The museum complex is a reconstructed power plant of the early 20th century, a brick structure with neoclassical stucco decoration, into which the crystalline forms characteristic of Libeskind are embedded. From the outside, they read like cubic and elongated blue stainless steel volumes protruding from the building's floors. They are in the form of two letters of the Hebrew alphabet - "hat" and "iod", which together form the motto of Libeskind's project L'Chaim, which means "to life." However, they are readable only if you look at the building from above, which is inaccessible to the average visitor of the museum.
In the lobby of the museum, the wall opposite the entrance is lined with highlighted relief lines forming the word "pardes", meaning "Garden of Eden," and also symbolizing the four levels of comprehension of the Torah. But this element of the project is also difficult to perceive due to the sharp bends in the lobby space.
On the main - the first tier of the complex - there is also an auditorium (on the ceiling of which the map of the Holy Land is abstractly depicted), an educational center and galleries. On the second floor there are administrative premises, as well as an exhibition hall of the same name inscribed in a huge cube of the letter “iodine”, illuminated through 36 polygonal windows.
Libeskind himself emphasizes the difference between the building in San Francisco and his Jewish museums in the Old World: the Californian building does not have the stamp of the Holocaust catastrophe, which is necessarily present in his European projects. Nonetheless, the language of Libeskind's architecture has remained the same: the sharp, broken lines that previously symbolized historical tragedy should now represent the "booths of heaven" of a thriving Jewish diaspora on the Pacific coast.
