When the apartment complex Habitat (Moshe Safdie, architect) appeared fully formed at Montreal's EXPO 67, it was greeted as a victory for humane values within the human jungle, an urbane solution to the housing crisis in the urban centers of the world. Wolf von Eckhardt wrote that it "answers a need so burning that it simply melts all the ifs and buts.... Safdie has dared a new answer to our urban housing problems.... Habitat may well constitute the first real victory of the modern industrial revolution." And The Architects Journal confirmed that it is "One of the most advanced housing projects ever conceived and certainly the boldest exercise in industrialized building methods attempted to date. [It] puts an end to the myth that industrialized building necessarily gives rise to an architecture of uniformity, monotony, drabness and soulless repetition."  Beyond Habitat is a highly personal statement—almost a diary—covering the author's life and career before Habitat, his struggle to transform Habitat from a "design solution" on paper to a living reality, and his general ideas on housing and other matters since its completion. The book is illustrated with halftones of his buildings.  Safdie's account of how Habitat came to life demonstrates dramatically that building housing appropriate to today's cities is much more than an architectural job—it's also a political one in getting a design approved at several levels of bureaucracy, and a technological one of getting it implemented through the use of mass-production techniques. Safdie's stunning success at EXPO 67 is thus based on his architectural originality, his tenacity as a political in-fighter, and his receptivity to new methods of industrial production.  As for the future, an article in Business Week noted that if Safdie is to extend his housing revolution beyond Habitat, "He must persuade dozens of government officials, organize scores of disparate trades, sway a swarm of labor unions, and sell his ideas to thousands of apartment hunters—a skyscraping order from a young architect. But says one EXPO official, 'He just might do it. He got Habitat built—from politics to concrete when he was an unknown 26-year-old architect who had never designed a building of his own before.'"  His book is a search for ways to embody these ideals in realistic and concrete form.

Beyond Habitat

Moshe Safdie

Tundra Books of Montreal

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture

Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press

* Contributions include critical appraisals by Peter Rowe, Michael Sorkin and Michael Webb * Only book to chronicle the work of this highly respected academic and architect * Features the full range of building types present in his work * Detailed descriptions of his most recent completed project - the Vancouver Library, Canada * Contains almost 800 stunning photographs * Detailed descriptions of his most recent completed

Arts & Photography

Paul Goldberger

Michael Sorkin

Witold Rybczynski

Peter Rowe

Architecture

wiley

175 meters long, the museum bores like a triangular beam through the Har Hazikaron, or Mount of Remembrance. It juts out from the hillside at either end, allowing visitors to enter and look out. This spectacular architecture is the setting for a lavish and impressive exhibition commemorating the Holocaust. The structure is the culmination of Moshe Safdie’s work in Israel. The architect, a student of Louis Kahn who began his career with the sensational residential complex Habitat at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair, maintains offices in Boston, Toronto, and Jerusalem. The museum, its architecture, and its series of interior spaces with their carefully designed exhibition facilities are documented in an indepth photo essay and illustrated with texts and plans.

Yad Vashem: MOSHE SAFDIE-The Architecture of Memory

Reference

Lars Müller Publishers

Yad Vashem was established in 1953. In 1957, a first building opened with administration, archive, and library facilities, followed in 1961 by the ceremonial Hall of Remembrance and a basic exhibit. A museum was inaugurated in 1973, and over the years a series of institutional spaces, memorials, gardens, and artworks were added. This culminated in Spring 2005 with the inauguration of a museum of Holocaust history and ancillary structures, designed by Moshe Safdie. This book explores how architecture copes with commemoration.

Yad Vashem: Moshe Safdie - The Architecture of Memory

History

ELIE WIESEL

Articles by Joan Ockman

Avner Shalev

World

Yad Vashem Publications

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Books by Moshe Safdie