This new building is a sanctuary, school, and community center that serves as a new East Campus for the expanding congregation of the renowned Park Synagogue in Cleveland Heights, designed by Eric Mendelsohn in 1950. Like its older ‘sibling,’ it was designed to offer welcome, shelter, and blessing to its congregation.

The building is a simple steel frame box clad in a stick and panel mosaic of copper cladding. Three large organic shapes burst from the box - a Jerusalem stone clad sanctuary and two great copper-covered canopies leading to a two-story lobby. These two entrances of equal importance - one for the school, the other for the sanctuary, library, and offices - bend towards each other in a gesture of welcome and blessing.

The sanctuary is surrounded inside and out by gently curving, monumental stone walls. The stone is coursed in large horizontal bands reminiscent of primordial construction of early Jerusalem temples. Chapel daylight comes indirectly from four edges, giving it a soft glow for quietude and solace.

While this building is straightforward for the sake of economy, its age-old materials and extraordinary light make it a sacred place.