The Ex-Nazi Sympathizer Who Built Israel’s Secret Nuclear Site
A new photography exhibition delves into the secret history of the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, designed by star modernist architect Philip Johnson

Collection of the artist
Collection of the artist
Collection of the artist
Israeli photographer Tomer Ganihar did something curious over the past decade—he visited a building that even its own architect never saw in person. The building in question was the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, Israel’s nuclear facility, which is normally verboten to photograph or fly over. The architect was archmodernist Philip Johnson, who was known in his day as the designer of the famous Glass House and lately, also as a Nazi sympathizer.
Ganihar’s photographs of Soreq are now on view in Tomer Ganihar/Philip Johnson: Transparent Secrets, an exhibition that opened at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum in June. The show centers around Ganihar’s shots of two Johnson-designed buildings—Glass House which he built for himself as a residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949, and Soreq, built between 1958 and 1960. New Canaan, Old Canaan, as Ganihar and the curatorial team have put it.
“The whole concept of the exhibition is the issue of hiding in plain sight—Johnson in his Glass House where everything is transparent but there are many secrets, and here [in Israel], it’s ‘come see what we can’t show you,’” says Gilad Reich, co-curator of the exhibition and photography curator of the Israel Museum.
Ganihar began this project inspired by the story he’d heard about Johnson and Soreq from his uncle Daniel Havkin, an architect and dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at Haifa’s Technion. Like most Israelis, Ganihar never knew about the elite architectural pedigree of the nation’s most hush-hush strategic facility. While the State of Israel was initially very public about Soreq, making things like commemorative stamps and postcards of Johnson’s building (some displayed in the exhibition), policy quickly changed and Soreq became shrouded in secrecy.
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem: Gift of Michael S. Sachs, Westport, Connecticut, to American Friends of the Israel Museum
“It’s a building that no one is supposed to see,” explains Reich. “And beyond the fact that no one is supposed to see it, it’s a completely afunctional building. In actuality, a reactor doesn’t require an architect—it requires an engineer.”
Ganihar decided to focus his research skills on producing photographs of Soreq. On his three visits to the facility (which he made after reaching out and receiving special permission), he created raw photographs of surprising angles and details. The result is a series of fragments and reflections, not standard architectural images where you can orient yourself just by looking at them.
Known for founding MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design and curating major exhibitions that introduced Americans to European modernist architecture, Johnson left MoMA in 1934 to pursue a full-time career as a far-right activist and journalist. He promoted Nazism in America and regularly wrote for Social Justice, an American fascist tabloid. Johnson visited Berlin often in the 1930s, meeting with senior Nazi officials and participating in Nazi party events including visits to Hitler’s rallies and Nazi youth camps. He heard Hitler address a rally in Potsdam in 1932, went to Rome to see the 10th-anniversary celebrations of Mussolini’s coup, and attended the 1938 National Socialist German Workers’ Party rally at Nuremberg. “You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it,” Johnson is quoted as saying about these rallies in his 1994 biography by Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work.
Johnson read Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi manifesto, Signale der Neuen Zeit (Signs of the New Era) and wrote positive reviews of English translations of Mein Kampf. In a letter that Johnson wrote to a friend while joining the Wehrmacht as a journalist to report on the German advance into Poland, he said, “there were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.”
It was only in the late 1940s that Johnson broke with the Nazis. By then, the FBI was investigating his potentially treasonous conduct: The exhibition includes a facsimile of an anonymous 1940 letter to J. Edgar Hoover stating that Johnson “is mesmerized by this evil that is trying to overpower the good in the world.”
During the 1940s and ’50s, Johnson worked at clearing his name by collaborating with Jewish patrons. He designed the Kneses Tifereth Israel synagogue in Port Chester, New York, pro bono, in 1954-56. Jewish businessman and philanthropist Samuel Bronfman’s daughter Phyllis Lambert was on the architect selection committee for the Seagram Building, the celebrated Manhattan skyscraper he helped design.
It was United Jewish Appeal Chairman Edward Warburg, a friend of Johnson’s from their Harvard days, who introduced the architect to Teddy Kollek and Shimon Peres, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s project managers for Soreq. Peres, then the acting director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, commissioned Johnson to design the building in 1958. When Israel received nuclear energy as part of the 1950s “Atoms for Peace” program under President Eisenhower, one of the stipulations was that an American architect design the reactor building. The Israelis were never obligated, however, to choose an American architect with Nazi inclinations.
It’s not entirely clear if Peres and Kollek knew about Johnson’s history of prewar pro-Nazi sympathies, which—to be fair—were not uncommon among large portions of the Anglo American elite before the war. “I think there’s coordinated and congruent opportunisms. Israel wanted a name architect for this building,” says co-curator Robert Storr, internationally renowned artist, curator, and critic. “Philip did not try to align his politics with his art. He was an opportunist, professed, and he just did what would enable him to extend his empire into new territories.”
In this instance, Johnson extended his territory into what he later called “my temple in the desert,” a faceted cylindrical structure whose at once ancient and modern looking design won Johnson a prestigious American Institute of Architects award.
Johnson didn’t visit Soreq before, during, or after construction, but later traveled to Israel twice in 1966 and 1970 with his friend Warburg. He was invited to submit proposals for the redesign of the national airport at Lod, and the plaza of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. (Neither moved forward.) And at no point during either of these visits did he go see Soreq, the one building he did design in Israel.
“From what we know, he didn’t even see it from the outside. Which is part of the complexity of this story—he designs a nuclear reactor which was a special incident for him personally, invests so much in its construction and builds an incredible building,” Reich recounts. “But he doesn’t make even minimal effort to see it, and this is a person who brought his own car during every visit to Germany.”
So who was trolling whom? Was the ex-Nazi fooling the young Jewish nation-state into thinking that he’d changed his antisemitic tune, or was Israel punishing Johnson for his racist past by having him design a monument to its rarefied military might? Maybe neither, or both. The exhibition dances around the question, but never answers it.
Johnson could never really whitewash his Nazi past because it was always part of his present. Storr knew Johnson personally, having interacted with him at MoMA in the 1990s. “Johnson clung to his early prejudices. Make no mistake: anti-Semitism was a permanent part of his Weltanschaung and of his professional ‘act,’” writes Storr in his essay for the exhibition catalog.
Storr recalls a particular incident in 1991 while installing an exhibition devoted to Art Spiegelman’s drawings for his graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus. Johnson said to Storr that he’d “got the Jews in” to the museum. Such cracks came easily to Johnson, Storr claims. “Adding virtually unlimited fuel from the reservoir of resentment filled by various discontents during the 1930s and ’40s was precisely what fascism did—on both sides of the Atlantic. It is happening again. Which gives the permissions granted to, and excuses made for and by Johnson a renewed importance, inasmuch as they set a still dangerous precedent.”
Perhaps another “crack” by Johnson that we should know is this one. Midway through working on the Soreq project, in 1959, he gave a lecture at Yale University and said: “We cannot not know history.” Johnson is a complicated part of the history of Soreq and, by extension, Israel; through this exhibition, we know more about it, even if we don’t entirely understand what the commission or the building meant to either the architect or his client.
Karen Chernick is an art historian and writer living in Tel Aviv, specializing in arts and culture, food, and travel. She is a regular contributor to ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, Artnet News, and has written for Haaretz, Elle Decor, Smithsonian, and The Times of Israel, among other publications.