In a powerful new documentary, Ada: My Mother the Architect, the audience is invited inside the mind and memories of Ada Karmi-Melamede – one of the most influential figures in Israeli architecture.
Karmi-Melamede and her brother, Ram Karmi, children of pre-state architect Dov Karmi, won the 1986 international contest to design a preeminent and prestigious national institutional structure: Israel’s Supreme Court building in Jerusalem.
In one scene, as Ada listens to a tour guide describing building – perhaps her most celebrated work – what unfolds is not just a story about design, but one about national identity, public memory, and a troubling tendency in Israel to create an institutional narrative unintended by the creators. Bringing the question, which narrative is more relevant?
The journey of Ada Karmi-Melamede
At the heart of the film is a quiet, mesmerizing journey: Karmi-Melamede walking through the Supreme Court’s sunlit corridors, and stairways leading to huge ceiling-to-floor windows calling attention to stunning views of Jerusalem – alongside her daughter, filmmaker Yael Melamede, narrating the building’s soul: its hidden geometries, light, and meaning. With the intimate authority only its creator could possess, we might never experience architecture the same way again.
The timing and the central story of this film, the designing of Israel’s Supreme Court building, ironically highlights the judicial reform controversy that has clouded Israeli society since before the Israel-Hamas War.
Melamede chose renowned New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger to appear in the film, both regarding his 1995 piece praising the building’s design, and his current disappointment that modern Israel hasn’t lived up to the soaring expectations of moral leadership as envisioned from the early days, as embodied in the new nation’s architecture.
“The belief that public buildings can be ennobling presences, not just containers for bureaucratic functions, is clearly what underscores this structure,” Goldberger wrote in his glowing 1995 Times piece on the Supreme Court building’s architecture.
“In the last decade, as Israel has become more certain of its continued existence, the notion of a permanent architecture has begun to take root – and nowhere to better result than in the new Supreme Court building, which marks a critical point in the architectural maturation of this country,” he wrote 30 years ago.
“The design itself is kind of a moral lesson in what public architecture can be,” wrote Goldberger. “With the completion of the Supreme Court, Israel, a nation that has shown little architectural leadership, has produced a building that can stand as an example to the world of the potential of public works to reflect a culture’s highest aspirations.”
Malemede said the decision to feature the architecture critic in the film was an easy one.
“I think Paul Goldberger is super interesting because he ties – and my mother ties – ideas that we don’t normally associate with architecture to architectural design,” she said.
“The fact that you can think about democracy and architecture – the film raises the question – how is it affecting me as a person? What does it mean when I walk into a building and feel respected and like I have a place? That a Supreme Court feels like it’s your court, [that] it belongs to you? I think that’s beautiful,” Malemede said.
“In the film, I love when the president of the Supreme Court says… He doesn’t like the American court [building] because it makes you feel so small, leading Americans to think that it’s an intimidating building. What is meant by evoking those emotions?” she asked.
“I say to my mother, ‘what’s it like to feel that the institution you designed is being attacked?’ And I kind of love my mother’s answer. It’s so typical for her to say, ‘it’s much bigger than me. You know it has nothing to do with the building.’ I think that’s her perspective.”
The relationship between mother and daughter
Through Yael Melamede’s lens, Ada: My Mother the Architect becomes more than a portrait of a pioneering one – it is an excavation of a layered and often-tender relationship between a mother and daughter shaped by distance, ambition, and legacy. What begins as a professional profile unfolds into a deeply personal reckoning: what does it mean to be the child of a national figure, when the nation often came first?
In the film, Yael traces her mother’s journey from New York – where she spent her early years teaching and establishing herself – to Israel, where she ultimately chose to build both her professional life and her public reputation. That decision meant leaving behind more than just geography. It meant, at times, parenting from afar, navigating two continents and two roles: mother and architect.
The film does not frame this as a failure, nor does it excuse the emotional complexity. Instead, it gently exposes the quiet costs of excellence. The mother-daughter exchanges, though often spare in words, are rich with subtext – Yael seeking understanding, Ada offering reflection more than apology. The architectural legacy becomes a kind of third presence in their conversations: not just what Ada built for Israel, but what she built instead of being present.
And yet, Ada is not a story of regret. Rather, it is an attempt – graceful and unsentimental – to map out the terrain of love and sacrifice, not unlike the way Karmi-Melamede maps out courtyards and corridors in stone. Her buildings, particularly the Supreme Court, are shown not just as monuments to justice and statehood, but as metaphors for her own values: clarity, integrity, and permanence rooted in the Land of Israel, literally.
Ultimately, the documentary shows how, for Ada, architecture is not merely a profession but a language: rigorous, elegant artistic language through which she speaks to Israel’s ambitions and ideals. And in capturing this, her daughter gives her space to speak again – this time, directly to her family.
While the film is very much a celebration of Yael’s mother, there’s also a certain sadness.
As Melamede said, “when I asked her at the end of the film, ‘do you wish we’d moved here’? She says, ‘no’ – because things are so difficult. I think that’s incredibly tragic.”
The film is currently streaming on YES Documentary channel and at film festivals around the world.
