THE RENEWAL OF THE ISRAEL MUSEUM is covered in the New York Times:

A Museum to Get Lost in, and How Israel Is Fixing It

By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 12, 2007

JERUSALEM
THE Israel Museum is one of the finest in the Middle East — if you can figure out how to get in and find the art.

Founded in 1965 by Teddy Kollek, the long-serving Jerusalem mayor, to ensure that Israel would have a national museum of world rank, the museum was a vital symbol of the new nation. Mr. Kollek wanted, and got, “a modernist temple to culture” surrounded by other symbols of Israel’s modern statehood, like the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the National Library, said the museum’s director, James S. Snyder.

From ancient artifacts to contemporary art, the museum seeks to anchor the archaeology, material culture and ethnography of the world’s Jews within a broader global context, both Western and non-Western. It boasts a dominant site at the entrance to Jerusalem, a widely admired sculpture garden and, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Yet its entrance is an uninspiring parking lot and ugly ticketing building, and the portal to the actual exhibits is 270 yards away, requiring a hike up a hill, often in the blistering sun. It’s also hard to find your way from one collection to the next.

Much of that is about to change as the museum embarks on an $80 million expansion and renovation that will transform the way a visitor navigates and experiences the museum.

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Mr. Carpenter, who is internationally known for his work with glass, including the cable-net glass wall at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, focused on the north-south orientation of the campus. Given the harsh light of the Middle Eastern sun from the east and the west at various times of the day, he deployed thick extruded ceramic louvers on those facades. Fixed in place, the louvers refract the light to provide a soft, interior illumination.

Yet the buildings feel largely open. Much thinner louvers on the northern and southern faces allow visitors to look in, reinforcing a sense of activity and openness, both day and night.

The architects also extended the promenade out to the street, Mr. Carpenter said, “so people would understand it as a route of invitation,” even from the parking lot. “Before, they were stuck with a closed campus and no obvious route of entry,” he said.

The new central concourse also allows museumgoers to make more logical connections, progressing historically, for example, from the ancient archaeology of the region through the Ottoman period, then to the Judaica and Ethnography collection describing Jewish life dispersed from the Holy Land.

Early regional art, beginning with biblical artifacts, will flow into the beginnings of Israeli art, which will feed into European works and then into the modern and contemporary galleries. New galleries will also allow the museum to double space for the display of 20th-century art, another strength of the collection. ...