GOING BIG

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture

By Moshe Safdie (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022)

REVIEW Annmarie Adams

Architects

Architect Moshe Safdie listens to Yo-Yo Ma play the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major on an open deck by the sea, seated alongside King Hussein and Queen Noor. He attends dinner parties for the Clintons at Yitzhak Rabin’s home. Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress, sends her private plane to fetch him for a meeting. He calls art historian Oleg Grabar when he needs to design a mosque. These are just a few of the celebrity-studded scenes that shape Safdie’s new autobiography, If Walls Could Speak, a look back at the well-known architect’s prolific life.

The story goes beyond his famous friends. We learn of Safdie’s parents, childhood, his two marriages and four children, his recent home renovations, his penchant for white collarless shirts, and even of the raccoon who lives outside his office window all alongside his lifelong dreams, sporadic disappointments, and ongoing aspirations. Little sketches and photos, sometimes in the margins, give the book the feeling of an intimate photo album. It’s a very human story.

For all these reasons plus two more, If Walls Could Speak is a great pleasure to read. First, I have worked at the McGill University School of Architecture since 1990 and Safdie is arguably our school’s most famous living graduate. He recently made headlines by donating his archives and Habitat ’67 condo to McGill. So I thought I sort of knew his story. But the book answers many of the questions that I simply had never considered: why exactly did he leave Montreal? How does he look back on Habitat ’67 after all these years? Where does he most feel at home?

Second, If Walls Could Speak gives real insight into a worldwide architectural practice since the 1960s. Twice in the book he offers a glimpse of his daily life a mix of exhausting global travel, leading four or five design teams at once, and spending time with his beloved wife, the photographer Michal Ronnen. “Our lives and our work,” he divulges in the Prologue, “are totally intertwined.” Especially good for students is Chapter 9, Megascale, where he explains the ways that big architectural projects typically evolve, starting from a sketch (sometimes done on an airplane) through concept stage and design development.

The megaproject in Megascale is Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, commissioned in 2005. It is a massive, mixed-use development with three towers, linked by a sky park, which Safdie says, somewhat implausibly to this reader, harkens back to Habitat ’67. Even more strange, though, is his suggestion that the shopping spine was inspired by the cardo maximus of ancient Roman cities. It’s not an obvious association Marina Bay Sands was a filmset for Crazy Rich Asians , not Spartacus but it is a window into how this guy thinks big. The story of Marina Bay Sands actually reads like a Hollywood screenplay, complete with men’s room deals, angry emails, gilded airplane interiors, a contentious lawsuit that accused Safdie of replicating the SkyPark design in a subsequent project, and spoiler alert an eventual reconciliation.

Such snapshots of the joys and risks of contemporary practice and an urge to explain projects in one’s own words overlap nicely with other autobiographies recently written by famous architects born in the interwar period. I think of Safdie’s friend (the families met up regularly in Mexico) Richard Rogers, who wrote A Place for All People: Life, Architecture and the Fair Society in 2017. Canadian examples of this genre would include Eb Zeidler’s two-volume Buildings Cities Life: An Autobiography in Architecture, which came out in 2013, and Jack Diamond’s Context and Content: The Memoir of a Fortunate Architect, published last year. In these books, and Safdie’s, you get a real sense that the authors want to give something back for all their successes.

A memoir is also an opportunity to say what one thinks might define good architecture. Safdie believes deeply in what he calls “the power of place.” He devotes an entire chapter to this idea about how to unlock the secrets of a site, citing examples including Machu Picchu and medieval

OPPOSITE Safdie at work on a model of Habitat ’67. The design was based on Safdie’s thesis project as an architecture student at McGill University. ABOVE LEFT Conceptual sketches for Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands hotel. ABOVE RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM Safdie in King Hussein’s helicopter with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Jordan, 1994; Safdie on the dance floor with Alice Walton, the creator and visionary client for his Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.

Italian hill towns. He insists that good buildings have a magical quality, beyond simply satisfying the program. “We need to insist on magic,” he reminds readers, alongside numerous references to the transformative power of music. His favourite buildings include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, and Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Safdie still loves to sketch, and the model shop in his office seems to be the octogenarian’s most magical place. “Architects who forgo the painstaking supervision and review of shop drawings never get the building they think they’re getting,” he warns.

