If Walls Could Speak E-Book

Moshe Safdie

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Over more than five decades, legendary architect Moshe Safdie has built some of the world's most influential and memorable structures - from the 1967 modular housing scheme in Montreal known as Habitat to the Marina Bay Sands development in Singapore. For Safdie, the way a space functions is fundamental; he is deeply committed to architecture as a social force for good, believing that any challenge, including extreme population density and environmental distress, can be addressed with solutions that enhance community and uplift the human spirit. If Walls Could Speak takes readers behind the veil of an essential yet mysterious profession to explain through Safdie's own experiences how an architect thinks and works - from the spark of imagination through the design process, the model-making, the politics, the engineering, the materials. Relating memorable stories about what has inspired him - from childhoods in Israel and Montreal to the projects and personalities worldwide that have captured his imagination - Safdie reveals the complex interplay that underpins every project and his vision for the role architecture can and should play in society at large. Illustrated throughout with drawings, sketches, photographs, and documents from his firm's voluminous archives, If Walls Could Speak is a book like no other, and will forever change the way you look at and appreciate any built structure.

Leseprobe

If Walls Could Speak

Also by Moshe Safdie:

With Intention to Build: The Unrealized Concepts, Ideas, and Dreams of Moshe Safdie

Megascale, Order & Complexity

The City after the Automobile: An Architect’s Vision (with Wendy Kohn)

Jerusalem: The Future of the Past

Beyond Habitat by 20 Years

The Harvard Jerusalem Studio: Urban Designs for the Holy City

Form & Purpose

For Everyone a Garden

Beyond Habitat

First published in the United States of America in 2022 by Grove Atlantic First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © 2022 by Moshe Safdie

The moral right of Moshe Safdie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Book design: Michael Gericke, with Reid Parsekian

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press UK Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 657 6 Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 873 0

Printed in Great Britain

For Michal, on our fiftieth together

CONTENTS

Prologue

A Week in the Life

Chapter One

A House on a Hill

Chapter Two

Ideas and Mentors

Chapter Three

The World of Habitat

Chapter Four

Old City, New City

Chapter Five

Private Jokes in Public Places

Chapter Six

“Does God Live There?”

Chapter Seven

Cutting through the Mountain

Chapter Eight

The Power of Place

Chapter Nine

Megascale

Chapter Ten

What If?

Chapter Eleven

Faith and Peace

Afterword

What I Believe

Acknowledgments

Projects by Moshe Safdie

Illustration Credits

Index

A swim in the infinity pool, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, 2010.

PROLOGUE

A Week in the Life

The offices of Safdie Architects are lodged in a four-story industrial brick structure, built at the end of the nineteenth century. It sits unobtrusively on a side street in Somerville, Massachusetts, fifteen minutes’ walk from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Over the years, the building has served as a wicker factory, a wine-wholesaling warehouse, and a motor-maintenance shop. Our firm occupied the premises in 1982. We cleaned up the interior but kept the bones basically intact. The brick structure is supported by a frame of massive wood beams and columns, with elegant cast-iron capitals—the topmost feature—forming the connection between column and beam. Large, subdivided, steel-framed windows punctuate the brick exterior. Eventually, we expanded the building, adding three bays on the back and a new fourth floor. There was ivy climbing the building, here and there, when we bought the place. Today the exterior is covered completely with a combination of Boston and English ivy. From the outside, the building appears leafy and green, with hardly any brick visible at all. In a gentle breeze, it seems to breathe. A raccoon has established a nest outside the window of my personal office, sheltered by the ivy. It sleeps against the pane most of the day—a calming presence.

On this Thursday morning in early 2020 I arrive at the office by car, a five-minute drive from my house in Cambridge. I had been back in the office for an uninterrupted two-week stretch—something of a rarity. In two days, I will be leaving again. Somerville may be the location of our headquarters, but the practice is worldwide, and much of the work in recent years has come from Asia. The pandemic, when it came, would momentarily disrupt our habits but not the work itself. My associates and I had just been in Singapore for the official opening of Jewel Changi, a retail-and-entertainment complex at the airport centered on a vast, toroidal dome of glass that caps a terraced tropical forest. A cascade of rainwater—the tallest indoor waterfall in the world—falls continuously from the oculus. At the opening ceremony, the prime minister had cut the ribbon. He had generous things to say about the design. Members of my office, along with my family, joined the celebration. We also celebrated the marriage of Jaron Lubin, a partner in our firm, to Helen Han, also an architect, with the waterfall as a backdrop. Jaron had served as one of two project principals in charge of Jewel. In Singapore, the family and the traveling staff stayed at Marina Bay Sands, the waterfront development that our firm had also designed and built—now a decade old and a Singapore landmark. If you have seen Crazy Rich Asians, then you have seen Marina Bay Sands, which is the setting for many scenes in the movie. The opening of the Jewel complex was the culmination of a six-year effort. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to Jewel on the first day, for the soft opening, and then kept coming. (There would be 50 million visitors in the first six months.) The mood upon our return to the office was jubilant.

The indoor waterfall at Jewel Changi, Singapore.

The premises in Somerville are a welcoming place on any day, under any circumstance—designed that way to enhance the functional, collegial spirit that a firm such as ours needs, and also to showcase some of our values in a modest way. From the glass front doors, a visitor looks down a passage that opens into a view of the full length of the building, all the way to the soft glow of natural light at the rear. The interior is expansive and layered—catwalks, open staircases, unimpeded views. From any space on any floor, you can see the rest of the activity on the floor, and from various places on any floor you can see parts of every other floor. I sometimes wonder what the artist M. C. Escher might have made of the place.

You enter the building on what is actually the second floor—it seems to a visitor like the ground floor, but there is a level underneath devoted to our business offices and, mostly, to the model workshop, a place where I could happily pass many hours of any day. On the lobby walls hang photographs of some of our signature projects—Jewel and Marina Bay Sands, of course; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Arkansas, commissioned by Alice Walton; and Habitat ’67, in Montreal, the residential complex designed for Expo 67, which jump-started my career—but also, nearby, photographs of the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, in Israel; the Skirball Cultural Center, in Los Angeles; the United States Institute of Peace headquarters, in Washington, D.C.; and the Khalsa Heritage Centre, in Punjab, India. There are also many photographs of the eight new towers just built in Chongqing, in China—at the urban prow where two great rivers meet—that have redefined the core of one of the world’s largest cities.

