Moshe Safdie's master's thesis quickly became a cult building: his modular "Habitat '67" apartments for Montreal Expo '67. Within a dizzying pile of concrete, each apartment was carefully sited to have natural light and a tiny, private outdoor space for gardening. These themes have carried forward throughout Safdie's career -- his buildings tend to soak in the light, and to hold cozy, user-friendly spaces inside larger gestures.
He's a triple citizen of Canada, Israel and the United States, three places where the bulk of his buildings can be found: in Canada, the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Vancouver public library. For Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, he designed the Children's Memorial and the Memorial to the Deportees; he's also built airport terminals in Tel Aviv. In the US, he designed the elegant and understated Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Masachusetts, and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.
“Whoever said we mellow with age obviously hadn't met Moshe Safdie. The Israeli-Canadian architect continues to work on grand projects at a prodigious rate, while remaining an outspoken critic of the shortcomings and blind spots of current architectural practice.” — Leaf Review
By Liz Jacobs and Helen Walters It’s often said that good design is invisible design — it makes things easy and delightful without us realizing it. But as host Chee Pearlman reminds us at the top of the session, we’re here to honor the “D” in “TED.” From the artistic to the architectural to the […]
Continue readingLooking back over a long career, architect Moshe Safdie digs deep into four extraordinary projects to talk about the unique choices he made on each building — choosing where to build, pulling information from the client, and balancing the needs and the vision behind each project. Sketches, plans and models show how these grand public […]
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