Rob Steinberg knows firsthand how an architect’s work can affect generations to come. After all, he was bar mitzvahed in it.
Steinberg, 53, is the son of Goodwin “Goody” Steinberg, the architect who designed Los Altos Hills’ Congregation Beth Am and, perhaps, did the most to transform the South Peninsula into the landscape it is today.
As an adult, Rob Steinberg’s life and career came full-circle when he oversaw large additions to Beth Am’s grounds in the late 1990s. Now he has the opportunity to touch even more Jewish lives as he oversees the design for Palo Alto’s massive Campus for Jewish Life.
It’s the kind of project that makes Steinberg happy to be alive, and when he says the Campus for Jewish Life is one of the most exciting endeavors he’s tackled, he sounds sincere. The more complex it is, the more mixed the uses, the more interwoven the design, the better.
To start with, notes Steinberg with palpable excitement, it is both a vertically and horizontally integrated site. Translated out of architect’s jargon, this means that the onsite tenants — the Palo Alto Jewish Community Center, the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the Jewish Family and Children’s Services and seniors living in the Jewish Home — will be housed in structures lying both next to, above and below one another.
The varying on-campus denizens will be blended together seamlessly thanks to a harmonious indoor and outdoor design plan crafted by Steinberg and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin.
The pair have spent countless hours huddled together, and Steinberg points out their latest epiphany with the pride of a father displaying his children’s wedding photos.
The two have hit upon a design in which outdoor patterns continue within several buildings through glass walls.
“We’re really obscuring and integrating the relationship between the indoors and outdoors. It’s going to be very cool,” gushes the third-generation architect, who works primarily out of his firm’s San Jose office.
It’s also going to be very Jewish. Steinberg assures that there will be no garish menorahs or six-pointed stars emblazoned onto the sides of edifices; it will be a subtly Jewish feel.
The archways and narrow corridors will evoke Old Jerusalem, as will the building materials. (This is not a Disneyland-style recreation of the Middle East, however. It’s more of a reference than a replica.) The 16-foot “podium” rise designed by Halprin symbolizes the notion of aliyah (and hides the parking garage beneath).
“Many times in architecture, one puts the richest materials at the pedestrian level where people can touch them and come in contact with them. We also want the Campus for Jewish Life to have some unique ornamentation on the tops of buildings,” says Steinberg.
“That would encourage people to look up, just as our religion teaches us to look up in a spiritual direction.”
Another dimension for Steinberg to integrate into the campus is the four acres of “market level” housing sold to a developer by the campus. He’s overseeing the construction of that roughly 100-unit housing plan and a 65-unit senior housing facility as well.
“This is a very rich, unusual mix of users,” he points out. “It’s probably the most interesting mixed-use project that’s ever been built in Palo Alto.”
And that just makes Steinberg happier.
“This is my specialty and this is what I love to do,” he says.
“This is a small city that has the ability to mix generations and a variety of users in a way that, will tremendously impact the lives of these users. And I love doing that.”
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