University of Jamestown Chapel Renovation and Center for Faith and Life
Jamestown, North Dakota
Preserving Legacy, Creating Connection
Cultural, Learning, Resilience
Temple Chai
Faith Settled in Gardens and Light
Location
Scottsdale, Arizona
Size
19,435 sq ft
Project Team
For years, the congregation of Temple Chai searched Phoenix for a place to call home. Sites were chosen and released. Designs began and were set aside. In a quiet echo of the faith’s own foundational narrative, the community wandered before it was allowed to settle. When a site was finally secured, the work of building something joyful and lasting could begin.
Jones Studio’s first synagogue took shape as a campus organized around joy and relationship — the easy movement between indoor and outdoor ritual, structures and gardens held together by landscape as much as by walls. Flexibility is built into its bones: spaces that open to one another, to the courtyard, to unify the congregation’s full and diverse community.
The project was well into design development when the profoundly consequential world event on October 7th took place, redirecting a significant portion of the budget. The congregation absorbed the disruption without retreating. The Rabbi and Temple administration refused to abandon what they had started, and the work began again — this time leaner, with the program priorities intact and a collaboration of uncommon depth between owner, architect, and contractor carrying it forward.
Understandably, the new campus required a walled compound, and the congregation was promised from the outset that those walls would be designed as welcoming gardens first, and the boundary would be experienced as invitation before it was felt as enclosure. That promise held. The perimeter defines a series of planted spaces that receive the visitor before any other impression takes hold.
The Sanctuary draws its organizing idea from the sukkah — the temporary shelter built each Sukkot to honor the passage through the wilderness and the fragility of life. Though permanent in construction, the space carries that memory. Naturally finished wood beams span the room overhead, draped in backlit white fabric that diffuses warm light across the interior.
At the front of the Sanctuary stands the Ark housing the Torah Scrolls, the congregation’s most sacred possession. Designed in close collaboration with the Worship staff, the Ark embodies the three pillars of Judaism through the geometric language of the star, the square, and the triangle. A sheer fabric veil references the curtained enclosures of the early Israelite temples.
Overhead, a custom cast glass sculpture serves as the eternal light. Behind the Ark, a memorial garden scene completes the composition, the same garden the congregation was promised at the beginning, visible now from the holiest place in the building.
In addition to the beautiful new worship spaces, Temple Chai houses 11 classrooms, allowing them to expand their Early Childhood Center capacity and services to better serve the local community. In support of these classrooms, the school also has an art room and three playgrounds for different age groups.
Three levels of security are passed through before entering the classroom wing. Once in the wing, visitors are bathed in light by four large, shaped skylights distributed throughout the hallway ceiling. These skylights also connect back to the angular design aesthetics of the rest of the building.
Along the north wall, a sequence of six slot windows tells the story of creation. The first holds repurposed stained glass set in crafted wood frames — the first day, when light was called into being. Each successive window marks a day, the intervals between them traced by linear accent lighting across seven faceted planes. The memorial garden placed directly east of the final window closes the sequence where creation ends and the gift of the garden begins.