Ada Karmi-Melamede is one of the most celebrated architects in Israeli history. She is the second woman to receive the Israel Prize for architecture and designed institutions that shaped the nation, including Israel’s Supreme Court, with her late brother Ram Karmi; Ben Gurion Airport; and the Open University. 

At 87, she has new dreams. Most notably, to design a museum or concert hall. 

Given her legacy, it’s this sense of how she maintains a beginner’s mindset that struck me in our conversation about the new documentary chronicling her journey, Ada: My Mother the Architect. “I always felt that I was lucky,” she said. “Every time something worked for me, I thought, This was lucky. . . . It’s interesting that so many years after when I go [to the Supreme Court], I think, Wow, I don’t believe we made it. It’s better than we could ever make it today.” 

Directed by her daughter Yael Melamede, award-winning filmmaker and founder of Salty Features, the documentary offers an intimate look into the vision and resilience required to become one of the world’s most acclaimed architects. Together, they visit her most prominent projects to reflect on the stories of her ascent and the principles that guide her. Here, mother and daughter discuss trusting the creative process, how surprise and conflict transform your work, and why there are no shortcuts, in architecture or in life. 

Yael Melamede: For me as a storyteller, or having tried architecture and I think failed, we don’t recognize how much architecture is storytelling in built form. We live in architecture all the time and the places we occupy should have beginnings, middles, and ends. There should be so much more thought given to them. Part of my interest in making the film was to see what you said before—that you saw things in a different way. A lot of my films are interested in people who look at the world in a different way. By being able to see it through their eyes, we learn something new about the world, but we also learn something new about ourselves and how to look at the world—like learning a new language.

Ada, you said, “Every time we build something, we enter a new context. In this context, there is the old, and the desire for the new. Somehow, we have to engage between the old, the layers of what’s in the past, and the desire to innovate or change things.” You achieved this with the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, where you kept the discovered ruins alive. What is your philosophy on merging the old and the new? 

Ada: It’s not like one can borrow something from the old and incorporate it in the new. I often think that each one of these things has a domain of itself, which shouldn’t be touched. Especially when you build in front of the Wailing Wall, there’s an incredible story to the old context. But the only thing you can do is recede from it and look at it, rather than take or borrow something from it. I left all the ground, which had a lot of remnants and footsteps from the past, by itself without touching it. I decided that the new has a right to exist like the old has a right to exist, and therefore they are separate. They almost look at one another.

It was moving when Aharon Barak, the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, said: “Every single time I go to the Supreme Court and I look at Jerusalem at the top of the stairs, I get emotional. I even get tears in my eyes sometimes. You have a conversation with the Supreme Court when you go in. . . . There’s a connection. It centers you.” What do you believe gives your buildings heart? 

Ada: You recognize from the beginning that the program is a set of words in which you have to discover a story. The program is always functional demands, which add up to a big sum of needs that the building has, but they don’t make a building. You have to find the glue that connects all these demands. It’s a long story—finding the glue. It is something that becomes apparent in a sequence. It’s not something that comes to you in a blast. The sequence in a building—in other words, when Yael was saying that there’s a beginning, middle, and end—I think there’s a beginning, middle, and end in every building and every room. A lot of it depends on the way that light affects the space. There’s a game, or conversation, between light, space, and movement. We’ve got to make sure that these three act together. It’s tough. In every building it’s different. But it’s a sequence. If you know the beginning, you hope that this beginning will lead you slowly, slowly, slowly to resolve itself in an end that deserves it.

When you’re at the beginning of the sequence, and you don’t know where it’s going, how do you trust the process? At the start, do you ever wonder, Where am I going? 

Ada: Sometimes the end is clearer than the beginning. Often, you think, I’d love to end there, but I don’t know how to begin in order to get there. We always think that starting is the most difficult thing in architecture, but I think it’s more difficult in the end. To know when to start takes a lot of imagination, courage, and inspiration. But to end, you have to make sure that all these things that were nourishing this process slowly go to sleep. 

Yael: That’s similar between architecture and film. Some films have a path that’s really clear. But a lot of films, a lot of documentary filmmakers in particular, we don’t have a script. So we start and have faith in the process that it will tell us where we need to go. I was looking at the bookshelf and there’s a lot of Louis Kahn behind us. Kahn said, “The building tells you what it wants to be.” I think a film tells you what it wants to be, too.

I was thinking about this interview, and remembering that I never thought this film would be very personal. Some people laughed at me and were like, “You made a film about your mother and didn’t think it would be personal?” I didn’t think it would be, but the film told us what it wanted to be over time. . . . But I do think interpretation is also interesting. I’ve shown this movie to a few people. Some think that we had a very difficult relationship and some think that we had a very loving relationship. It’s astonishing to me that the same film can be interpreted so radically differently. 

Yael: My mom has often quoted Barak, saying: “All the words have been used, but the spaces between them change.” I think that’s really beautiful. . . . That’s in some ways true in film, too. So many structures are similar, but the pauses and connections between the different images change.    

There is a beautiful story in the film, when you were working on the Supreme Court with your brother, you would face each other on opposite sides of the table and draw on either side of the paper. What was most beautiful about those moments for you? 

