If Walls Could Speak

Starred review from June 13, 2022
“The mystery of architecture... is perhaps not unlike the mystery of life itself,” muses Israeli architect Safdie (The City After the Automobile) in this marvelous look at his life and career. After graduating from Montreal’s McGill University in 1961, Safdie apprenticed in Philadelphia under architect Louis Kahn, but it was his innovative modular design for Habitat ’67—a model housing apartment complex created in Montreal for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition—that placed him on the world’s stage. As he recounts the structures he built over the over the next half century (Canada’s National Gallery of Art, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands), Safdie walks readers through the creative process behind each, sprinkling in colorful anecdotes about friends such as Yo-Yo Ma, whose impromptu cello performance at Safdie’s Class of 1959 Chapel awoke the architect to his work’s “fine acoustics.” He also details the political and economic barriers that influenced such works as Habitat Tehran, the plans of which were abruptly ended by the Iranian Revolution. In prose unburdened by pretension, Safdie articulates his artistic philosophy against the backdrop of a changing world, maintaining that architecture should be both intentional and socially engaged. The result yields a brilliant defense of architecture as an expression of truth and beauty.

August 1, 2022
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.

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