Once, Moshe Safdie was the future. Then he wasn’t. Now, decades later, it turns out that, after all, he was. In 1967 he realised Habitat at the Montreal Expo, one of the most memorable projects of that decade, a revolutionary model of urban living that didn’t quite catch on. In 2010, the Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore was completed to his designs, where the world’s longest infinity pool is lifted in a “sky park” 200 metres in the air. Along with the glass-roofed “paradise garden” and the world’s biggest indoor waterfall that he installed in the same city’s Changi airport in 2019, it is an icon of the epoch of the Instagrammable, ultra-spectacular mega-development that at least some of us now inhabit.
Now 84, Safdie is thinking about his legacy. He has donated his flat at Habitat 67 (for he did the thing that architects are often accused of not doing, which is to live in their own developments) to his alma mater, Montreal’s McGill University, along with his archive. He has written a memoir, If Walls Could Speak, which goes back to his birth in Haifa, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, to Jewish parents, his mother from Manchester and his father from Aleppo. Now, sitting in the London home of the restaurateur Ruthie Rogers and her late husband, the architect Richard Rogers, old friends of his, Safdie reflects on his career. “For a building done by a bunch of kids it has stood up amazingly well,” he says of Habitat.
Safdie, who moved to Canada with his family as a teenager, was working in the office of the celebrated Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn when he got the chance to work on Expo 67. “I was an immigrant kid, 25 years old, who had never built a building in his life,” he says. The project gave him the chance to realise what was essentially his student thesis project, a concept he had pursued with “obsessional” energy. It grew out of a tour he had done of housing in the US, both the vast public housing projects in inner cities such as Chicago and the popular developments that private developers put up in the suburbs, especially the “Levittowns” that Levitt and Sons built in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
“The public housing really shocked me,” he says, “monotonous… soul-crushing… as if the residents were being confined in cages.” So he decided to give city apartments the features that drew people to Levittowns – to make “every apartment feel like a house, with its own garden”. These projects would be built using prefabricated building elements, for efficiency, but would achieve “variety within standardisation”. In this way he hoped to achieve “an urban option with an equal quality of life to that in the suburbs”, and so “stem the out-of-town exodus” that was then hollowing out the centres of North American cities.
Habitat thus created 158 homes out of 354 identical concrete boxes stacked up like children’s building blocks, sometimes teetering vertiginously over fresh air, with vegetation climbing up its terraces, a composition that might owe something to the eastern Mediterranean towns of Safdie’s childhood. It was achieved in the face of financial and political storms that saw it cut to a third of its original intended size, and a threat by one minister to dump the concrete boxes before they had been erected in the adjoining St Lawrence River. The project, said one critic, was “a wildly insane example of criminal naivety”.
But it was a hit of the expo, its image going as viral as viral could then be. It got Safdie on to the front cover of Newsweek. It was mostly popular with the people who ended up living there, although there were some complaints about damp. “For a utopian project,” says its creator, “it achieved total public acceptance.” He had, though, hoped that the idea would “replicate like mushrooms”, but it didn’t. Prospective Habitats in New York and Puerto Rico came to nothing. “In the 70s and 80s its ideas were ignored,” says Safdie, even though its stepped terraces became a favourite motif of resort hotels in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.
Safdie started designing projects in Israel, for example, on the decades-long rebuilding of the Mamilla district in Jerusalem, which had been devastated by conflict and is now, according to his book, “among the few places where Arabs and Jews enjoy the city together”. Other projects included a terminal at Ben Gurion airport. Safdie designed two memorials at the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem and, from 1995 to its opening in 2005, the site’s Holocaust History Museum. He continues to work in Israel; although he says that the settlements in occupied territories are a “tragedy” and that “what’s happening there causes me great frustration and pain”, it’s “a stupid mistake” to boycott the country altogether.
He also built a successful career in North America. He was asked back to work in Canada, after a break of some years, where he designed the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (1988), Vancouver Public Library (1995) and other cultural landmarks. But Safdie was outside the mainstream of critically approved architecture. “In the 70s and 80s, my ideas were ignored. I was antagonistic to postmodernism” – the style that was then ascendant – “and I paid a price.”
He never really got back into that critical mainstream, but he did design the “integrated resort” of Marina Bay Sands (2011), a $5bn leisure-retail extravaganza with convention centre, exhibition halls and casino, which took only four years from conception to completion. Composed of three towers supporting the curving, projecting, 340 metre-long, 200 metre-high beam of its sky park, it’s not exactly subtle or graceful, but it has become a Sydney Opera House of the government-directed turbo-commerce of the city state of Singapore. “I had no idea it would become an instant icon of the city,” says Safdie, “but the public embraced it like booommm.”
Then came the Jewel Changi airport (2019), where the shopping fest that goes with modern transportation takes place within a simulated forest so lush and overwhelming that, claims Safdie, “when you’re in it you forget where you are”. Most recently, his Raffles City project (2020) has been completed in the Chinese city of Chongqing, a still-larger variant of the Marina Bay Sands idea, whose beam-across-towers design has sufficient conceptual similarity to the Singapore model to have caused the latter’s developer to sue Safdie, unsuccessfully, for reusing his own architectural motif.
What, then, connects the idealism of Habitat 67 to commercially driven mega-developments in Singapore and China? An enthusiasm for merging his architectural compositions with large chunks of nature, for a start. Also formal boldness, copious chutzpah and an unconcern with ordinary good taste. Most important, Safdie would say, is intent to design for the people who use the buildings – those terraces in Montreal, the trees in Changi. He describes how, even though the Singapore and Chongqing developments are privately owned, he strives to give public access to them. You don’t have to board a flight or go shopping to enjoy the garden at the airport, which is what many Singaporeans do.
In his book, Safdie describes his early infatuation with The Fountainhead, the 1943 Ayn Rand novel that celebrates the vast, creative ego of its architect-hero Howard Roark, which he soon rejected in favour of “care for the lives” of those he builds for. In truth, there’s still quite a lot of Roark in Safdie’s hugely ambitious projects, but I can also believe that they give more pleasure to more people than the same commissions would in the hands of other architects.
• If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie (Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
