biblical sources for inspiration, including a verse from Psalms contrasting truth growing from the earth with justice looking down from heaven; the interplay of straight and curved lines in the building has been connected to this imagery of justice as a circle and truth as a straight line.[2] Karmi-Melamede related the design to legal precedent, describing architecture as working between what came before and the desire to make something new.[2]

Karmi-Melamede said the design's relationships between freedom and order, stone and plaster, and light and shadow continued to inform her later work.[6] After the Supreme Court project, the siblings pursued separate professional paths.[2]

Following the Supreme Court, Karmi-Melamede built a substantial body of work in Israeli public and academic architecture. Her projects include a master plan and academic buildings for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Open University campus in Ra'anana, the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, an expansion at Ein Harod, the Copaxone building at Teva's Ramat Hovav plant, Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem, buildings at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, the Ramat Hanadiv Visitors Center, and private residences in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.[1][6] The Jewish Women's Archive reports that the Ramat Hanadiv center was the first Israeli building to receive an “Excellent” green-building designation from the Israeli Standards Institute and the first to obtain approval under the American LEED rating system.[1]

For Beit Avi Chai, commissioned in 2000, Karmi-Melamede combined public uses — a lobby, performance hall, library, and event courtyard — with classrooms, meeting rooms, and the foundation's offices, using pink-toned local stone, glass screens, and steel frames.[9] She had planned a planted strip and benches between the pavement and the building wall, but the municipality appropriated the strip for a public-transport lane.[9]

A later project, the Neot Hovav Council Building and Visitors Center, designed with responsible architect Matan Lipman, comprises two buildings united by a large curved concrete wall that follows the site's topography.[10] The wall connects the buildings, incorporates stairs to the roof, and functions as a public route; a shared approach passes between the two structures, with their entrances facing each other and an observation terrace at the end.[10] The complex stands on a high ridge overlooking Route 40, and Karmi-Melamede said the strong topography prompted her to create a wall that would convey belonging to the site.[10] Light-colored stone was selected to blend with the Negev setting.[10] Construction began in February 2014 and lasted far longer than anticipated — her office worked on it for ten years, through changes in both the council head and contractors.[10]

Recurring characteristics of Karmi-Melamede's work include organic forms, the treatment of natural light as integral to a building rather than incidental, and the use of local materials.[10] She has described a building's conceptual “glue” as something beyond its functional program — an expression of what the building is meant to do for the people inside it.[10] She also emphasizes circulation, arguing that the route through a building, as its most shared space, is often given less thought than the functional rooms it connects.[10] Karmi-Melamede described her philosophy of architecture to the Jerusalem Post as “storytelling in built form,” adding that “the more profound the story, the greater the likelihood to touch people.”[11]

Karmi-Melamede has combined architectural practice with an extensive teaching career. She taught at Columbia University from 1969 to 1982 and later held teaching appointments at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.[1] She described teaching as a way of broadening her perspective, saying that students made architecture seem to her “like a rich text with many interpretations.”[6]

Publications attributed to her include Single Family House, coauthored with Hanan Pomagrin (2002); Life Sciences Buildings, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, coauthored with David Robins (2003), a 132-page illustrated volume published by Birkhäuser Publishers for Architecture;[12][1] Ma(r)king Ground: Three Projects (2013);[1] and the Hebrew-language autobiography En route (Sihot al ha-derekh, 2012), produced from weekly conversations with Sharon Harari held in Karmi-Melamede's Tel Aviv office between 2009 and 2011.[13] The book's introduction describes their discussions as touching on “matters of material and spirit, what can be realized and measured, and what is difficult to explain in words.”[13] Her later books include Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate, 1917–1948, coauthored with Dan Price, and My Father, Dov Karmi.[1]

Karmi-Melamede received the Israel Prize in Architecture in 2007, becoming only the second woman to be awarded that distinction.[1] Her family holds a distinctive place in the history of the prize: her father, Dov Karmi, received it in 1957, and her brother, Ram Karmi, received it in 2002.[1] Other recognition included the Rechter Prize for work at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya in 2005 and the Magshim Israel Award for the Ramat Hanadiv Visitors Center in 2010.[1]

The Israel Prize judges emphasized the public value of Karmi-Melamede's architecture and her careful attention to creating architectural relationships between private and public space.[2] The Jewish Women's Archive characterizes her approach as combining universal modern principles with local and historical ones.[1] Profiles published in 2023 and 2024 continued to present her as active in architectural practice and engaged with recent projects.[2][10]

Some of Karmi-Melamede's work in highly sensitive historic settings has generated public controversy. The Jewish Women's Archive identifies Beit Strauss and Beit Haliba at the Western Wall Plaza as projects that drew archaeological, political, and architectural objections because of the religious and historical sensitivity of their location.[1]