IF WALLS COULD SPEAK

The internationally renowned architect chronicles his life and describes the evolution of his ideas and major projects.

Safdie was born in 1938 in Haifa, in what is now Israel, where the iconic “Baha’i Gardens, which almost functioned as my backyard, instilled a deep and enduring love of gardens and landscape.” In 1953, his family moved to Montreal, where Safdie graduated from McGill with a bachelor’s degree in architecture. From the beginning of his career, the author was interested in issues of housing, especially how to provide a suburban quality of life, with access to nature and gardens, in urban, high-rise living. An apprenticeship with master architect Louis Kahn taught him the value of internal systems. “We don’t have to sneak these systems in—we can make an architecture that gives all these systems their rightful expression,” writes Safdie. For Montreal's Expo 67, the author created Habitat ’67, comprised of modules prefabricated in an onsite factory. Habitat's slopes of stacked houses, stepping back from floor to floor, create spaces for open gardens on the roofs of the units below. Safdie's later projects, such as planning new districts in Jerusalem and Cambridge, Massachusetts, considered social ideals. For the author, as for the modernists before him, urbanism and architecture are inseparable. In this engaging narrative, he offers intriguing details of design and construction, as well as photos and drawings, for a variety of major projects, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, “the most challenging and symbolically demanding project I’ve ever undertaken”; and the "Jewel" environment in Singapore's Changi airport. The author’s main point is that architecture has a responsibility to consider human rights and the needs of an entire society, not just the wealthy—to remain true to “principles that guide communal life.”

A thoughtful, appealing memoir of architecture, creativity, and purpose.