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.