Moshe Safdie, C.C., B.Arch., LL.D. , F.R.A.I.C., FAIA (b. July 14, 1938) is an architect and urban designer. He was born in the city of Haifa, Palestine. He moved with his family to Montreal, Canada when he was a teenager, a move he disliked as a dedicated Zionist and socialist.
Career
An excellent student, he studied architecture at McGill University and apprenticed under Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. At age 24, his master's thesis was selected to be constructed as part of the Expo 67 celebration. The Habitat 67 project, a complex of cellular residences that could be lifted into place like LEGO blocks, propelled him onto the world stage. In 1967, he returned to Israel, where he was part of the team that refurnished Old Jerusalem. He lives in a renovated home in the Old City and has Israeli, U.S., and Canadian citizenship.
In 1976, he became a professor at Harvard University and set up his firm's head office in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts, where it remains today. In 1986, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 2005. His company, Moshe Safdie and Associates, Inc. is based out of Boston with branch offices in Toronto and Jerusalem.
His son Oren Safdie is a playwright.
His daughter Taal, is an architect in San Diego, and partner of the husband-wife firm, Safdie Rabines Architects.
His nephew is Dov Charney, founder of the clothing company American Apparel.
Architectural projects
Moshe Safdie's works are known for their dramatic curves, arrays of simple geometric patterns, and usage of windows and open spaces.
Modelled on the Colosseum in Rome, Vancouver Library Square is one of Safdie's most recent Canadian commissions, and one of his most popular
- Habitat 67 at Expo 67 World's Fair, Montreal, Quebec
- Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California
- Jepson Center for the Arts, Savannah, Georgia
- The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
- City plan for the city of Modi'in, Israel
- Former Ottawa City Hall, Ottawa, Ontario
- Several major buildings, including the new central museum, opened 2005, at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel
- Hebrew Union College, first phase and Merkaz Shimshon expansion, Jerusalem, Israel
- Mamilla Centre and David's Village, Jerusalem, Israel
- Vancouver Library Square, Vancouver, British Columbia
- The Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts, Vancouver, British Columbia
- Main Branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library, Salt Lake City, Utah
- Airside building of Terminal 3, Ben Gurion International Airport, Israel
- The Marina Bay Sands, Singapore's first integrated resort and casino
- Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Kansas City, Missouri
- West Edge, Kansas City, Missouri
- Toronto-Pearson International Airport, with Skidmore Owings Merrill
- The Class of 1959 Chapel, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts
- The Grave of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin
- The campus of Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts
- The Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
- The 2003, $190+ million redesign of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts
- Eleanor Roosevelt College campus, UC San Diego
- Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (scheduled to open in 2010)
- United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. (under construction for completion in 2009)
- The Exploration Place Science Museum in Wichita, Kansas
- Coldspring New Town, Baltimore, Maryland
Publications
- The City After the Automobile: An Architect's Vision (1998) Amazon Listing
- Beyond Habitat by 20 Years (1987)
- For Everyone A Garden (1974)
- Beyond Habitat (1970)
- Moshe Safdie Volume I (1st edition 1996/2nd edition 2008)Amazon Listing
- Moshe Safdie Volume II (2008)Amazon Listing
- Yad Vashem - The Architecture of Memory (2006)Amazon Listing
See also
External links
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