How does Canada figure in Safdie’s story? We are big. In 1953, Safdie’s family emigrated from Haifa, where he was born, to Montreal. He studied architecture at McGill University, where his thesis became Habitat ’67, the iconic housing project whose impact ripples throughout the decades and the book. Additionally, many Montrealers appear in the narrative as significant allies. Stuart Wilson and Sandy van Ginkel stand out as teachers. From Wilson, Safdie learned “the idea that architecture needs to be built, not just drawn .” Dutch-born van Ginkel was Safdie’s first employer and a huge influence. “To know Sandy van Ginkel was to become more sophisticated,” remembers Safdie. A letter from Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Sandy’s partner, introduced the 22-year-old to Louis Kahn, who would soon after employ him.

The Canadian architecture scene is simultaneously something of an enigma in Safie’s memoir. “Ever since Habitat ’67, Canada had for some reason been tough to crack. To this day, I can’t quite explain why this should have been so,” he writes. Even so, Safdie designed landmark Canadian buildings such as the National Gallery of Canada and Vancouver’s Library Square. He blames the rise of Quebec nationalism and his own criticism of postmodernism for a hiatus of Canadian projects just after Expo. A handy list of Safdie’s projects appears at the end of the book, listing the names, dates, and locations of 53 projects he considers significant since 1967: nine are in Canada.

When I teach students about Safdie in undergraduate architectural history courses, I often use the analogy of a chameleon. Holding Canadian, American, and Israeli passports, and with homes and work around the world, he seems to fit everywhere. What the book reveals, however, is that he has often felt out of sync. He resigned an endowed chair at Harvard’s GSD, for example, because he felt isolated from other faculty members. The multiple references to not getting jobs in Quebec and Canada, too, suggest that Safdie’s extraordinary mobility may have come at some professional cost.

Safdie clearly sees himself not as a chameleon, but as a mediator. He views architecture as a way to bridge differences. Like me, however, some Canadian readers may be slightly annoyed by the ways in which If Walls Could Speak is so clearly pitched at American readers. Safdie calls Douglas Cardinal, for example, a native Canadian (rather than Indigenous) architect, and there are other more subtle but equally jarring Americanisms throughout the book. Another minor disappointment is that one of my favourite Safdie moments gets no mention whatsoever. In 2007, he made headlines by walking away from the billion-dollar McGill University Health Centre project because it was slated to be built as a P3. That is chutzpah that deserves loud applause.

Speaking of health care, If Walls Could Speak might even be counted among the silver linings of Covid-19. It took a global pandemic to slow down Safdie’s schedule enough to focus on this long-running memoir. For that, we can be grateful.

D’Arcy Jones Architects, 2009-2020

By D’Arcy Jones (Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2022)

EXCERPT

FROM INTRODUCTION

BY Trevor Boddy

Barely at the mid-point of his career, D’Arcy Jones is already established as one of Canada’s most inventive designers of houses. As this book demonstrates, Jones is constantly searching for new forms, through reconsiderations of construction and space-making. The re-invention of the idea of the house is, for him, almost an obsession.

How is it that D’Arcy Jones has devised so inventive a series of houses as the 14 shown in this book, so variable in their design? All are different in detail and construction, yet each of them advances the notion of the enclave. One answer might be found in the architect’s biography. It is rare for an architect of his generation to have spent hardly any time working for other firms in Jones’s case, this included brief periods working with Vancouver’s Nigel Baldwin and Acton Johnson Ostry while he was a student. Many architects, by contrast, spend their careers working out the “anxiety of influence” from former employers or a validated canon of prominent precedents, from which they borrow, too often simplistically.

It is also worth noting that currently many students do not graduate from Canadian architecture schools until they are over the age of 30, and are often over 40 before achieving professional registration. At this point, most have the responsibilities of families, property, and student debt; these factors can easily combine to make design careers short and conservative. D’Arcy Jones, on the other hand, founded his own firm in his 20s and fulfilled his professional regis - tration while executing his own designs. When designers are not socialized into the habits of others, opportunities for individual invention increase.

This pattern also applies to Jones’s education. After a year in general arts at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, he went on to receive a degree in Environmental Design from that institution in 1995. He then moved to Halifax, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design Studies from TUNS (now Dalhousie University). Returning to Winnipeg, he completed a professional Master’s in 1999. In that same year, he opened his own design practice, and it has been in operation ever since. His built work was being published in Europe and the United States a mere six years after he founded his firm, extremely early for a Canadian designer. All through his career Jones has immersed himself in unusually wide and deep reading he is much more likely to cite inspiration from something he has read in the New York Review of Books than that online bible for his generation, dezeen.com.

