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Feb. 22, 2008
Creator of organic architecture
Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie is one of the world's most-respected designers.
EUGENE KAELLIS
New materials and engineering have enormously broadened design possibilities in architecture. Skyscrapers, for example, couldn't be built until elevators and steel framing were available. As new types of materials are developed and engineering techniques evolve, architecture, like the graphic arts, generates originality. Unlike the fine arts, however, architecture does not have to be sought out; it is exposed to view and even to habitation. Some people will like it, some won't. And so it is with the work of Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie.
Safdie was born in Haifa in 1938. When he was 16, his family moved to Montreal. In 1955, after winning 10 scholarships, he graduated from the McGilll School of Architecture. In a relatively short time, he had fashioned a worldwide reputation for originality.
Because building requires money, or the power to coerce, for millennia, monumental architecture has been the purview of governments or dominant and wealthy individuals. This has often generated conflict between the taste, imagination and technical knowledge of architects and the sometimes unrealistic wishes of their clients. Much of the world's imposing and famous architecture was built as an attempt at edificial immortality. This may have, consequently, made ordinary people the reluctant heirs of what is ugly, obtrusive, inappropriate and burdensomely expensive.
Whatever else may be said about Safdie's designs, they are not awe-inspiring; rather, they seem more organic and scaled to human proportions. Safdie is one of a rare group of architects who have the vision and strength to acquire important commissions while consistently expressing their unique style.
Safdie is known locally for his design of the new Vancouver Public Library, a commission he was awarded after a three-stage competition. Along with many of his other projects, it elicits strong feelings; people are rarely indifferent to it. The unique feature of the library is its surrounding free-standing elliptical wall and its concrete facing, made to resemble brown sandstone. Because of its tiers of arches, it has been called, sometimes admiringly, sometimes not, "Vancouver's coliseum."
The contrast between the new and the nearby old Vancouver library building, now a huge record store, is noteworthy. The latter is a simple, unadorned rectangular block of poured concrete, broken only by doors and windows. Its plan was influenced by the Bauhaus movement, which originated in Germany's Weimar Republic days. Bauhaus was essentially a post-First World War revolt against the architecture that had dominated Europe for centuries under the rule of monarchs – the building of exquisitely elaborate structures, pandering to their conceit and allegedly assuring their memory. Behind Bauhaus was anger at the terrible idiocy and misuse of power that had brought about the war and the collapse of Europe.
In deciding between the style of Bauhaus and, for example, Safdie, one could pose a question (perhaps simplistically): Which is more interesting, an egg box or a shoe box?
Safdie's breakthrough as a world-renown architect began with Habitat, the architectural showpiece designed for the 1967 Montreal World's Fair and still in use as a multiple-dwelling residence today. It exemplifies Safdie's "signature" – the repeated use of discrete, stacked, space-containing units; cubic at first, hexagonal and octagonal in later projects, in a variety of arrangements. Each house is made up of one, two or three boxes to form a one- or two-storey building of between three to seven rooms. Safdie conceived more than 15 types of arrangements, each one providing sunlight, with the roofs of the units below offering garden areas.
Habitat's engineering was based on cantilevers (projections supported at one end only), which permitted the unusual and varied stacking of the prisms, using overhangs and setbacks. In a later design for a New York project extending over the East River Drive, Safdie had a central tower containing the core utilities and elevators and the anchors of cables, which, in addition to cantilevers, supported the clusters of outspreading units arranged around the core.
While Habitat is in stark contrast to other buildings, and is possibly more "efficient" in land use, it consists of "shoe boxes" so familiar they usually go unnoticed.
A high proportion of Safdie's projects are in Israel. The yeshivah Porat Yosef, built on a steep escarpment, goes up 10 storeys from east to west along an elevation that faces the Western Wall. In this design, Safdie made unusual use of daylight. He incorporated translucent domes, containing prisms – in one case, acrylic prisms – filled with mineral oil, to provide the desired refraction, so that the interior has the full spectrum of the rainbow, reminiscent of stained glass. He also incorporated the traditional Middle Eastern half-arches to connect the building to regional historical culture.
As required by law, the buildings were faced with yellow sandstone from nearby quarries that confer a textural and chromatic unity, making Jerusalem, when caught in the bright Middle Eastern sun, in the opinion of many, the world's most beautiful city. The only comparable effect of light I have ever seen was, in Utah's Zion National Park, where huge smooth yellow sandstone facings reflect the desert sun.
The Hebrew Magen David College in Mexico City, designed by Safdie, was completed in 1990. It is a co-educational school providing facilities for more than 2,100 students, from kindergarten through high school. The large-windowed facing and the courtyard are protected from Mexico's fierce sunlight by vines, climbing plants and wooden louvres.
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa is also a Safdie design. Across the inlet from the Parliament Buildings, its tower culminates in steeply pitched mansard-like roofs. Safdie displays his ability to use light as an architectural feature: skylights and shafts lined with reflective material combine to provide natural light illumination for the galleries.
Safdie's design for the Harvard Business School Chapel displays his versatility. Its centrepiece is a large, 27-foot-high cylinder, seating 100, abutting a glass pyramidal structure. The cylinder is built out of concrete with green oxidized copper panels. Inclined skylights, rotated by computer control, capture the maximum amount of daylight and refract it into spectra on the interior walls.
In 1989, Safdie's was the winning entry for the renovation and expansion of Ottawa's city hall. Two new wings, perpendicular to the existing building and enclosing a courtyard, were accompanied by two double rows of trees and other outdoor elements, providing a pastoral-like setting.
Safdie claims that the greatest influence on his thinking is the biology of plant growth. Plants exhibit stability, self-protection and maximum exposure to light. They demonstrate what he calls a "vegetative architecture." And, true enough, if one half-closes one's eyes when looking at Habitat or some of the other Safdie-built projects, the structures seem to be organic, "growing" out of their surroundings.
Safdie is one of an estimated 30 architects in the world who are called upon internationally to design special structures.
Eugene Kaellis is a writer and a retired academic residing in New Westminster.
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