The second and third floors consist mainly of open drafting areas, interspersed with models—projects built but also projects that, for some reason, never came to fruition, such as Columbus Circle, in New York City, a bewildering story; and the National Museum of China, a promising venture that fell apart for reasons I still don’t quite understand. The drafting room is now an anachronistic name for a space filled with computers, where no one except old-timers like me “drafts” with a pencil or pen. Almost everyone at Safdie Architects works in this common space, subdivided by low partitions. The computers in some cubicles have two or three screens. I happen to love physical models—to me, they are in fact essential—but digital drafting, where designs can be rotated and flipped and manipulated every which way, is how almost all the drawings in the office are created.

Our offices in a former factory and warehouse in Somerville, Massachusetts, just over the line from Cambridge.

My wife, Michal Ronnen Safdie, 1973. The magazine was marking the State of Israel’s twenty-fifth year.

My own office, where I can hold meetings and small conferences—private except for the raccoon—is on the third floor. One wall is filled with books and little toys inspired by our projects, such as a Lego version of Marina Bay Sands. Behind my desk, the wall is covered with photographs of children and grandchildren. My daughter Taal and her family at Machu Picchu. My son, Oren, and his family in Egypt. My daughters Carmelle and Yasmin in Jerusalem. My wife, Michal, on the cover of Newsweek, back in 1973. There is a photograph from the day I showed the historical museum at Yad Vashem to Barack Obama, then a young senator. And a cartoon from The New Yorker poking gentle fun at Habitat ’67. I spend most of the day not in my office but walking from desk to desk, meeting one team after the next, sharing sketches I may have worked on the night before or brought back from a trip and perhaps sitting with an associate by a computer screen and watching as ideas are developed in three dimensions.

The topmost floor consists of a very large conference room from which you can see the skyline of downtown Boston. The room can seat forty people. We built it when we were working on Marina Bay Sands, having learned something important about cultural variety and the different ways of doing business around the world. For giant Asian projects—like Jewel, like Chongqing—clients will fly in people from everywhere for workshops. There is a hierarchy that must be respected. There are people who must be included in any meeting. Elements of process may be as sacrosanct as they are unclear. It is not like brainstorming on the back of a napkin in a coffeeshop.

Today we are meeting with people from yet another unfamiliar culture—a team from Facebook, now called Meta, which has flown in from Menlo Park, California. We have just finished a large model for the new complex that Mark Zuckerberg intends to build at the corporate-headquarters site. The model for Project Uplift, as Meta/Facebook calls the effort, is at a scale of one inch equals twenty feet, and physically about seven feet long by four feet wide. The project was the outcome of a design competition completed only three months earlier. The challenge was to find a way to connect the two existing corporate campuses with a proposed third campus. The area in between wasn’t empty—it encompassed highways, wetlands, and some urban development—and somehow had to be bridged. And the new campus had to be multipurpose, including not only an office complex but also a hotel and a town square. In the end, our team won the commission, producing a design that includes an elliptical park hovering above the terrain and connecting major structures, and also a domed garden setting, the Forum, for conferences and public programs. Now, months into the process, two presentations have already been made to Zuckerberg. Both meetings were short, preceded by intense planning and targeted on the very narrow open slots in his schedule. In a conference room, the models and drawings were laid out on tables. Zuckerberg, in his gray sweatshirt, took it all in and focused on the essentials.

Today, with the company’s leadership team, we are discussing in more detail the program for the Forum, as well as issues that will need to be addressed in order to obtain the complex approvals needed from local and state agencies in California. Getting approvals—negotiating a design through the maze of building codes, zoning laws, and community boards, which differ from place to place but are byzantine everywhere—is a big and unglamorous part of what any architect does. And it is a reminder that architecture does not exist on some abstract, ethereal plane where demigods wave their wands. It is grounded in actual places filled with actual people.

Client meeting at our offices, 2019: reviewing the design for Meta/Facebook’s new campus, to be built in Menlo Park, California.

The Meta/Facebook meeting ends after lunch. I spend the afternoon in the drafting areas to meet with various teams. Some are working on construction documents for a medical school we are building in São Paulo, Brazil. We have just received samples of materials from the site, and there are details to review of the vast glass-and-steel roof structure being developed and manufactured in Germany. Another team is working on a new apartment complex in Quito, Ecuador. We have already presented and obtained approval for the overall concept and are now beginning what is known as the schematic-design phase. New input from the engineers has been received, with various alternatives for how we might refine the geometry. Across the room, our interior-design team is assembling samples and color swatches of carpets, tiles, and woods for the hospital we are building in Cartagena, Colombia. We then review the patient rooms, waiting areas, and restaurants.

By five o’clock, I am back at my desk. Emails have begun to accumulate, and some need an immediate response—queries from our field offices in Singapore, Shanghai, and Jerusalem. At any given moment, our firm has projects worth several billion dollars in some phase of development. The projects are spread across twelve time zones. Somehow, all of this is managed with a staff of eighty in Boston and twenty to thirty, all told, at the field offices. I respond to the emails as needed, by degree of urgency, often adding sketches to elaborate a point or to explain my larger thinking. By seven o’clock, I’m at home, earlier than usual, for a quiet dinner with Michal. I report on the day’s events; Michal reacts and advises. She responds with joy to the good stories and tends to take disappointing news harder than I do. Our lives and our work—Michal is a photographer—are totally intertwined.

Marina Bay Sands, immortalized in Lego.

Friday: the last day before a marathon trip. As always on the final day, there is a rush to review everything that must be done. We are working intensively on a presentation that I am to take to Singapore—to be given to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) for a major addition to Marina Bay Sands. The 3D printer and the model shop are in overdrive, completing the model and preparing it for the trip. Almost everyone has seen architectural models, but few pause to consider what is involved in safely sending a big model halfway around the world. We not only need to construct crush-proof containers but also to fit them out with large windows to satisfy the security screeners and make clear to baggage handlers that the contents are indeed delicate. The art of packaging is itself a form of architecture.

