heneghan peng architects

Museum of Jesus’ Baptism

Al-Maghtas "Bethany Beyond the Jordan"

The Museum of Jesus Baptism at Bethany, Jordan International Design Competition invited teams to respond to a brief that called for an exemplary story-led museum and garden in a sacred place surrounded by a preserved wilderness – a setting dedicated to the history and significance of baptism in the Christian faith.

Finalist Gallery https://competitions.malcolmreading.com/bethany/gallery

To preserve the ‘authenticity’ of the 2-thousand-year Spirituality of the site, the museum immerses itself within geology and bonds with its stratigraphy.

The Museum of Jesus Baptism emerges from a new tributary sprouting at the precise bend in historical Wadi Kharrar along the site edge at its plateau edge. Shaped in the same way a Wadi is formed, our proposal gently bends the natural contours in the soil’s surface with little or almost imperceptible ecological disturbance to the extreme fragility of this sacred land.

The tributary fulfils 2 strategic - conceptual functions:

1. To the WEST, the newly formed tributary of the museum as an edge, defines, respects, protects, and illuminates, UNESCO’s border. It becomes the physical manifestation, the certification of this border at the edge of the protected sacred land. The proposal will be bonded to the site in a way that it cannot be removed. It cannot stand alone. It can only stand in solidarity with Al-Maghtas.

2. To the EAST, this same tributary becomes the story-teller, the narrator of this story-led museum. From within, the individual layered catenary defined vaults that fan from east to west would tell the exhibition of the ‘greatest story ever told’. Along the tributary edge, the story of the river Jordan would unfold both physical & symbolic. This would guide visitors, a map for their journey from the light, descending into an immersive darkness and re-emerging back into light again. To enhance the experience of the biblical ground, the floor of the museum is gently raised above it, allowing the ground to slip under and into the space of exhibition or concealed when not desired. The exhibition space is conceived of as INFRASTRUCTURE.

The layered vault provide the ability to subdivide the space into various sizes yet within an interconnected framework in time & space specific to its context. The facades can vary between solid screens for an immersive digital experience or glass to connect to the biblical landscape beyond. Lastly, the floor has the capacity to reveal the biblical ground below, present a traditional floor or combine the two into an ‘authentic’ immersive experience that can be experienced nowhere else but here along the Wadi Kharrar.

From the beginning, we took a conscious decision not to occupy the entirety of the site we were given but only its edge as does your masterplan, along the line of the contour separating the protected descent to the River Jordan of the Baptism site and the plateau extending to the East.

Our museum is conceived as a threshold tied precisely to its place with a building just fractionally smaller than the allotted footprint both above and below, again in the hopes of minimizing disturbance to the sacred soil.

What remains, is a void, silent and sacred that would become the contemplative reflective space of the Wilderness Witness Garden, the land between 2 Wadis.