Before Jones graduated from the University of Manitoba his parents relocated to Kamloops; they and their new neighbours became his first clients. Subsequently Jones established a partnership in Vancouver with Caralyn Jeffs, an architecture graduate who now works as the primary caregiver for the couple’s three children, including twins; the architect’s empathy for the needs of couples with children is grounded in his own experience, and many of his clients are at the same stage in the family cycle. A sense of community is crucial to Jones. His early practice was boosted by the modest house he designed for his own young family in 2007. Its completion prompted a string of requests for renovations and rebuilds in the same neighbourhood one of them breathing new air into the tired formula of the split-level rancher, another finding privacy while wedged between larger neighbours, a third raising up a small house to capture light and increase space for a photo-based artist, a landscape architect, and their children. Noting this pattern in his work, Jones explains, “I take families seriously we listen to them, observe them.”

A house is one of the most complex human inventions. There is no more practical or essential a structure, yet dwellings represent some of the highest cultural and spiritual aspirations. A well-conceived design for a house demands deep understandings of the lives it envelops. As Le Corbusier suggested, houses are “machines for living.” They are also exemplars of sociality, live-in artworks, membranes against the forces of nature, and shelters that nurture personalities. They represent one of the biggest investments that people make. Houses are our castles though also our prisons, playthings, and our psychoanalysts.

Videogame Atlas: Mapping Interactive Worlds

By Luke Casper Pearson and Sandra Youkhana (Thames and Hudson, 2022) REVIEW Ksenia Eic

Video games are usually seen as mindless entertainment. But for those of us who grew up playing video games and continue to be inspired by these rich, virtual environments, we know that they offer much more.

In this book, authors Luke Casper Pearson, an associate professor at Bartlett School of Architecture in London, and Sandra Youkhana, a registered architect and lecturer at Bartlett School of Architecture, bring their professional training to bear by focusing on the spatial design of video games, highlighting some of the many layers of design thinking that go into game development.

Opening the book and seeing the beautiful diagrams all in a decidedly architectural style, using only linework and hatches made me thrilled to start reading it. But although many interesting design ideas are covered in its chapters, I was left unsatisfied and several questions persisted. Why did the authors choose this particular set of analyses, which in my view often did not offer much in the way of transferable or insightful design ideas? Why create so many diagrams on relatively simple ideas (such as the climbability of buildings and the scale of realworld buildings relative to their virtual counterparts) rather than dive deeper on more complex design strategies?

Ultimately, the goal of this book to investigate game design to inform architecture and other forms of design is admirable, but the execution left something to be desired. I kept wondering to myself: who is this book for? Experienced gamers are likely to already be aware of many of the insights illustrated here, while for readers new to video games, the book perhaps relies too much on familiarity with the games that form the basis of the case studies for them to garner much from the studies. I am glad that the book exists, as it lends credibility to an emergent field, but I hope that future work on the subject of design thinking in video games goes into more depth, and focuses on more worthwhile aspects of this fascinating topic.

Architecture + Itinérance: Pratiques inclusives pour une ville solidaire

By Sarahlou Wagner-Lapierre, Élizabeth Prince, Véronic Lapalme, and Sonia Blank; edited by Carolyne Grimard and Élène Levasseur (Architecture sans frontières Québec, 2023)

REVIEW Elsa Lam

How can architecture help the unhoused? Working with Architects without Borders’ Quebec chapter, a group of researchers have set out to docu- ment examples of best practices, collating them into a catalogue of techniques intended for designers, organizations, and policy-makers working with people experiencing homelessness. www.asf-quebec.org

The well-being of the unhoused is at the heart of the strategies presented, which address a range of spaces used by this client group, from warming shelters to social housing. The focus of the publication is on positive examples of places that both enhance cities and provide valuable essential services for the unhoused.

Bridgman Collaborative’s Pop-Up Washroom in Winnipeg, and Sustainable | Architecture for a Healthy Planet’s Friends of Ruby Home in Toronto are among a half dozen Canadian examples, pointing to the need for amenities in public spaces and the value of collaborative design processes, respectively.

The majority of the examples are projects from the United States and Europe. These include La Ferme du Rail by Grand Huit Architects, a mixed-use project in Paris that includes housing for vulnerable people, a restaurant, and a student residence adjacent to a railway station. Shelter from the Storm, by Holland Harvey Architects, is a London, UK project that adaptively reuses a grocery store as a shelter and exemplifies how such an environment can be warm, welcoming, and secure.

As it concludes, the book offers several avenues for further research. Can prefabrication and modular design aid in reducing the costs of building for the unhoused? How can we better understand the needs of groups such as Indigenous and LGBTQIA2S+ communities, who are overrepresented amongst Montreal’s unhoused? Can zoning bylaws be made more inclusive for people experiencing homelessness? The present publication offers a solid foundation for continuing to explore these questions.