Arch Tour Fest: Katz Family Pavilion | 2PM

Photo Credit: Lehrer Architects LA

Arch Tour Fest: Katz Family Pavilion for the Athletics and Culture | 2:00PM

Arch Tour Fest – Full List of Tours Here

This is an in-person tour. Attendees will be required to show proof of vaccination. Please read and check the agreement and safety boxes in the registration. Additional information regarding the tour and check-in process will be emailed directed to registrants 24 hours before the event. Tickets are non-transferable.

Architecture Firm: Lehrer Architects LA

CES Learning Units: 1 LU

Tickets Available Below & Passes Available Here

Over the past 50 years, the hilltop campus of Stephen Wise Temple has been chronically filled-in with buildings, hardscape and parking. Anticipating their jubilee, the community leadership sensed it could be better. The architect’s masterplan—preceding this project by 2 years– established that this site was singularly pivotal, able to transform the entire campus. The solution was to create a commons, a green that would unify the campus where everyone would cross paths, from school to synagogue and community.

This vision is reimagined as a new Pavilion and Commons Green, the new heart of the campus. They conceived it as a singular indoor/outdoor play/create/recreate/celebrate/gathering place; the big idea is that in Southern California such places must be inevitable, if not mandatory.

The vast steel and steel grate roof, approximately twice as large as the programmed interior space, was shaped to respond to these “urban”, contextual conditions shaping spaces, and viewsheds. Topography was manipulated to celebrate hilly conditions and solve seamless and joyous movement through the site.

The entire north wall of the building is made of 4 x 30 feet high/23 feet wide full height operable glass walls that open the entire façade to the new Commons Green and Plaza. The building and its landscape become one. Activities are now regularly done with doors open to the Southern California fresh, rejuvenating air.

This new Pavilion and Commons Green —mandated merely to house a full-size basketball court—is now the iconic gym/culture/community center and park/garden centerpiece of this 18-acre religious/educational hilltop campus. It melds with and transforms an existing building and landscape, providing space for bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, and all-community meetings, as well as basketball games.

Structural Engineer: Walter P. Moore
Owner: Stephen Wise Temple
Contractor: Delamo Construction
Acoustical: CSDA Design Group
Landscape Designer: Studio-MLA
Lighting Design: KGM LIGHTING

Tour Led By:

Michael B Lehrer, FAIA – Founding Partner, Lehrer Architects

Michael B. Lehrer, FAIA founded Lehrer Architects LA in his native Silverlake District of Los Angeles. The work–from the intimate to the monumental–is grounded in the idea that beauty is a rudiment of human dignity. He designs for the community with a reverence for light and space. Delight is a matter of extreme gravitas in the work. The work is to elevate every day and celebrate the community.

Learning Objectives:

+ Participants will understand how a master plan can target a site’s weakness and turn it into a strength.

+ Participants will understand how sculptural elements can frame a campus, like the roof and garden.

+ Participants will understand how glazing and (enormous) operable doors, can facilitate communal activity and passive ventilation.

+ Participants will understand how flexible space can on one hand facilitate multiple uses and on the other unify far afield spaces.