Ada: These moments were sometimes beautiful and sometimes painful. My brother had an incredible hand. We all draw in the family—my father, brother, and I—but he has this strong hand. He worked with a pencil (which we call a 6B and is a very soft lead) and that wasn’t enough for him. So he would use charcoal, which means that when you put a stroke on the paper, it was almost like he was murdering the paper. It had an amazing strength. So when I’m there sitting with my little 6B pencil, and I can only do small sketches, I would be at some points jealous, some points angry. I went through all these different feelings. He was extremely talented and loved to speak about architecture. The problem was proportion, and this is a problem in every step we make—where to begin and where to end. Sometimes, talent doesn’t help you. It’s really an instinct, where to begin and where to end. 

Yael: What I love about the Supreme Court section in the film is that it’s about conflict in a building, but it’s also about conflict in a relationship. Those are paralleling each other and [showing] that not all conflict is bad. Out of something that was very difficult came something beautiful—and the fact that, in the end, you both admitted that the building was much better because both of you worked on it, rather than either of you doing it alone.  

Ada: One doesn’t realize at the beginning that conflict actually makes a building alive, [whereas] harmonious makes the building asleep. You need both.  

 I’d love to explore this insight that Ada shared in the film: “I always think that with one beam of light that falls right, one can change everything.” For either of you, how do you discover those transformative elements in your work?

Yael: I don’t think we talk about luck enough in the creative process. . . . The other thing is that, in film and architecture, these are collaborative fields. So some of the decisions come by working together with someone else, what’s meaningful to them, and then checking oneself again. What’s special about both fields is that when you’re successful, it is so much greater than the sum of the parts. You can never plan that. You have to hope for that to happen. That’s the magic of it. It’s like rowing (I rowed once and was terrible), but we got to have one feeling of flying. That’s what you’re chasing the whole time—that feeling of taking off. 

In the film, Ada’s students and colleagues discuss how much she impacted them, and that they repeated her phrases for decades after. One of your former students shared that you were looking for “principles to extract,” which he can still hear you sharing. For either of you, what are the most important principles that guide you? 

Yael: I think the search for a deeper truth is what interests me. I’ve produced more than I’ve directed, but the three films I’ve done are essay films around one person’s work. . . . For each of them, they do their work with—I love this term we’ve coined at home—humbility: incredible ability, but also humility that the search is so much bigger than they are. For me, that’s the principle. It’s really important today when everybody wants to and can disagree about a lot of facts. I still believe there are some deep truths, and searching for those is of interest to me.  

What did you learn about each other in the process of making this film?  

Ada: She’s my best critic. She doesn’t think twice whether to say or not to say. She’s with her own sense of criticism, right or wrong, beautiful or not. She comes through these kinds of extremes and it really works. You’re my best critic. Make sure you remain that way.  

Yael: I always knew Ada was tough, but I don’t think I quite understood the level of resilience and how difficult that had been. One thing I learned, and it’s not about Ada herself, but people have a hard time speaking about women architects with the same creativity that they do male architects. I found that astonishing. It was so hard for people to be effusively positive. Her students, of course. I don’t think it’s chauvinism. I think it’s a lack of habit that people would often talk about my mother, like, “She’s so put together and conscientious.” For a male architect, the knee-jerk reaction is, “They’re so creative.”

Ada: When you have an opinion, they say that you are tough. That’s it. That’s the problem. You’re not supposed to have a strong opinion as a woman. 

How would you like to see that story change for women in architecture? 

Ada: Just keep on working. Work is the thing that will save us all. Continue to work and not find shortcuts. There’s no shortcut in architecture until you get a building to work in terms of function, time, and money. Then, light, space, and movement (the other things that make the building alive). It takes a long time. The computer doesn’t help one at all. I often do things much quicker than the computer. Then it remains much more personal than the language of the computer. To find your own personality through the language of the computer is very difficult. Very few people can do it. It’s important that we all keep our free hand—free hand is like free thought.  

Route is one of the four chapters of the documentary and the architectural philosophy you explore together. Ada, you described how route applies to life when you said: “On the short route, we learn nothing. On the long route, we live.” Can you elaborate on the beauty of taking the long route and what it taught you that you couldn’t have learned on the short route? 

Ada: A short route is the domain of the feet. The feet find the shortest route to get from A to B. The eyes travel and provide you with a long route. There is this conflict between the two. Two things should work together. It’s very difficult to orchestrate it such that they complete one another. 

Yael: I worked with a journalist who looked at the way we worked and said, “I can’t imagine doing the kind of work you do. I work and it’s done the next day.” To have faith in something for so long, and keep going for so long, seemed impossible to her. That’s why I’ve remained, in many ways, an independent filmmaker, because it’s hard to do that within more conventional structures. But being able to give a film the time it needs and allow oneself to be on the long route is a real privilege. The same is true for the kind of architecture that my mother does. It is a long-route architecture. 

Ada: Hopefully. It’s how you understand life. The short route tells you about certain events in your life, but it doesn’t tell you about the sequence or the way events are tied to one another. That’s what the long route is doing. 

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