For me, ever since my earliest days in architecture school and then my apprenticeship with Louis Kahn, the model shop has always been a magical place. At our firm, seven professionals toil away full-time making large- and small-scale models: the study models, the presentation models, the small mock-ups. Some building models are so big you can stick your head inside and see the interiors. Other models re-create an entire urban district or rugged rural landscape, showing a proposed building in context. Looking around the model shop, I see saws and drills, paint booths, 3D printers, laser cutters, and sheets of wood and Styrofoam and multicolor plastic. Cabinets with scores of drawers hold tiny figures of people at different scales, and tiny escalators at different scales, and tiny cars and boats and airplanes. There is material for making manicured lawns and desert scrub, fresh water and ocean, and trees and bushes of every kind: Aspen. Oak. Maple. White pine. Palm. In our projects, sustainability and the integration of architecture, site, and plant life demand that a model fully describe both the building and the landscape. The little drawers are full of material that helps us capture this ambition.

By evening (seven p.m. in Boston is eight the next morning in Singapore), we have a Webex conference call about the Marina Bay Sands addition. With this form of global videoconference, we can project images for all the participants to see, and during the meeting we can draw on the images and revise them in other ways. Later, when the pandemic lockdown took hold, in the spring of 2020, video-conferencing would keep our projects worldwide moving forward on schedule. This conference call today involves the client team, our associate architect in Singapore, and the engineering teams we are working with, based in New York. We discuss how the meeting will go on Tuesday in Singapore: what to watch out for, issues that might be raised, lingering challenges.

The next day, Michal and I fly to New York to catch a Singapore Airlines flight to Changi. Between flights, we sneak in a couple of hours with our two-year-old grandchild, Gene, Carmelle’s son. The trip to Singapore, door to door, is a long one—close to twenty-four hours. I settle into the nonstop eighteen-hour flight from Newark, New Jersey, which consumes most of Sunday. As always, I do a bit of work, a bit of reading. I make sketches in my notebooks—a practice I’ve followed for sixty years. I have amassed more than two hundred of these notebooks, sequentially numbered, going back to the early 1960s. On long flights I generally watch a movie. There are many foreign films available on Singapore Airlines, and I always look for European or Asian films that I’d be unlikely to encounter at theaters in Boston or even New York. On this trip I watch a Polish film, Paweł Pawlikowski’s astonishing Cold War. I sleep for at least eight hours—which is essential, because I will have to start work immediately upon landing. I have the necessary luxury of flying first class and—having spent decades traveling in seats you could not sleep in, even when traveling first class—am grateful that these long flights now have comfortable sleeper seats. Some even offer suites.

We land early Monday morning, Singapore time. I always make sure a pool is available in the hotels where I stay, because I try to swim every day. During the warmer months in Boston, and even some of the not so warm ones, such as late September, I swim in the mornings at Walden Pond, in Concord—the setting is beautiful and the discipline important. On this trip, after a swim at the hotel, I prepare for the meeting with the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Then, at noon, we hold a rehearsal. By two o’clock we have convened with government officials—presenting, discussing, getting input and suggestions. Our firm and the URA have a long history of successful experience together. We share the agency’s belief in the role of urban design—to bring together multiple projects to form cohesive urban districts. It is a mutually respectful relationship, and the meeting is a good one.

In the evening, Michal and I have dinner with my client and by now close friend Liew Mun Leong, formerly chairman of CapitaLand, Singapore’s largest developer, for whom we have undertaken several megaprojects. Liew at the time was the chairman of Changi Airport, under whose auspices we completed Jewel, as well as of Surbana Jurong, Singapore’s largest architecture and engineering firm, for which we are designing a new headquarters building. Whenever I am in Singapore, one evening is devoted to catching up with Liew. We try different restaurants. The conversations range widely, from the state of the world to the various activities both of us are involved in. We often discuss books we have read, recent trips, and political developments in the United States, Israel, Singapore, and China. Liew is fit and energetic—he is a runner—and he speaks in rapid bursts. I must concentrate to take it all in.

On Tuesday, we are back at the airport for the six-hour flight to Chongqing, a city in the People’s Republic of China that few people know much about, even though the municipality as a whole has a population of 33 million. Chongqing is also the site of the largest project that our office, so far, has designed and built: a 12-million-square-foot mixed-use complex known as Raffles City, on the historic and strategic site of Chaotianmen Square. This is where the Yangtze and the Jialing Rivers converge, forming a wedge somewhat like the tip of lower Manhattan—the Emperor’s Landing, as it’s known. It is the most symbolically charged site in the city. The project was the outcome of a design competition we pursued jointly with CapitaLand, which is vigorously engaged with development in China.

Raffles City, in Chongqing, China, 2020—eight towers on the “prow” known as the Emperor’s Landing.

The term “design competition” sounds straightforward, but competitions are time-consuming, expensive, and unavoidable. In a firm such as ours, more than half the projects we undertake are obtained through some type of competition, compelling us to butt heads against firms whose principals are peers and in some cases personal friends—Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, and others. Most of these are invited competitions, in which a limited number of “short-listed” firms are engaged, usually with some sort of stipend. But the stipend may cover as little as 10 percent of the cost of doing the actual work. For one major museum project in China, for which we proceeded through four competition stages before ultimately losing out, our firm spent approximately $1 million. The larger and more complex the project, the greater the risk and the expense. It is almost impossible for a medium or large firm, given its overhead and expectations, to participate in a competition for less than a few hundred thousand dollars. The uncompensated outlay can exceed several millions of dollars when dealing with, say, a competition for a major international airport. And the dynamic can be insidious: the more ambitious the firm, and the more tempting the project, the more leverage the client has in getting that short list of architects to invest more and more of their own resources in the competition. We win about half of our submissions, but that statistic is misleading—we’ll sometimes have several winners in a row and then a baffling sequence of losers, causing dejected spirits and financial stress. I often wonder how the renowned architect Zaha Hadid endured years of rejection before emerging into a thriving career—a mark of her deep and sustained conviction.

