MOSHE SAFDIE ON DESTINATION SPACES
THE ARCHITECT AFFIRMS HIS PHILOSOPHY OF PLANNING FOR PEOPLE
THE TERM ‘STARCHITECT’ IS SUPERFICIAL — IT CREATES EXPECTATIONS
NEW YORK • Moshe Safdie threw over his conventional dress shirts long ago for a jauntier wardrobe of band-collared alternatives. The version he wears as he heads north along a grassy stretch of the High Line lends him the look of a cleric, minus the priestly severity.
Peeling back his lapels to show off an expanse of beefy white cotton, he all but brags: “It’s the only shirt I wear. I designed it 40 years ago and had my tailor make it up in different weights for the seasons.”
It doesn’t allow for a tie. So what. “I never wear a tie,” Safdie says, “unless it is to the most stuffy clubs in London.”
If an idea has merit, as he likes to say, he will pick it up and run with it. It’s a precept that governs his wardrobe and, more tellingly, a body of work with a global reach that extends from the Punjab region of India to the foothills of the Ozarks.
In recent years, Safdie, 77, whose visit to New York coincided with Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie, an exhibition at the National Academy Museum, rediscovered the merits of his Habitat 67. That groundbreaking modular system of high-rise dwellings unveiled at Montreal’s World Expo in 1967 made his name.
He is still finding ways to adapt, modify and expand on his original theme: “For everyone a garden.” That notion, he adds, is “a metaphor for making an apartment in a high-rise structure into what connotes a house.”
His vision extends to his first project in New York, a 64- storey mixeduse tower to rise on West 30th St., just south of the Empire State Building. Its tower, a series of three- storey offset projections, owes a clear debt to his original Habitat scheme.
Safdie might have been expected to take a dim view of the High Line, that meandering strip of elevated railway track turned people’s park, which has since its inception a decade ago met with praise and its share of disparagement as a Disney World on the Hudson. Instead, he seems all admiration. “Look what happens in the city when something becomes a destination,” he says, his gaze settling first on the streams of passersby enjoying the last shoots of greenery lining the path, then wandering to the fishbowl- like towers that flank it.
He strolls beneath a leafy bower and finds it soothing. “You forget that you are in a city at all,” he says.
Still, the proliferation of adjacent residential structures gave him pause. The High Line has merit, as he might say, “but it takes urban hype to sustain it.”
A believer in light and a longtime champion of the kind of urban planning that allows, he says, “for gardens, porosity, community and space,” he frets that the outcropping of towers on both sides of the park would soon overshadow it, creating something of the canyonlike effect that blights much of Lower Manhattan.
In Singapore, where his triple-tower Marina Bay Sands stands as his first major project in Asia, “when they sell the land, they sell with it the urban design scheme,” Safdie says approvingly. “It makes for cohesiveness.”
“In parts of China,” he adds, “there is an ordinance that every apartment should get three hours of sunlight each day.” Here, by contrast, “Every developer wants to have his tower smack against the High Line,” he says. “The quality is sure to be higher than average, but if you had some kind of thoughtful urban planning, it would be greater still.”
City developers, he points out, seem to operate from a different, often conflicting agenda. “They are seeking star architects,” Safdie says evenly, with infinite tact. He clearly recognizes the signature of a handful of celebrity architects whose buildings loom to the right and left. But he declines to name names, having stirred a tempest decades ago with his pointed critiques of the work of some of his best-known contemporaries.
“Basically for 30 years I was not forgiven,” Safdie says dryly.
“I think architects some time ago began to understand the value of branding,” he says, “and that once you become a brand, there is a quantum leap.”
Safdie, who is a citizen of the United States, Canada and Israel, made that leap long ago, earning by dint of his gifts — and his name — a multitude of far-flung, extravagant commissions. And yet. “The term ‘ starchitect’ makes me uncomfortable,” he says. “It’s superficial. It creates expectations.”
“I’m not against spectacle,” he says, adding after a ruminative pause, “but for me, that’s not the journey.”