Design brief for a Nursery, Kindergarten, School and Jewish Center complex.

client
SHALOM Organization of Jews in Bulgaria
users
The Jewish community in Bulgaria
location
Sofia, Bulgaria
type
Design brief
area
15000 ㎡
year
2020

The Challenge

The Organization of Jews in Bulgaria “Shalom” embarked on an exceptionally ambitious project: to build a new complex, housing a kindergarten, school and the new Jewish center in Sofia. This held more than one complex challenge, but the primary one was that for the first time all of Shalom’s teams of people, students, activities and organizations were to come under the same roof. Since the fall of the Communist regime in Bulgaria, the Jewish community in Bulgaria has been steadily growing but due to limited space, they used many separate smaller buildings that were dispersed throughout Sofia; this did not allow the community to function easily as a whole. Nobody knew how to approach the creation of such a massive new building because they could not imagine not being dispersed. To make things worse, the last project of a similar scale for Shalom was the construction of the Synagogue in Sofia in 1909, which put a lot of pressure and expectations on the new building complex to be even better.

Shalom had already agreed to hold an architectural competition to ensure the best possible design. They quickly realized that the key to a good competition outcome was a good design brief; however, the community was unsure how to describe their needs.

That is when Shalom chose to entrust us with this extremely important task– not just to write the design brief for the new complex, but through it to help them become more conscious of their own community’s needs in terms of space.

The major challenge on our side was to understand the idiosyncrasies of the Bulgarian Jews, their roots, traditions and history and how to create the brief in such a way as to ensure the competition proposals would honor them.

Design solution

To match the challenge posed to us by Shalom, we designed a multi-level discovery process that aimed to get to know the community. It included several levels of research:

More than 30 interviews and deep-dive storytelling experiences
More than 15 discovery and ideation workshops with people from all ages and groups
Six visits to significant buildings for the community
Meetings with more than 150 people from 4 to 80-year-olds with diverse functions in the community

We had intended an additional level of observing and spending time “in the field”, however due to Covid lock-downs we were not able to put this part of the process into action.

One of the most significant results of our efforts was the realization that the community did not require three buildings as initially suggested; instead it needed a single shared Home for all generations. How to achieve this became the backbone and principle requirement of the design brief.

We also created numerous diagrams and intricate maps, not just of spaces, but of people as well. We wanted to translate what we learned and felt about the community’s interrelations and goals to the architects in the competition. The stakeholders map and functional diagram were both a monumental effort in that direction.

There were so many stories that we wanted to be heard and remembered throughout the brief and not to be lost during the design phases. Shalom felt that our role needed to continue beyond the mere creation of the brief and hired us to represent them during the later stages of design. We acted as consultants to the winning architects on how to interpret Shalom’s goals and not lose sight of the primary significance of the building. We again relied heavily on co-creation with the community to ensure that they understood what the architects proposed in terms of functionality. This two-way communication influenced and radically changed the inner programming of the final building for the better.

Significance

The value to Shalom was not only the creation of a well thought-out design brief, even though this was the required outcome.

On the way to creating the brief, Shalom managed to understand better how they function, to cut out the unnecessary and to add what they did not know they needed. It was a transformative journey that reinvigorated the community.

What is more, because of how the process was designed, the whole community was an active partaker in the creation of the building and this exhilaration was felt on multiple levels. It united everyone behind a common vision they recognised as their own. This in turn produced not a mere shiny new building, but a true spatial embodiment of a group of human beings, truly connected by values and the care for one another– a home.

Credits: Despina Kaneva - urban designer