Happily, we had come out on top in Chongqing. Now, after eight years of design and construction, the project is nearing completion. For several years, I had been traveling to Shanghai or Chongqing every six to eight weeks, reviewing the details, the mock-ups, the materials. In Chongqing, I have walked the site on more hot summer days than I can count, in temperatures often reaching one hundred degrees. I have walked the site on frigid winter days too. Chongqing’s extreme and variable climate is the reason we decided to create an enclosed conservatory—which links four of the eight skyscrapers, on the fiftieth floor—rather than an open sky park, like the one that creates the green whoosh of a parkland plateau atop Marina Bay Sands. Think of the conservatory as a “horizontal skyscraper”—a thousand-foot-high tower lying on its side. Imagine if the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building, and 30 Rockefeller Center were clustered together in lower Manhattan and connected by that horizontal skyscraper—an enclosed version of the High Line in a tube, eight hundred feet above street level. The conservatory has been acknowledged by Guinness World Records as the world’s longest sky bridge. Here, at the prow of Chongqing, we are creating a new kind of urban canopy, a new way to mitigate density by means of a parklike resource up in the sky, linking people in buildings who would otherwise be many altitudes and elevator trips apart.

The conservatory in Chongqing, a landscaped sky bridge.

We land in Chongqing at one o’clock and are off to the site immediately. We have two days and a lot of territory to cover. We must review the retail podium, the apartment towers, the offices, the hotel, and the conservatory, now nearing completion. At this point, we are mostly down to fine-tuning the last details—adjusting the lighting, checking the signage, improving the interiors. All the big decisions were made long ago. The elevators have been installed, and to everyone’s relief, much of the space is already air-conditioned. But it is essential to inspect in person. On-site, my eyes are wide open, like an owl’s, alert for what others may not have observed and for new conditions that need watching. For instance, there is construction dust on the leaves of the trees in the conservatory—an eighth of an inch, threatening thousands of newly planted trees and shrubs. An army of cleaners must be summoned to sponge every leaf.

That night, we have a team dinner at a large round table, and the client and many of the consultants join the architects from our firm who have been on the site for the past five years. The next afternoon, on Wednesday, with our work at Chongqing finished, we fly to the gleaming city of Shenzhen, on the Chinese mainland near Hong Kong. Two weeks ago, at the opening of Jewel Changi, we had met with Shenzhen’s vice mayor and the chairman of its airport authority. They had in fact brought an entire delegation with them. Word had gotten out about Jewel: that it had changed the paradigm of airport design. Americans, in particular, may not realize it, accustomed as they are to accepting the dreariness and inconvenience, and sometimes outright squalor, of many substandard airports, but in Asia, airport design is highly competitive—a fierce battle for supremacy. Singapore’s Changi has enjoyed the presumptive status of “best airport in the world” for several years—the designation is bestowed by Skytrax, the international air-transport rating organization—and Jewel is a facility that no other airport can match. But Shenzhen would like to try. The city recently completed the construction of a much-photographed new airport, designed by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas. The meeting in Shenzhen concerns the possibility of creating a Jewel-like complex—but even bigger—to go with it. Shenzhen was China’s first “special economic zone.” Its municipal administration is considered enlightened. It is also ambitious—even by Chinese standards, which have few apparent boundaries.

Upon landing at Shenzhen, we are received at the airplane’s door by the airport’s chief executive officer—always a good sign—and escorted immediately to a banquet. We are joined by Jaron Lubin and Charu Kokate—a partner from our firm’s Singapore office—who arrived several hours earlier. Over Cantonese delicacies (duck, abalone, dumplings) the airport’s CEO and its chairman, along with their team, describe what they have in mind: the scale, the program, the vision.

The next morning, Thursday, we tour the airport and the site of the proposed complex. It is to be an airport city—a node of high-end offices and high-tech research centered on our own catalyzing project, which we have come to refer to as the Crystal. Then there is another banquet, this one joined by officials from Shenzhen. It is lively and jovial, the traditional toasting fervent, frequent, and prolonged. Fortunately, the toasts do not involve the Chinese spirit Maotai, which is very strong. Perhaps in deference to a visitor, or to the hour, the toasts merely involve sips of Bordeaux. In the afternoon, we are taken around the city, a place that has evolved from Hong Kong’s backyard hinterland to a metropolis of 12 million in two generations. China never ceases to elicit amazement, just as its governance and bureaucratic systems never cease to produce bafflement. But from what we have learned during our two days in Shenzhen, the airport project seems to be ours.

This is good news, but the real work and the real risk lie ahead. Design aside, the economics of architecture are daunting. In the United States, beginning decades ago, antitrust legislation forbade architects from establishing a standardized schedule of fees. Henceforward, each architect had to negotiate an overall fee—in advance—with every new commission. To appreciate the extent to which this does not make sense, consider the legal profession, where fees are generally charged by the hour at rates that cover cost and overhead (and of course profit). In contrast, the architect’s fee, fixed at an early stage of the project, sets two contradictory objectives. Carrying out the work responsibly requires that you devote to it all the hours it takes, including oversight of construction. At the same time, the business manager at the firm is always watching the clock.

The raccoon in my office window.

The scope of a project like the Marina Bay Sands development was in the billions of dollars. Our overall design fee included fees for local architectural firms playing supporting roles, as well as for multiple engineers and specialists on matters ranging from landscape to graphics to acoustics—by themselves totaling in the low nine figures. The number of people involved from some of these architectural and engineering firms could be as many as fifty. The duration of construction was set for a certain number of years, but unforeseen circumstances could easily produce unexpected delays. Hurricane Katrina once forced our team to rethink the design of a federal courthouse we were planning in Mobile, Alabama. Inflation and fluctuations in exchange rates can have corrosive consequences. When we embarked on Lester B. Pearson International Airport’s Terminal 1, in Toronto, for instance, we had a contract payable in Canadian dollars. At the start of the project, a Canadian dollar was worth ninety American cents. At the finish, it was worth sixty-five cents, cutting mightily into our fee. Virtually every component of a project like Marina Bay Sands—or Chongqing or Shenzhen or the Salt Lake City Public Library—turns out to be, in essence, a variable: the time, the people, the materials, the costs, and the state of the world, including during a pandemic. And yet, the architect is expected, in advance, to commit to a fixed fee and to bear the loss if one or more variables spiral out of control. You can set contingencies and safety factors, and sometimes renegotiate, but given the range of imponderables, architecture is a high-risk profession.

