The name of Bezalel is synonymous with 100 years of Israeli art, innovation and quality. Established in 1906 as the “Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts”, it is currently Israel’s leading academy in its field, incorporating traditional crafts and state-of-the-art technologies. Today, the Academy is spread over three campuses - Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, the Historic Building of Bezalel in Jerusalem City Center, and the Bezalel Gallery in Tel Aviv. It is home to 1,765 students, 400 teachers and another 100 employees and hopes to grow in numbers by an estimated 25% in the future.
The relocation of the campus to the city center of Jerusalem presents not merely a physical move, but a cultural shift through which Bezalel aims to participate in the life of the city and to bring the academy closer to the general public, who will have easy access to exhibitions and events conducted on campus, as well as informal meetings with the students and teachers.
Bezalel Academy is a creative and intellectual base for its students and faculty, and will be open for use 24 hours a day. It is hoped that the new campus will provide an agreeable and stimulating environment where the multi-disciplinary approach of the Academy will be optimized. This will be achieved, in part, by offering not only functional education facilities but also places for leisure and any services that may be required to ensure that users can spend most of their day on the campus.
Bezalel aspires to generate ongoing discourse between artists and designers both from within and outside the Academy by being an interface and meeting place. The Academy therefore has to negotiate between the more private spaces for work and contemplation, and public spaces that encourage interaction.
In addition to housing its current academic curriculum, Bezalel aims to create place for the development of new departments and growth in numbers of students and teachers, for a variety of extra-curricular and external courses, and an infrastructure that will allow the Academy to extend its resources to the public and pursue its ongoing workshop programmes promoting education.