Moshe Safdie is an architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author. He designed the National Gallery of Canada, as well as the Musee de la Civilisation in Quebec City, the Toronto Ballet Opera House, and Expo ’67’s Habitat. He was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1938 and moved to Canada with his family as a teenager. In 1961, he graduated from McGill University with a degree in architecture. He has taught at McGill University, various institutions in Israel and at Harvard. In 1970 Safdie established a Jerusalem branch office, commencing an intense involvement with the rebuilding of Jerusalem. In 1978, Safdie relocated his residence and principal office to Boston when he became Director of the Urban Design Program and the Ian Woodner Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His honors include the Companion of the Order of Canada, the Gold Medal from both the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the American Institute of Architects, la Medaille du Merité from the Order of Architects of Québec, Canada, and Israel’s Rechter Prize.
Safdie’s central concern in his lecture was describing the theory and the language of architecture. In other words, he sought to find an answer to the question “are there constants in architecture, even in a rapidly changing world?” The postmodernist legacy of the 1980s and 1990s, Safdie argued, was an attempt to redefine the meaning and essence of architecture. He suggested that architecture had its own language, distinct from the other arts. He expounded upon three ingredients of this language: its tectonic characteristics, its built and purposeful nature; its central concern with purpose, how architecture accommodates life; and its sense of site and place. Site was important to giving form to a building, determining what its basic structure would be so that it made sense in the surrounding landscape. From here, he turned to evaluate what he called the hubris and violent mentality of the current day. Safdie’s lecture called attention to the ways in which modern architectural design mirrored the violence found in society at large, for example, by pointing to designs that resembled the destruction caused by the San Francisco earthquake a year earlier. Many of these projects have been declared a rebellion against consumer-obsessed society, yet Safdie proposed that in such a violent society, art and design were one way to seek serenity and calmness. He claimed that buildings should be designed to enhance or at least co-exist with the environment around them, and they should be design with their ultimate purpose in mind. Ultimately, he concluded, arrogance is incompatible with nature. Working with and through nature, we can seek truth, and through truth and order and usefulness, we can find beauty.
An audience of about 125 came to hear Safdie speak. His lecture was the first of a two-part series that concluded the following week with Douglas Cardinal’s lecture.
Listen to Safdie’s lecture below.