It is also a deeply satisfying one. The results make a difference in people’s lives: the way people work and sleep and travel; the way they consume the planet’s resources; the way they derive aspiration and inspiration from the built environment around them. There are few greater pleasures than visiting a project that is fully occupied and functioning as planned, and hearing from residents or workers about how their lives have changed for the better.

In the afternoon we make the two-hour trip from Shenzhen to Hong Kong airport to catch Cathay Pacific’s direct flight home. It is Saturday in Boston when we land. The time is eleven p.m. A week has elapsed since the trip began. I take Sunday off, catching up with friends, listening to music. On Monday I drive once again the five minutes from my home to my office.

The ivy rustles. The interior beckons with light. We pick up where we left off.

Haifa, from the slopes of Mount Carmel, in the 1940s—the city I knew as a boy. The view is similar to the view from our apartment.

CHAPTER ONE

A House on a Hill

As I reach further into my eighties, traveling around the planet several times a year, I think of the long journey that brought me improbably from the city of Haifa, before the State of Israel even existed, to the adventure in architecture I have pursued for six decades.

Haifa, now in Israel, was during my childhood administered by the British under the Mandate for Palestine, conferred by the League of Nations. Indeed, the British headquarters were in Haifa. The city lies at the southern end of a long crescent bay, with Acre anchoring the far end and the Lebanon mountains visible to the north. Haifa rose along Mount Carmel in layers. On the waterfront was the port, built and controlled by the British. It extended eastward toward the bay, where the oil refinery of the Iraq-Mediterranean pipeline, with its pair of iconic chimneys, had its terminus. Along the port was the main downtown boulevard, then known as Kingsway, now Independence Road. It accommodated the banks and business district. Immediately behind this was the lower city, or the Old Town, as it was known, its architecture mostly Arab-Mediterranean vernacular, with narrow streets and crowded markets. A wafting aroma of spices and meat roasting on wood fires filled the air. The architecture was stone—warm and Mediterranean, vaulted and domed. Since childhood I have loved domes. There is a spiritual element, I am sure—circularity symbolizes unity—but the practical, evolutionary aspect, which I would learn about only later, inspires awe in its own right: in desert regions without many trees to provide wood, domes built of brick or stone are the only means to span a large room.

Upward from the Old Town, then as now, the city changed color and character as it rose in elevation. Midway up the slopes of Mount Carmel was a neighborhood, Hadar HaCarmel, of white, Bauhaus-style buildings. At the center of Hadar HaCarmel was the campus of the Technion—today, Israel’s equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast to the stark, modern simplicity of the Bauhaus style, the Technion was a domed, symmetrical winged structure built with buff stone arcades—a European attempt at Romantic Orientalist architecture. Farther up the hill were the Baha’i Gardens, the holiest place for the Baha’i religion, where its founder is buried. I thought of these gardens in my youth as the most beautiful place in the world—the embodiment of paradise. Finally, at the crest, with extraordinary views over the harbor and the city, stood a precinct of landscaped villas and low apartment buildings. The population on the summit was dominated by highly educated and sophisticated German-Jewish immigrants—professors, professionals, businesspeople—whom the less rarified referred to as yekkes, a term derived from the acronym for the Hebrew phrase “fails to understand.” They were made fun of—for instance, because of their accent when they spoke their newly acquired tongue—but at the same time deeply respected. They were the ones, together with other Europeans from Eastern Europe, who had brought Bauhaus architecture to Haifa and Palestine in the first place. Classical music could be heard as you passed their open windows on a warm afternoon. The crest of Mount Carmel was thick with pine trees. To this day, every time I smell pine, I think of Haifa. It remains a beautiful city.

I was born in Haifa on Bastille Day 1938. My parents had met in the city a little over a year earlier. My father, Leon Safdie, had come from his hometown of Aleppo, in Syria, in 1936. He was the ninth of ten children in a Jewish merchant family. It was never clear to me what had brought him to Haifa. Was he a Zionist? Was he looking to carve out his own turf in a family with too many competitors? But there he was, setting up his own trading business. He imported textiles, quality woolens, and cottons from England, and fabrics from Japan and India for the local markets. My mother, Rachel Safdie, née Esses, was English, but she too came from a Jewish family with roots in Aleppo. Her father’s business was also in textiles, and he and his family had emigrated to England at the turn of the century, settling in Manchester, which at the time was a global hub of textile manufacturing. My mother was born in that city and brought up as a good English girl. She had a strong Mancunian accent all her life.

In 1937, my mother, age twenty-three, had embarked from Manchester on a trip to visit her sister Gladys, who lived in Jerusalem. She had sailed from England to the port of Haifa, intending to make her way overland from there to Jerusalem. Disembarking, she almost immediately met a young man who had an office near the docks. She married him a month later. With a world war breaking out not long afterward, a decade would pass before she returned to Britain. My father spoke Arabic and a poor Hebrew and had been educated in French, and so was fluent in that language; my mother spoke English and also knew a little French. They did not at first even have a strong common language. I was the first of their children; two more, Gabriel and Sylvia, came within a few years; and a fourth, Lilian, arrived when I was eighteen, and the family was living in Canada.

The Jews of Aleppo were broadly known as Mizrahi, or Eastern Jews, but most of them also claimed to be Sephardic—that is, descended from the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition at the end of the fifteenth century. (Sepharad is the Hebrew word for “Spain.”) In fact, the Aleppo population also included many Jews whose ancestors had never left the Middle East. The Sephardim spoke Ladino, a Spanish dialect, though in time the old Middle Easterners took on Ladino as well, making the distinction between the two groups difficult to ascertain. In the world of Jewry, strongly divided into Ashkenazi (European) and Eastern Jews, the Jews of Aleppo, no matter what their actual origin, belonged to the Eastern group. My own family came originally from the town of Safed, in Galilee—hence the surname Safdie, variants of which (Safdié, Safadi, Safdi) can also be found among Muslim, Christian, and Druze families. Sometime during the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, driven by the economic decline of Safed, many Jews had moved north from Galilee to Aleppo.

