The architect bidding to rebuild Hamburg’s Bornplatz

Modern Art Oxford has been delighting gallery-goers since its November reopening for its architecture as well as its art. The former brewery storehouse has revealed its industrial heritage, with dark grey paint stripped from the walls to reveal the original bricks.

At the entrance, seven steps take visitors slightly above street level, reflecting the reception area’s history as a loading bay. Together with a shop and café, the ground floor community gallery creates a dialogue between locals, the major artists on show in the upper main exhibition space, and the gallery itself.

“Galleries are significant public spaces. It isn’t exclusively about experiencing great art. There should also be public meeting and encounter spaces where you might reflect on what you are seeing,” says David Kohn, the architect behind the transformation.

The refurbished Modern Art Oxford museum, designed by David Kohn, shows its industrial heritage (Image: Modern Art Oxford)[Missing Credit]

Kohn is a half-Jewish, half-Anglican, South African transplant to Britain. Following other successful projects in Oxford, Ghent and elsewhere, in February he was selected to take part in the international design competition for the reconstruction of Hamburg’s Bornplatz Synagogue; winning designs will be selected in September.

The Bornplatz project would arguably be Kohn’s highest-profile project to date – and certainly the one most closely aligned with his Jewish heritage. The synagogue has been defunct since being desecrated during Kristallnacht in 1938, and German political leaders including former chancellor Olaf Scholz have spoken of the planned reopening’s importance in countering rising antisemitism.

Born in Cape Town, Kohn came to England in 1976 aged four. His parents Richard and Gerda, a doctor and a teacher respectively, made the decision to leave South Africa’s “wicked, unsustainable project of apartheid,” he says, forming part of a wave of emigration from South Africa in the 1970s. He declares the move to England “a successful transition”, his family first settling in Southampton.

On his father’s side, Kohn’s Jewish forebears came to South Africa in the 19th century from Lithuania. His grandfather ran a store in a small rural town, and Richard became a doctor in Cape Town, where he met Gerda. She is an Anglican, descended from a 19th century Scottish Presbyterian missionary, the Reverend ‘Red’ George Barker. Gerda’s family were well established in Cape Town and had a long history of involvement in education.

Kohn was brought up in “neither faith” and attended a mainstream Anglican school in Leicester, he says. “I am not practising in any way, and have inherited the cultural aspects of both.”

“I consider myself culturally Jewish,” he says. “But identity is complex. When I got my driver’s license I found I knew every street in Cape Town.”

Celebrations with the wider family in Cape Town also contributed to Kohn’s sense of identity. Passover was celebrated as a big family gathering at his aunt’s house with kids playing and lively conversations taking place, leading up to the Seder meal in the evening. A family heirloom plate is on the mantelpiece of Kohn’s Tufnell Park home.

Architect David Kohn (Image: David Kohn)[Missing Credit]

Having children was “an interesting moment,” he continues. “Through music I felt closest to my Jewish family. My grandmother was a violinist and both my daughters Eva and Eleanor play the violin. Not in an overt way, but I did feel a connection to that side of the family.”

While Kohn did not have a bar mitzvah, he highlights his father’s “best friend” Gerald Bernbaum as a godfather figure. Bernbaum had a long career in university education at Leicester and South Bank University. His 2017 obituary appeared in the JC. He was “a figure in the Jewish community,” Kohn says.

“Gerry was like a surrogate godfather. My parents were conventional and wanted me to study academic subjects, and Gerry cultivated my interest in art and photography.” Bernbaum also commissioned a piece of art when Kohn attended the Slade Summer School between the first and second year of reading architecture at Cambridge: “The first public outing for my creative work.”

Since then, Kohn has made a name for himself with a style that is hard to pin down. “My work has been described as eclectic. Rowan Moore said I was post, post, post-modernist,” he says. “I believe in playful acceptance, that many different ideas can be sustained in a project with no loss, that it is a positive.”

Famously, Kohn put a boat-like structure on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in A Room for London in 2012, a collaboration with artist Fiona Bannerman. He renovated the quad at New College Oxford. He is working on SMAK, the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, repurposing a 1913 flower market to give the expanded facility a similar sized gallery space to Tate Modern.

Kohn’s twin hallmarks are a scenographic approach to architecture, where a building is always developed in the context of its surroundings, history and the structures which already exist; and collaborations with artists, including Eva Rothschild for the gates at New College. “I believe in dealing with the world as you find it, researching projects and coming to something with newness,” he says.

The exterior of the refurbished Modern Art Oxford museum, designed by David Kohn (Image: Modern Art Oxford)[Missing Credit]

Kohn cites Isaiah Berlin, the great Jewish philosopher, as a creative influence. Berlin always rejected the term “English philosopher”, countering: "I am a Russian Jew from Riga, and all my years in England cannot change this. I love England, I have been well treated here, and I cherish many things about English life, but I am a Russian Jew; that is how I was born and that is who I will be to the end of my life." Berlin’s championing of a plurality of sources and outlooks is reflected in Kohn’s practice.

“My work is influenced by Isaiah Berlin,” Kohn says. “At London Metropolitan University I gave a lecture on [co-author of Collage City] Colin Rowe’s use of Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, centred on the idea that ‘whilst the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Creative output can be at the service of one big idea or express many different ideas. The case that one can sustain interleaving ideas in creative output is well argued.”

As an example, Kohn points to the 24 gargoyles placed along the cornice line of his new quadrangle for New College Oxford. The gargoyles reference those in the college’s original quad dating from 1405, the first ever quad to be purpose built. The new gargoyles are a collaboration with artist Monster Chetwynd and stonemason Fergus Wessel, who has experience in making and repairing gargoyles. Animals endangered by habitat loss and climate change thematically link traditional gargoyles with 21st century concerns.

“The gargoyles on New College Oxford, dating back to the fifteenth century, are some of the most loved in the country. Readers of the contemporary gargoyles on New College’s Gradel Quad can construct a meaning that is to do with djinns, or whatever cultural projections the work can sustain. It’s good if many different people find expressions of their interests and desires in the same project,” Kohn says.

Austrian architect Josef Frank is also influential on Kohn’s practice. Frank fled Vienna for Stockholm in 1933, aged 48, to escape Nazi discrimination. Kohn describes Frank as pro-kitsch, believing architecture should concern itself with everyday life. “Frank is the antidote to impulses in modernism – that there is a correct way to live and a correct way to design, and a singular architecture will provide optimal living conditions,” he says.

By contrast, Frank advocated for a human-centred architecture, interpreting people’s lives and the way they lived, and making space for the things they wanted to have around them.

Kohn reflects that his background provides an openness to new ideas and solutions. “For me the religion of my forebears, the family history of emigration and coming to the UK as a young child have provided an openness of approach – there is not one right answer to any given problem.”