MadaTech, the Israel National Museum of Science

The German Jewish architect Alexander Baerwald was asked for first plans in October 1909 and given the detailed design in August 1910. What he produced is symmetrical, three storeys high and built as five masses: a tall central block carrying a dome, with the main entrance set under an arch that rises the whole height of the building, and two long wings ending in blocks that step slightly forward of the facade. The building stood alone on the hillside when it went up, and was sited to be seen from the lower city and the port.

Baerwald was working to an explicit idea, that an architecture for the country should join European form to Eastern elements. Hebrew Wikipedia's account of the building calls the result one of the two most important works in the Eretz Israel style, an early phase of the eclectic architecture of the period, the other being the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, which was demolished. The European half of that is the symmetrical composition and the square windows; the local half is the pointed arches, the stone cladding, the merlons along the parapet, the dome, and a climate strategy of high rooms with small octagonal vents above the windows to let hot air out.

Baerwald did not only draw it. He settled in Haifa, became a professor, and headed the first faculty to open in the building, architecture. He died in Haifa in 1930. The second structure he planned on the same plot was meant as a secondary school and became the Reali School, which is still the neighbour and still runs the paid car park MadaTech visitors use at weekends.

The institute was the project of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, the Berlin relief society known in Hebrew as Ezra. Its director Paul Nathan toured Palestine in the autumn of 1907 and came back proposing a technical college. Haifa was chosen over Jerusalem and Jaffa because the Ottoman government was making it a railway junction and planning to enlarge the port, and because its small Jewish community was less politically fixed than the alternatives. A plot of 46 dunams in a neighbourhood then called Mirawan, later Hadar HaCarmel, was bought from Arab and Templer owners and registered in August 1910.

Permission to build took two years and three separate permits. There were no skilled construction workers locally and they were brought from Jerusalem and Germany; most of the materials and all of the machinery came from Germany; and the well on the site defeated the local crews until a German engineer with the right equipment reached groundwater at 100 metres. The man supervising the work for the institution was Shmaryahu Levin, whose name is now on the street the entrance stands on. The cornerstone went down on 11 April 1912 and the main building was largely finished in 1913.

Then it stopped. The row over the language of instruction put the project at the centre of a public fight and the budget ran out with it. On 17 July 1914 the board met in Berlin for the last time and Ezra, the principal creditor, proposed selling the whole thing at auction. Two weeks later the war began. The Technikum association's assets were auctioned on 15 March 1915 and Ezra duly bought the land and the buildings for 225,000 marks. In 1917 the German army took the site for a disinfection plant and a slaughterhouse, the Ottoman army turned the main building into a hospital, and after the British took Haifa in October 1918 they used it as a military hospital too.

The Zionist Organisation bought the place from Ezra on 6 February 1920 and spent five years repairing it, replacing stolen machinery and hiring staff. Einstein came in 1923, planted his palm and agreed to head the institution's committee. The first evening classes were held on 14 December 1924, entrance examinations two days after that, and the formal opening fell on Tu BiShvat, 9 February 1925, thirteen years after the cornerstone. The site then ran to 46 dunams and seven buildings, with teaching concentrated in one of them, six teachers and sixteen students in two departments, architecture and civil engineering.

The Technion began moving up the hill to Neve Sha'anan in the early 1950s. By 1965 the Faculty of Architecture was the only one still in Hadar. In the early 1980s a group of Technion professors converted two old classrooms into a place to show science to children, and in 1983 a first public exhibition opened in the workshop building under the name Technoda. A donation from the Recanati family in 1985 turned the operation into Israel's national science museum.

Accounts of when the building actually changed hands do not agree. The museum's own timeline puts the Technion's departure and the handover in 1984. Hebrew Wikipedia's article on the museum says the building passed to it in 1986, having served all faculties from 1925 to 1965 and the architects alone from 1965 to 1985. The difference is a year or two of overlap rather than a real dispute, but it is there in print.