The Technion, in Haifa, designed by Alexander Baerwald and completed in 1924—a flagship of Jewish education in Palestine.

In Haifa, my family lived at first in a three-story Bauhaus-style apartment building in the bourgeois neighborhood of Hadar HaCarmel, home to much of the city’s large Jewish community. I went to kindergarten on the campus of the Technion and recall being allowed to walk there by myself at the age of four or five, my mother watching from the balcony as I crossed Balfour Street, thus entering the campus, until I was out of sight. At this early age I already enjoyed a sense of true independence, a feeling that would become even more pronounced in my teens—an experience familiar to many Israelis of my generation.

The onset of the Second World War provides some of my earliest memories. On Friday evenings, we hosted Jewish soldiers from the Australian Army for Shabbat dinner. We went down into the air-raid shelter in the basement of the apartment building almost nightly. I remember looking with excitement at the giant silver barrage balloons that were launched above the bay, tethered to cables that served as obstacles to air attack. I remember stone towers along the waterfront emitting smoke to camouflage the oil refinery, which was the main reason Haifa was an enemy target to begin with. Luckily for us, the enemy wasn’t the Luftwaffe—it was the Regia Aeronautica, and while the Italians did score a couple of hits and inflict some damage, they never landed a crippling blow.

Unlike Haifa, Jerusalem was never bombed during the war. My mother’s sister Gladys lived in Jerusalem with her husband and four children. To escape the dangers of the coast, my own family stayed there for an extended period in 1940, during which my brother, Gabriel, was born. Traveling from Haifa to Jerusalem was a major undertaking in the early 1940s—four or five hours by bus on dusty roads, stopping now and again for breaks and refreshments at little shops offering falafel, orange juice, and sandwiches.

I did not enjoy staying with my aunt and uncle. Their home in Jerusalem was small and therefore crowded, and they were very religious and deeply observant, which my own family was not. They were also aggressively zealous. My uncle, an imposing figure, once offered to give me a pound sterling if I promised not to use electricity on Shabbat for an entire year—this was back in a day when a pound was worth four dollars. I can still see the silver coin in his hand. But I declined the offer. Judaism and spirituality weave through my life in important and distinctive ways, but the implacable religiosity of my aunt and uncle’s family—their attempted imposition of orthodoxy—served only to fortify my resistance.

The commercial center of Haifa, 1940. An influx of modernist architects shaped many parts of the city.

Jerusalem itself I loved, especially the Old City, with its narrow passageways and up-and-down steps everywhere. I wandered the souks, with their spice counters and local crafts. The almost orchestral hum of languages and dialects was matched by the diversity in forms of dress—Muslim women covered modestly in many colors, British soldiers in khaki shorts, religious Jews in black, English women in floral hats. The sonorous tolling of church bells punctuated the Muslim call to prayer—this at a time when the call to prayer still came from an actual muezzin in a minaret—a man of flesh and blood—rather than an amplified recording. The Western Wall, the last surviving remnant of the Second Temple, was at the time accessible only by means of an alleyway, perhaps fifteen feet wide, sandwiched between the Temple Mount and the Mughrabi (or Moroccan) Quarter. For a Jew, visiting the Western Wall in effect meant negotiating a canyon-like passage through an Arab neighborhood. The tension was palpable. One never knew when trouble would start—stone throwing, sometimes worse. But throngs of Jews could always be found praying at the wall—men mixing with women, unlike today. Because the canyon offered no perspective, hemmed in as it was by the Moroccan Quarter, the wall loomed high above one’s head; there was no vast plaza, as there is now, to shrink it down to size. Outside the ancient city walls was an emerging modern downtown. The elegant King David Hotel, its tall Sudanese doormen resplendent in red turbans, overlooked the Old City. From the terrace in back you could see the city walls, the golden Dome of the Rock, and beyond the city itself the Mount of Olives. Ben Yehuda Street bustled with cafés and shops. Jerusalem to me felt very cosmopolitan. The British presence was inescapable—officials, soldiers, businesspeople. So was the old Arab aristocracy. Jewish life revolved around the Hadassah Hospital, the Hebrew University, and the Jewish Agency, the precursor of the government of Israel.

To go from the coastal plains to the higher interior elevation offered a thrilling sense of ascent to Jerusalem; the biblical language of the psalms—“going up” to the house of the Lord—had it right. After Israel achieved independence, in 1948, and for two decades thereafter, until Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Jerusalem was divided, and the Old City was inaccessible to Jews from Israel. But in the early 1940s, when I first knew it, the city was a unified place. As a rule, we went to Jerusalem twice a year. Every summer, we also traveled from Haifa in the other direction—north to Lebanon. Much of our extended family lived there, having moved to Beirut from Aleppo. Among other things, we would visit the resorts in the Lebanon Mountains, places like Dhour Shweir and Bhamdoun. My sister Sylvia was born in Lebanon during one of those trips—another extended stay prompted by wartime conditions. This time the worry was close to panic, though I was aware of the fact only in retrospect. The panic had to do with the advance of German general Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps across the Libyan Desert, toward Egypt. Would Palestine be next? We stayed in Lebanon until the battle of El-Alamein, in Egypt, in 1942, when English forces under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery blunted the direct military threat posed by Nazi Germany.

My mother (third from the left) and father (far right) during a trip to Egypt, c. 1938.

* * *

Our last trip to Lebanon came in the late summer of 1947. I knew that, on one level, good things were happening in the family. There was a palpable sense of affluence. The war years had turned out to be good for business, as my father was able to continue importing goods that were shipped from India by my uncles. My parents bought an apartment building on Mount Carmel. We went to Beirut and bought a car. And it wasn’t just a car. It was a 1947 Studebaker Commander—the first car that extended the trunk back horizontally, like the hood. People would look at it and wonder which direction it was meant to go. The Studebaker, with its radical new design by the brilliant Raymond Loewy, was ivory in color and sensational to behold.

