Architect turned film-maker Yael Melamede presents us with this insightful, though perhaps faintly indulgent, portrait of her mother, Israeli architect Ada Karmi-Melamede. With her brother Ram Karmi, Karmi-Melamede designed the supreme court of Israel building in Jerusalem in the early 90s, and then had a brilliant solo practice, creating Ben Gurion Airport.
Karmi-Melamede’s ethos is to establish buildings that take root in their allotted space, an “architecture of the ground and of the sky” – rather than replicate the endless glass towers of first-world cities which could be put down anywhere. Another witty maxim of hers is: “The cheapest building material is the light.” She aimed to do away with her brother’s fashionable brutalism and concrete, a conflict which appears to have resulted in a fascinating dialogue (or possibly conflict) within the supreme court building itself.
Karmi-Melamede is an articulate, quietly energetic figure, answering questions from her daughter which touch (glancingly) upon a painful family split: her family were settled in New York in the 80s where she taught at Columbia University, but she left when she was hurtfully not granted academic tenure by the male-dominated establishment and returned to Israel, leaving her husband and children behind in the United States.
This family split corresponds to a split within Israel itself: Karmi-Melamede is clearly downcast by the Netanyahu government’s move three years ago to lessen the power of the supreme court; she is shown adjacent to a demonstration, though not exactly joining in. New York Times architecture correspondent Paul Goldberger, who raved about her supreme court building in 1992, now says that his words today make him sad, because they “evoke a time when one anticipated international leadership from Israel”. He says that this must surely occur to anyone associated with the symbolic building, but Melamede does not in fact put this point to Karmi-Melamede. A lucid and informative study nonetheless.
• Ada: My Mother the Architect is in UK cinemas from 1 May.