The present name is younger than the museum. In 2006 it ran a public competition to find one, and MadaTech won: mada, science, joined to tech. The institution it inherited the building from had been through the same exercise. On Chaim Nachman Bialik's proposal, accepted in September 1924, the college was spelled in Hebrew with a tav rather than a tet, from the Hebrew word tekhen, on the argument that the Greek root had come from the Hebrew one in the first place. The spelling was settled as Technion only in 1945.

When the museum took the building over, later additions that had spoiled the elevations were removed and the rest was restored to Baerwald's original drawings. The Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel gave the museum a citation for that work. What a visitor sees from the plaza in front, which is named after Shlomo Kaplansky, is therefore closer to 1913 than the building was for much of the twentieth century.

The most literal survival inside is the historic classroom, kept close to what it was. The original furniture is still in place. There is a small hole in each wooden desk, which is where a student set an inkwell, and some of the chairs carry names that their occupants carved into them. The walls now hold a photographic exhibition of the Technion between the 1920s and the 1950s, with QR codes that open the same images on a phone.

Everything else is a museum fit-out inside old rooms, and it shows in the plan. Most of the permanent exhibitions take up a single former classroom each, which is why the historic building reads as a warren of small rooms rather than as open galleries; the newer displays are the ones that knocked two or three rooms together. The touring exhibitions, the innovation centre, the education wing's classrooms and laboratories and the Wanger family fab lab are all in the second building, the old workshop, whose main space is named Einstein Hall.

The Enigma room is built around a machine that Britain gave the Israeli army and that was partly converted to Hebrew, shown alongside interactive stations that let a visitor work the cipher and an account of Alan Turing's part in breaking it. The museum puts the chance of decoding a single letter unaided at one in 150,738,274,937,250 for the machine in its simple form, and far longer odds for the more complicated version on display.

The Nobel gallery is named for Aaron Ciechanover, who was born in Haifa and studied and taught at the Technion in this building before sharing the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose for the ubiquitin system. The museum says he gave it the original award, and the medal, 18 carat gold with a line from Virgil on the back, is shown with the diploma and with his 1982 doctoral thesis. The museum's page dates his decision to 2003, a year before the prize was announced, so the object is more reliable than the date attached to it.

The newest wing is space, opened on 2 August 2025. It includes a projection hall built as a spacecraft called Sababylon 5, recommended from age five and with an adult for children up to ten, and an exhibition of Israeli space hardware put together with Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael, Astroscale, SpacePharma, the Technion and the Israel Space Agency, among others. A guest exhibition from the American Museum of Natural History in New York shows visualisations built from James Webb, Hubble and Gaia observations. On Saturdays and school holidays the journey to space runs in timed groups rather than continuously, so it is worth doing early.

• The yellow wave: a room lit only in monochromatic yellow until a switch on the wall brings the other colours back
• The music room: a laser harp played by cutting the beams, and a vibrating plate that draws patterns in sand at different frequencies
• The innovation centre: three displays and an immersive hall that simulates a journey through the human body

The yard between the two main buildings reopened at Hanukkah in 2011 as a science park of about four dunams. It is divided into five courtyards, one each for Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernoulli, Newton and Pythagoras, and the exhibits in each were built around what that person worked out. There is an amphitheatre for about 400 people with a computer-controlled fountain laid out as a compass rose at its centre.

Archimedes gets a lever long enough to lift a sibling, a screw pump to turn by hand, and the array of mirrors he is supposed to have aimed at enemy sails, which the museum labels honestly as a system that may never have worked in practice. The da Vinci courtyard is the ideal city: dams, locks, pumps and paddle wheels built from his drawings, with the flow of water under visitor control. Pythagoras gets three outsized xylophones, in bells, wood and pipe, and a wheel that demonstrates his theorem using liquid.

The exhibit most people photograph is in the Bernoulli courtyard and is there because it would not go through a door: a real Israeli Kfir fighter, which the museum says many visitors have come to treat as its symbol. The park is also the part of the site where eating is allowed and where the water play is.