Joyful Forum for Jewish Tradition : Building: Construction of the $55-million Skirball Center complex in the Sepulveda Pass is scheduled to be completed late in 1992.

Motorists on the San Diego Freeway may think that a 15-acre construction site in Sepulveda Pass is just one more plot of parched earth. But to Uri Herscher, executive president of Hebrew Union College, the dusty site is akin to the Promised Land. It’s the future home of the college’s Skirball Cultural Center, a $55-million complex designed to celebrate Jewish-American experience.

Foundations are now being laid for the 130,000-square-foot project, just west of the freeway at Mulholland Drive. When the center opens to the public--late in 1992, if all goes according to schedule--it will contain a community center, museum, amphitheater and gardens, all intended to provide a joyful forum for Jewish education.

“I thought it was important for American Jewry, which is largely ignorant of its own history and its own traditions, to learn about them in the context of celebration,” said Herscher, who teaches American Jewish history at Hebrew Union College. “Because of the tragedies in Jewish history, there has been a tendency to emphasize the mournful. But in 4,000 years of history we have had our share of the joyful and the creative, not just the destructive--especially in the United States, where we have every reason to celebrate.”

Teaching Jews about themselves in a land of freedom and opportunity is not the only agenda for the Skirball Cultural Center, however. The new Westside institution will welcome people of all cultures, embrace all immigrant experience and address social issues of concern to the entire community, such as poverty and homelessness, Herscher said. “Jewish experience is just one strand of the fabric of American life” and it does not exist in a vacuum, he said.

Neither will the Skirball Cultural Center. Although firmly rooted in Los Angeles’ Jewish community, the center will have a national outlook. The Skirball Foundation has given the center a total of $15 million to date, but such non-Jewish organizations as the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Ahmanson Foundation and the Roy Disney Family Foundation also have made substantial contributions. Memberships will be solicited across the country, while the center’s publications, exhibitions and other programs will be distributed nationwide.

The center’s ambitious program presented architect Moshe Safdie with a set of functions to be fulfilled when he took on the project in 1984. He was also faced with “a very fragile, difficult site,” said Safdie, who is based in Cambridge, Mass., but frequently travels to Los Angeles to guide the project.

At first the challenges of creating a workable design for an irregular strip of land between potentially unstable hills seemed overwhelming, Safdie said. But now that the design is done, he prides himself on turning problems into opportunities. A hill that was subject to mudslides, for example, will be a backdrop for an amphitheater and the site of a biblical garden--but only after much of the hill was removed, shored up and restored. A single big building wouldn’t work on the site, so Safdie arrived at a plan that he calls “a clustering of pavilions.”

“It’s a very delicate fit,” he said, pointing out how buildings, plazas and parking lots follow contours of the landscape.

Plans for the Skirball Cultural Center are “the culmination of a lot of thoughts about museums,” said Safdie, a Haifa-born architect who has been designing museums for 10 years. He made his mark with Habitat, a utopian housing project designed for the Montreal’s Expo in 1967, and he recently won critical acclaim for the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

His design for a college campus in Jerusalem--particularly “the idea of a courtyard as the living room of the campus”--inspired the Skirball complex. The indoor/outdoor approach also follows a Southern California “tradition of haciendas and offers an escape from the chaos of the world,” said Safdie who portrays the Skirball plan as “an essay in calmness and serenity and harmony with nature.”

Like the ancient Greeks who “treated nature with great respect” while building such monuments as the Delphi temple complex, Safdie said he let topography shape his plans. The buildings’ palette also defers to the landscape. Pinkish granite walls held together with bands of concrete will harmonize with native stone. Silvery stainless steel roofs will pick up colors of the sky, and vine-covered trellises will shade windows.

Herscher has in mind “an educational and cultural center unlike any other in North America.” Lessons about Jewish values and holidays will be inspired by the museum’s exhibitions. About two-thirds of the 20,000-square-foot museum will be devoted to a permanent exhibition from the museum’s collection of Judaica, designed by Jean Andre. The remaining space will be used for temporary shows.

The museum’s collection of 18,000 objects reflecting Jewish heritage was established in 1876 on the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College, but it moved to Southern California in 1954 when the Los Angeles campus was established. Since 1972, selections from the collection have been displayed at the college’s Skirball Museum at 32nd and Hoover streets. The college will remain at that location and the 19-year-old museum will continue to present exhibitions when the new complex opens, Herscher said.

Building has barely begun in Sepulveda Pass, but plans for expansion of the new cultural center are already under way. An architectural model includes a 12,000-square-foot addition to the museum, to be built on a parking lot in front of the amphitheater. Parking at the north end of the complex is expected to move underground so that the community center can expand. A 2 1/2-acre parcel of land on the east side of Sepulveda can also be used for parking. And the college has city permission to double the current 130,000-square-foot project to a total of 260,000 square feet, Herscher said.

J. PAUL GETTY CENTER

The Skirball Cultural Center is not the only construction project in Sepulveda Pass, nor is it the most ambitious. On top of a hill just south of the Skirball, the much-discussed, long-delayed, $350-million J. Paul Getty Center is scheduled to open in 1996. Undaunted by falling in the shadow of a wealthy giant, Herscher said that the two institutions will employ the same landscape architect, Emmett Wemple and Associates, and will probably develop joint programs. “They are on the top of the hill and we are on the bottom, but there’s a synergy of having two cultural institutions one exit apart on the freeway. This is becoming a cultural corridor,” architect Moshe Safdie said.