On this 1947 trip we ventured farther than usual, to Aleppo itself, the only visit I ever made to that city. Our extended family, children and adults alike, piled into three Chrysler limousines and drove north from Beirut to see my grandmother Symbol, fragile and petite. We visited the ancient citadel of Aleppo—an imposing medieval structure on a site that had been fortified for four millennia. Memorably, my uncles panicked when they realized that my brother and I had badges from our school sewn onto our shirts. The badges showed the profile of the Reali School, which we attended, and were embroidered with the words vehatznea lechet, meaning “Proceed with humility.” Because the words were written in the Hebrew alphabet and marked us as Jews, the adults were fearful of letting us into the streets. Tensions ran especially high in the Arab world during those last days of the British Mandate for Palestine. The countries of the newly established United Nations were at that moment deliberating whether to form the State of Israel, which by its nature would have life-changing consequences for everyone in the region. In the end, my uncles ripped the badges off our shirts and told us not to speak Hebrew in public. We fell back on English, our other language.

Advertisement for the Raymond Loewy–designed 1947 Studebaker Commander that my parents bought in Beirut.

Palestine had been in a state of civil insurrection for several years, as Jewish fighters for independence waged a guerrilla campaign against British authorities. Our family was in Jerusalem in July 1946 when the Irgun, the militant underground Zionist organization that believed in violence as a tool of persuasion, exploded a bomb in the King David Hotel, where the British maintained their Jerusalem headquarters. I was a child of eight, standing with my cousins at the Jaffa Gate at that very moment, looking west. We saw the flash, and a second later the horrifying sound reached our ears. Scores of people—British, Arabs, Jews—were killed.

The United Nations agreed to the creation of an independent Israeli state on November 29, 1947, partitioning Palestine, at which point the conflict with Britain broadened into a conflict between Jews and Arabs. By springtime, the battle of Haifa was underway, as Jewish forces—the Haganah, the nucleus of the Israeli military—sought to gain control of the strategically important city, which was in the area designated for a Jewish state. From our home high up the slope, overlooking the port, we could hear the shooting. After stray bullets came through a window into my bedroom, we erected defensive steel plates on the veranda and windows. It is said that, after the battle of Haifa, the message from the Jewish victors to the Arab population from loudspeakers mounted on cars was encouragement to stay in the city—which emphatically was not the message in other places during the War of Independence. And, in fact, quite a few Arabs stayed. My parents had Arab friends. Haifa today is probably one of the more successful mixed communities of Israeli Jews and Arabs. But tens of thousands of Arabs, understandably fearful, left the city in 1948, fleeing to Arab towns farther north and to Lebanon and beyond.

My recollections of this exodus are firsthand and troubling. With my friends, we watched as much of the Arab population picked up and left—and then watched Jews from the poorer abutting neighborhoods enter the Arab neighborhoods and start to loot. They would go into houses, pull out drawers, and empty the contents. People had often departed very quickly, leaving silverware and other goods behind. I saw someone take off with a stamp collection. At this young age, I already felt that life was taking a turn toward something more complex.

On Independence Day—May 14, 1948—when I was not yet ten, I remember going to downtown Haifa with friends. None of our parents were with us. We joined the crowd outside city hall, listening to the broadcast as David Ben-Gurion, in Tel Aviv, proclaimed the State of Israel. Arab armies from neighboring countries would invade the next day. What is remarkable to me, looking back, is that in a period of ongoing hostilities, a bunch of ten-year-olds had the freedom of the streets without supervision.

The Reali School was an elite institution that had been founded before World War I, and I attended the outpost of the school atop Mount Carmel instead of the original school near the Technion campus. My parents had apparently had a hard time getting me into the Reali School; they once confided that I had initially been turned down, they believed, because we were Sephardic. As my father told the story, he went to the manager of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, with whom he did business, and had him intervene to get me admitted. I was one of two Sephardic students in the school; this number would swell to three and then four as my siblings Gabriel and Sylvia enrolled. As a young man I never experienced any kind of singling out, much less outright discrimination, on account of my origins. But my parents clearly had a different experience and were acutely sensitive to the issue.

At school, in my early adolescence—I was perhaps thirteen or fourteen—I did not behave as if I were there at anyone’s sufferance or owed anyone a particular level of performance. I was part of a high-spirited group, verging on wild, and a frequent source of trouble. One of my report cards characterized my behavior with the words Moshe lo sholet berucho—“Moshe is unable to control his spirits.” My mother was continually being called in to answer for my actions or at least be informed of them. On one occasion, a student was expelled for some infraction, which the rest of us perceived as a great injustice. We organized our class outside the school building, and we took stones and stood in a row and broke every window on the facade. All the parents were summoned to the school and ultimately paid for the repairs.

At around the same time I entered the Reali School I also joined the Scouts, as did virtually everyone else I knew. It was not the Boy Scouts, just the Scouts—a coed group, and one of three or four major youth movements in Israel. Others included the extreme-socialist group Hashomer Hazair and the moderate-socialist group Ha’Noar Ha’Oved. The Scouts, or Tzofim, embodied socialism’s most liberal wing. Participation in the Scouts, unlike participation in my school, was something I took very seriously, drawn by the camaraderie, the idealism, and the immersion in nature, and it soon became the center of gravity of my life. My parents were supportive. Being in the Scouts meant two meetings a week, one on a weekday and one on a weekend. It meant three- and four-day hikes into the mountains and other parts of the countryside. And it meant going for the entire summer to a kibbutz, for what were called work camps.

I had spent time on kibbutzim before; they ran summer camps where younger children could swim and run around, visit the cowshed, and get a taste of kibbutz life. A work camp for teenagers was very different. We lived in wooden shacks and ate at long communal tables in the collective dining hall. We rose at five a.m. and went to work, and the work was hard—jobs like digging up potatoes, working the fishponds, clearing debris, and picking plums, peaches, and other fruit. In the evening we would wander about. Often there were bonfires with singing. Those of us in the work camps would have our own events, but sometimes we would meet up with the kibbutz kids, who all lived together, away from their parents. At a work camp one truly became a part of the kibbutz community. Back then, most of the kibbutzim were agricultural; today, some of them have big industries. One thing can be said of all the work camps I attended: the settings were beautiful. Neot Mordechai, for instance, north of the Sea of Galilee near the Lebanese border, occupied a fertile valley surrounded by mountains, some of them capped with snow.

