text: For an architect assigned to design a Jewish building, the menorah is an irresistible starting point. Its recognizable form instantly conveys Jewishness and Jewish values — enlightenment, knowledge, endurance, resiliency. And yet the metaphor is so obvious that when I told my editor Drexel's new Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life was inspired by a menorah, her groan was immediate and loud.
  Before you join the chorus, let me say that the architect, Stanley Saitowitz, has produced Drexel's most powerful new building in years, and it's anything but a cliche. Slotted between a pair of Victorian houses on 34th Street, the three-story jewel box marries a deep commitment to modernist ideals with religious symbolism and some old-fashioned Philadelphia redbrick. At a time when so many new buildings in our city have become relentlessly generic, it's a pleasure to see one saturated with narrative and meaning.
  Drexel has been gradually stepping up the quality of its architecture, in part by importing big-name firms from out of town. Not all the stars have delivered high-quality results. After first contemplating a rather boring, contextual design, Drexel decided to seek out Saitowitz, who has a reputation for practical, well-crafted buildings that come with a side of poetry. He's known as an architect's architect.
  He grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in South Africa and came of age in the profession when Louis Kahn was at the height of his influence. After moving to Berkeley, Calif., to study and teach, Saitowitz helped start Natoma Architects. The firm has won high marks for synagogues in San Francisco and La Jolla, Calif., and for the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. The La Jolla and New England projects both incorporate the menorah symbolism into the design.
  What makes the Center for Jewish Life special is that it fuses Saitowitz's formative experiences — growing up Jewish, worshiping Kahn — into a single building located, appropriately enough, in Kahn's hometown.
  Kahn saw architecture as a search for eternal forms, and you can see Saitowitz striving for the same result. For many years, he taught a course on Jewish religious architecture. The earliest synagogues were simple cubes topped with a dome. Here, he inverts the idea by turning the "dome" on the boxy Perelman Center into a circular void open to the sky. The area below the opening is enclosed by glass walls, creating a meditation room. Kahn would have enjoyed the geometry.
  Even though the facade takes its shape from a menorah, it is not a literal interpretation and relies on simple geometry. At this time of year, we tend to be focused on the nine-branch menorah called the Hanukkiah, but the seven-branch candelabra that stands in front of the Torah ark is really the more common Jewish symbol. Yet, by my count, the center's facade has 10 glass branches, 11 if you think of the brick verticals as the menorah.