The humanist architecture of Moshe Safdie

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Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie

Donald Albrecht

Moshe Safdie gained a reputation as the architect of the audacious ‘Habitat’ project of stacked prefabricated housing at Expo 67 in Montreal. Only a fraction of the development was built; it proved more expensive to construct than anticipated, and failed to provide, as the architect intended, a solution for low-income housing. But the project still lives: 43 years later, it is the treasured habitat of enthusiastic upper-income people who enjoy many of the features that Safdie envisioned, not least the terraced gardens. His original premise was based on his belief that ‘suburban projects squandered land and resources while the urban ones lacked privacy and gardens’. His solution, conceived as a city-within-the-city, involved increasing the surfaces of buildings ‘to multiply opportunities to maximize light and views, but also to transform the mass of large buildings, perforating the surface so that, basketlike, you can see the sky beyond and allow the air to flow through the building mass’.

Safdie, who designed further Habitat-like projects for New York, Puerto Rico, Israel and Tehran, none of them built, continues to wrestle with the issues of high-density housing conceived in a humanistic manner. This book presents, in his own words, some of his analysis and design solutions for the habitat of the future. It also shows how similarly inspired design processes have led him to create, and bring to fruition, a series of outstanding buildings around the world that earn him the title ‘Global Citizen’. The essays in the book: ‘Creating a sense of place’ by Don Bacigalupi; ‘An extraordinary journey’ by Uri D Herscher; ‘Creating a humanist architecture’ by Donald Albrecht, and ‘Architecture as a vocation’ by Sarah Williams Goldhagen, show Safdie as an architect who is more interested in making places for human interaction than in building monuments.

Albrecht writes of ‘Safdie’s aesthetic language of transcendent light, powerful geometric form, and metaphoric imagery’, producing ‘buildings that are ceremonial and uplifting, without being intimidating’. The architecture, illustrated in the book with fine photographs, was commissioned by diverse clients, from the governments of the USA, Canada, Israel and Punjab, to cultural organizations and museums, and built on a variety of sites from city centres to a tree-lined valley in Arkansas.  The architect’s concern for the human scale is apparent as smaller spaces and elements mediate with massive structures. While embracing the tenets of modernism he often endows buildings with a playful character, expressed in changing rhythms, sweeping curves and unexpected juxtapositions. These characteristics are particularly evident in the Exploration Place Science Center in Witchita, Kansas, 1994–2000, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts 1996–2003 and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art at Bentonville, Arkansas, 2005–12, where the building hovers over cascades and dams. In the Khalsa Heritage centre in the holy city of Anandpur Sahib in the state of Punjab, which celebrates 500 years of Sikh history and faith, a path undulating beside a serpentine pool penetrates a graceful arch, and sandstone walls are crowned with exuberant roof forms. The Salt Lake City Public Library 1999–2002, described in Newsweek as ‘America’s unquietest library’, combines an internal street lined with shops and restaurants, an outdoor gathering space, with state-of the-art book stacks, and intimate reading areas.

Born in Haifa in 1938, Safdie grew up on a kibbutz as a passionate believer in the State of Israel. After his family moved to Canada, he worked briefly for Louis Kahn and studied at McGill University, winning the Habitat competition while still a graduate student. In 1978 he became director of the Urban Design programme at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and opened a Jerusalem Studio. He worked with students in three disciplines, focusing on planning and design issues in disputed areas, particularly the no-man’s land between Jewish and Palestinian neighbourhoods. Safdie, who had worked for Muslim patrons in three countries, intended his design for the Mamilla Center by the Wailing Wall to create a bridge between Israeli and Arab areas. In practice, the political realities proved insurmountable. He completed a skilful piece of urban design by knitting together ancient fabric with the new, but has not satisfied critics concerned with the political issues.  All the residents of the housing in the project are wealthy Jews.

The book is lavishly illustrated; the essays, although they sidestep political issues, are provocative and helpful in placing Safdie in the context of global architecture today.

Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie   by Donald Albrecht is published by Scala Publishers 2010, ₤19.95 $35.00. 143 pp., 78 colour/51 mono illus. ISBN 978-1-85759-587-1