Moshe Safdie: The Power of Architecture directed by Donald Winkler, Canada, 2005, 91 min., Beta SP, French/English w/subtitle

By Donald H. Harrison 



It was almost mandatory to use the photograph above for this film review, because Habitat 67 in Montreal was the project in which Israeli-born architect burst upon the world scene. Concerned that everybody wanted a home and a garden, yet urban land is scarce, a young Moshe Safdie designed a modular community in which concrete block homes were set into frames and stacked one atop the other in a way to provide both rooftop gardens and views of the river.

Curiously, what had been expected to be an antidote to the lack of low-cost housing in Montreal turned out just the reverse. The prestige of the project—built initially for Canada's Expo 67— catapulted the units into housing for the prestige-minded rich.  Safdie believed, however, that the idea of constraining costs by prefabricating the units would take root in other cities, but such has not been the case. Especially in urban areas, developers continue to build the kind of dreary, fortress-like public housing that once horrified Safdie while touring Philadelphia and Chicago as an architectural student.

Almost 30 years after Habitat 67, Safdie returned to the modular concept when he designed the Israeli city of Modi'in to accommodate 60,000 immigrants.  Built on the site from which the Maccabees sprung, the new city might have incorporated numerous architectural references to the Chanukah story.  However, there is no evidence of such in the documentary.  Instead, Safdie explains how he looked at the slope of the hills and decided that whatever buildings were built there should imitate the natural lines of that environment.  So, once again utilizing modular units both to keep costs down and to build more quickly, Safdie set one modular unit atop another with the roof of one serving as the patio or garden of another.  He emphasized different plant life  in different neighborhoods, to give each a sense of its own identity.  In one neighborhood, jacarandas and palms; in another, ficus; in a third, eucalyptus, all radiating from the circle of the city's inner core.

In between Habitat '67 and Modi'in, Safdie worked on public architecture projects in Canada, the United States and Israel, so much so that he became a tri-national figure with offices in each of these countries.  

Impressed by the reputation Safdie had made at Expo, Israel invited him to come back to the country his parents had left when he was a child.  It was the jubilant time after the Six Day War when Israel took possession of the old City of Jerusalem and with it, the Western Wall.  In return for Safdie opening a Jerusalem office, Israel gave him contracts to restore some of the buildings of the Old City—quite an undertaking because many of them were centuries old in terrible disrepair,and  without sewers or water.  So Safdie's assignment was to modernize the Old City, while maintaining its external architecture character.

Safdie purchased a home  with a breathtaking view of the hills of Jordan, the Dead Sea, Al Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, the Kotel and Mount Scopus lying before him in a panorama.  From the terrace of this home, which he remodeled, he contemplated Ha Kotel, and decided that it should be restored to its former grandeur. If dirt and silt that had built up over the ages were removed, he said, then the Western Wall actually would stand 30 feet taller, from bottom to top, than it does today—twice its current size.  Safdie proposed the creation of a series of plateaus stepping up and away from the base of the Wall, so that there could be numerous venues for people to worship and celebrate within the giant Wall's shadow.  However, the idea became a political football, with Safdie observing wryly that it became "more subject to coalition politics than to architectural debate."

Safdie's main office today is in Boston, where projects are modeled both on computers and physically. Using such techniques, Safdie developed his concepts for the performing arts center in Kansas City, for the main libraries in Philadelphia and Vancouver, for the reutilization of turnpike space in Boston, for the Mamilla Center in the former no-man's land dividing Jordanian and Israeli sections of Jerusalem, for the art museum in Salem, Mass., and, one supposes, the buildings of Eleanor Roosevelt College at UCSD.

Unfortunately for those of us who love to learn more about San Diego, Safdie's UCSD project was not mentioned in the documentary.  Safdie's daughter, Taal, an architect involved with that project, perhaps will fill in that gap when she sits in on a Feb. 16 showing of the film.   There is another "local angle" to the story that I'm sure the people up in Carlsbad will appreciate.  Safdie said that he spent considerable time as a child playing with lagos, which he said impose certain rules upon an architect (they have to fit together), but nevertheless leave plenty of room for the imagination. I would not have been surprised if Lagoland had underwritten the entire Film Festival in exchange for that endorsement.

As perhaps Israel's foremost architect, Safdie has dealt with other emotional issues in the land of his birth.  He hates the border wall  now being constructed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, declaring that anything that ugly can't be good.  He has been one of the guiding architectural forces behind Yad Vashem, Israel's National Holocaust Memorial and Museum.  In particular, he designed the stunning Children's Memorial as an experiential place, rather than as one with yet more information about the Holocaust.  One walks through a darkened tunnel around candles that reflect off prisms to create the image of 1.5 million flames—one for each child murdered in the Holocaust. A roll call of actual victims' names adds to the emotional impact.

Upon the invitation of Leah Rabin, he also designed the memorial to slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin upon Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem, and is the architect behind the Rabin Center in Tel Aviv, which is much like an American presidential library.  Interestingly, there are gardens at the center named for U.S. President Bill Clinton and for the late Jordanian King Hussein.

Safdie shares with us that whenever he takes on a project, he likes to walk over the land where it will be built, absorbing the feel of the land, gaining inspiration from it.  It is not unusual, he says, for him to have a magical moment of inspiration during such walks—when a geographic feature, or a viewshed, will help crystallize his thoughts about how his structure should be designed or oriented.