Moshe Safdie

Moshe Safdie (born July 14, 1938, Haifa, Palestine [now in Israel]) is an Israeli-Canadian-American architect best known for designing Habitat ’67 at the site of Expo 67, a yearlong international exhibition at Montreal. Habitat ’67 was a prefabricated concrete housing complex comprising three clusters of individual apartment units arranged like irregularly stacked blocks along a zigzagged framework. This bold experiment in prefabricated housing using modular units aroused intense international interest at the time, though it did not inaugurate a trend toward the mass production of such low-cost units.

Safdie was educated at McGill University School of Architecture in Montreal and began his career (1962) in the offices of Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn. He subsequently opened his own architectural offices in Montreal (1964), Jerusalem (1970), Boston (1978), and Toronto (1985). Safdie designed different versions of Habitat for cities such as New York, Baltimore, and Jerusalem, but the only one to start construction was Habitat Puerto Rico. The modular housing system was begun in 1968 but never completed. His other early works included Yeshiva Porat Yosef, a rabbinical college with dormitories, teaching facilities, a library, and a synagogue, in Jerusalem (1979); Coldspring New Town, commissioned by the city of Baltimore, a plan for a new town, including residences and related public and service buildings (1971); and Wailing Wall Plaza, in the Old City, Jerusalem (1974). While continuing to oversee projects, Safdie served as director of the urban design program (1978–84) and professor of architecture and urban design (1984–89) at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

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Safdie’s later projects included, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, a children’s Holocaust memorial (1987), a transport memorial (1995), and a Holocaust museum (2005). In North America he designed an expansion of the Toronto international airport (2007) that was a joint venture with two other firms; a headquarters for the United States Institute for Peace (2011) in Washington, D.C.; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2011) in Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (2011) in Kansas City, Missouri. Safdie opened an office in Singapore in 2007 and one in Shanghai in 2011. By the early 2010s he had completed several projects in southern Asia, including the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort (2011), Singapore.

Safdie began to seriously consider green space during this period, integrating lush gardens in such projects as the Sky Habitat Residential Development (2016) and the Jewel Changi Airport (2018), both in Singapore; the latter features a central waterfall. He also created high-density housing interspersed with gardens in Qinhuangdao (2017), China, and Toronto (2019). Safdie’s projects from the 2020s included the mixed-use complex Raffles City Chongqing (2020), China, which he described as a vertical city.

In 2015 Safdie was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal in recognition of his oeuvre. He held citizenship in Israel, Canada, and the United States.