‘A cipher for crazy self-projection': why are architects so obsessed with Solomon's Temple?

The Guardian

2 days ago

No legendary building has ever inspired more conjecture about what it might have looked like than Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. It is said to have been built in c.950BC, on the mound where God created Adam, and was destroyed 400 years later by marauding Babylonians. But, beyond some inconsistent descriptions in the Bible written centuries after the temple was razed, there is no archaeological evidence that this palatial edifice ever existed.
And yet, for more than two millennia, generations of architects, archaeologists and ideologues have bickered over the building's appearance. They have debated its exact height and width, speculated on the design of its columns, and battled over the precise nature of its porch. The mythic building, also known as the First Temple, has inspired everything from a Renaissance royal palace in Spain to a recent megachurch in Brazil, to the interiors of masonic lodges around the world – all built on a fantasy.
'It really draws out the batshit crazy,' says Argentinian artist Pablo Bronstein, standing in front of his monumental new drawings of what Solomon's Temple, and its contents, might have looked like. 'It has been used as a cipher for pretty much every crazy projection of power and self-delusion for 2,500 years. I find it totally fascinating – particularly as the whole thing is entirely fabricated.'
Bronstein's work has long played with the provocative power of architectural image-making. He has poked fun at Britain's pseudo-Georgian housing and given us orgiastic depictions of hell, which he imagined as a showcase city strewn with garish monuments worthy of the most tasteless dictator. But the subject matter, location and (incidental) timing of his latest mischievous outing couldn't be more charged.
Bronstein's speculative drawings of the holiest site in Judaism are now on display in Waddesdon Manor, an inflated French chateau built in Buckinghamshire in the 1890s as the weekend party pad of the Rothschilds – an immensely wealthy Jewish banking family who were instrumental in the creation of Israel. Baron Edmond de Rothschild – the French cousin of Baron Ferdinand, who built Waddesdon – financed a number of early settlements in Palestine and founded the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association in 1924, run by his son James, who inherited the manor.
When the Balfour Declaration was written in 1917, declaring the British government's support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, it was addressed to Ferdinand's nephew, Walter Rothschild, an eccentric zoologist who liked to pose astride giant tortoises, ride a carriage drawn by zebras andwho was also a prominent Zionist leader.
A permanent exhibition at Waddesdon, in a room preceding Bronstein's show, celebrates the Rothschilds' connection with Israel. It recounts the family's funding of the construction of the Knesset building, seat of the Israeli parliament, the Supreme Court building and, most recently, the National Library, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in the shape of a swooping stone ski jump. Architectural models of these trophy buildings gleam in Perspex vitrines, like the priceless antique treasures displayed elsewhere around the house.
To this lavish display of patronage in the Holy Land, Bronstein's florid drawings add an imaginary additional commission. In a brazen act of architectural cosplay, the artist has inserted himself into the minds of two contestants for a fictitious version of the Prix de Rome, a prominent prize for students of architecture in 19th-century Paris, as they compete to recreate Solomon's Temple in their own image.
'I became fascinated by the construction of Jewish identity in the 19th century,' says Bronstein, who was born in Argentina, grew up in London, and describes himself as a 'diehard atheist Jew'. Several years in the making, his new work was commissioned alongside a wider research project about Jewish country houses, and it seems to have triggered a deep curiosity and scepticism in the artist about his own cultural heritage.
'As nationalisms develop in the 19th century, particularly in Germany, Judaism begins to develop its idea of a body of people that are somehow genetically connected to the ancient Middle East,' he says. 'They start to see Jerusalem not as an abstract idea, the way that Muslims look at Mecca, but as a reconstructible place of belonging, tied to a kind of orientalist architectural fantasy.'
Bronstein's mesmerising drawings depict what, if taken to extremes, this fantasy might have looked like. Painstakingly drawn in pen and ink, and beautifully coloured with layers of acrylic wash (with the help of two recent architecture graduate assistants), the images are magnificently grandiose projections of that exoticised 19th-century longing. They depict two rival designs, in precisely detailed elevations, cross-sections and facade studies, for reconstructing the temple. Both are wild mashups of architectural motifs, sampling from the richly embellished catalogue of Asian antiquity, medieval and gothic revival, baroque and art deco with promiscuous relish.
On one wall is a version of the temple that Bronstein describes as 'vaudeville beaux arts', its interior glowing with the gilded razzle-dazzle of a New Orleans casino. Marvel at the spiralling Solomonic columns at the entrance, sampled from Bernini's baldacchino at St Peter's in Rome, and the illusionistic domes that hover above the Ark, influenced by Alessandro Antonelli's Mole Antonelliana in Turin, which was originally conceived as a synagogue. 'It's the temple as a sort of gin palace,' says Bronstein – an architecturally virtuosic one, nonetheless.
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On the opposite wall is a more restrained version of the temple, with interior wooden panelling that recalls the kind of synagogue you might find in Golders Green, north London – not far from where Bronstein grew up in Neasden. There are also notes of Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque de Saint Geneviève in Paris, as well as dazzling blue lapis lazuli walls, representing the celestial realm in a medieval manner, along the lines of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the 'arch-reconstructor of historic architecture', a caption tells us. It's a heady cocktail, made no less so by the fruity facade, which depicts the heads of Moses, David and Solomon as blue-bearded gargoyles above the entrance, and a relief of God, flanked by sphinxes.
'There's a good amount of scholarship about what a temple would have actually looked like if it was built in the 10th century BC,' says Bronstein. 'And it's got nothing to do with monotheism.' He thinks it's much more likely that, had the temple been built at the time the Bible alleges, it is highly likely that it would have been a pantheistic riot, full of different representations of the divine – as is the case with a comparable structure that has survived in Ain Dara in Syria, built in 1300BC, 'which is just full of goblins, basically.'
If all this wasn't enough, Bronstein has also drawn the Ark of the Covenant – depicted as a gilded medieval reliquary casket, topped with a cushion, where God is said to have rested his feet – and the temple's menorah, imagined as a twirly rococo candelabrum, whose branches emerge from a chinoiserie-style grotto. Drawings from the Waddesdon archive in a following room help to set the project in context, and show that Bronstein's flamboyant fantasies aren't so far from what was being designed by the 19th-century architects from whom he took inspiration.
Alarmingly, nor are they too far off what some people are still hoping to see built in Jerusalem. The Third Temple movement continues to campaign to rebuild the original temple on Temple Mount, one of the most contested sites on the planet – known as the Haram al-Sharif in the Muslim world, site of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, two of the holiest sites in Islam. We can only hope the Third Temple fanatics don't misconstrue Bronstein's drawings as a blueprint.
He began these drawings long before war erupted in the region after Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023. Has Israel's merciless bombardment of Gaza altered his position? 'The work hasn't changed,' he says. 'But the war has changed my relationship to Judaism. It made me really question the fact that we all get instinctively bullied into the idea that we have a genetic, cosmic link to the Holy Land. It's genuinely a 19th-century construct and it's total rubbish.'
Pablo Bronstein: The Temple of Solomon and Its Contents is at Waddeston Manor, Buckinghamshire, until 2 November