It was a foregone conclusion that, when we graduated from school, at age eighteen, my friends and I would go together into the army—in Israel, military service was mandatory for both men and women—and would register for the Nahal brigades, which you joined as a communal group dedicated to agriculture. After the army, it was understood that the group would go on to form its own kibbutz. I had decided, at around age fifteen, that I was going to study agriculture, and I was already registered to enroll in the Kadoorie Agricultural High School, a boarding school in the shadow of Mount Tabor. The institution had been founded in 1933 as a result of a bequest by Sir Ellis Kadoorie, a philanthropist whose family came originally from Baghdad. One of its graduates was Yitzhak Rabin.

The future would turn out differently for me. But despite all that has happened, my friends from this time remain a close and cohesive unit. Sixty or seventy years later, we still gather every five years. We know that we were privileged to have shared a unique moment in history. And we recognize that this group of ours was once the center of the world.

* * *

Today, as an architect, I do indeed “work the land,” though not in the way I had anticipated. In those early years, I don’t remember thinking consciously in terms of architecture as a subject of specific interest—and yet, looking back, I can see a connection to themes that would become central to my becoming an architect. The Baha’i Gardens, which almost functioned as my backyard, instilled a deep and enduring love of gardens and landscape. Intuitively, I was aware of the two architectural languages expressed in the middle of Haifa—the Mediterranean vernacular (stone, sensual, warm, domed, rustic) and the modernist International Style (white, minimalist, cool, curvy, formal). I certainly didn’t use words like “language” or “vernacular” in an architectural sense, but I registered the aesthetic distinction between downtown Haifa and uptown Haifa. I may have taken it for granted at the time, but I was aware of the difference and it probably planted something that ripened over time.

“Since childhood I have loved domes”: My early sketch for Yeshiva Porat Yosef, Jerusalem, 1972.

In the early twentieth century, when what was called the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, started building places to live—new towns like Tel Aviv and new neighborhoods like the upper city of Haifa—it initially adopted a kind of romantic Middle Eastern approach, making buildings with arches and domes. The original Technion, built in 1912, is such a place. But then, in the 1930s, a wave of immigrant architects arrived from Europe, fleeing the growing anti-Semitism and the seemingly inevitable drift toward war. They were Bauhaus-trained or German-trained or Vienna-trained, and they built whole communities employing a modernist vocabulary that had not taken root to such an extent anywhere else in the world. Unlike in Athens or Berlin or Milan, where one finds Bauhaus buildings mixed in among older structures, in Israel, the properties being newly developed didn’t have any older structures to compete with. The so-called White City, a Bauhaus-inspired neighborhood in Tel Aviv, is today a UNESCO World Heritage site. It has some four thousand Bauhaus-style buildings, mostly three- or four-story apartment buildings but also schools, concert halls, theaters, department stores. This style can also be found in kibbutzim. There were some remarkable local adaptations. In Jerusalem, the British had legislated in 1918 that everything in the city must be built with Jerusalem limestone, a softly golden local material that has been used for building since ancient times; British authorities hoped, by mandating its use, to preserve the city’s harmonious color and texture. And so, in Jerusalem, Bauhaus architecture is clad in Jerusalem stone. I call it Golden Bauhaus.

In Israel with friends from the Scouts, 1952, at Kibutz Hulda. I am at lower right.

I can see other aspects of my early interests that are almost premonitions of what would come. Thinking now of the high regard in which I held my father’s Studebaker, I realize that I must even then have had an intuitive feel for design, although the name Raymond Loewy—responsible for the streamlined S1 locomotive and, later, the Shell Oil Company logo and the classic color scheme and typography of Air Force One—meant nothing to me.

The demands of ordinary life in Israel also brought a familiarity with what communities must have in order to sustain themselves. During and after the War of Independence and the first years of Israel’s statehood, amid stringent austerity, everything was rationed: two eggs per person a week; very little meat. My family had an easier time than some, because my mother’s brothers, who had moved to Dublin, Ireland, from Manchester, were shipping us boxes of food. But still, with the austerity, we were all encouraged to become farmers. And I took to that. Because not everything was built up and urbanized, we could easily use the ancient terraces around the house to plant vegetables. I had a henhouse in the garden and twenty-five hens, producing quite a few eggs a day. I had a donkey. I had pigeons.

I also kept bees—mesmerizing for both their social and architectural dynamics. It started as a school project—the school helped order beehives, and I got an Italian breed of bees along with instructions. I was completely absorbed by the social organization of bees and also by how they come to build the structures they do with such precision. In modern beekeeping, the bees receive a little imprint of wax, but it’s just the outline of the hexagonal cells—the bees themselves build the walls of the cells with wax of their own making. They would not accept wax cells made by machine—the architecture would not be precise enough, from their perspective. At the time, I wasn’t thinking in terms of architecture or about the process of bringing physical structures into existence. I would later learn about geometry and close packing and the platonic solids and other relevant ideas. In the moment, I just enjoyed beekeeping.

Another school project may have had a lasting impact—an exercise that had to do with the idea of harnessing the power of nature. All of us needed to come up with a project. I and a friend—Michael Seelig, who also eventually became an architect—made an enormous model, which we built using an old door as the foundation. It was about three feet wide and about eight feet long. The surface was fashioned out of clay and plaster. We created mountains with waterfalls and painted the scenery to be realistic. Then we added hydroelectric installations and windmills to generate power. It weighed a ton. Our parents had to get a truck to take it to school. But the model was a sensation. To this day I enjoy immersing myself in the work of the model shop at the office. Fortunately, we use lighter materials than clay and plaster.

Finally, as I think about influences that may have planted seeds—flowering only later into a passion and a career—I cannot forget my own home. I was born in a three-story modernistic apartment building. Our residence occupied the second floor, and it had a small balcony. A communal staircase was shared by several families. When I was ten, we moved up the mountain, toward the crest. We lived on the third, and top, floor of a hillside apartment building, and one entered the apartment directly by means of a bridge from the garden—indeed, because the building was on a hill, every floor could have its own private entryway. We had a magnificent view of the city, and the entire rooftop was ours to enjoy.