From his 60s utopian housing development to infinity pools in the sky, the Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie has always designed larger-than-life buildings. Now 84, he has written a memoir about the obsessional energy that still fuels his career
Once, Moshe Safdie was the future. Then he wasn’t. Now, decades later, it turns out that, after all, he was. In 1967 he realised Habitat at the Montreal Expo, one of the most memorable projects of that decade, a revolutionary model of urban living that didn’t quite catch on. In 2010, the Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore was completed to his designs, where the world’s longest infinity pool is lifted in a “sky park” 200 metres in the air. Along with the glass-roofed “paradise garden” and the world’s biggest indoor waterfall that he installed in the same city’s Changi airport in 2019, it is an icon of the epoch of the Instagrammable, ultra-spectacular mega-development that at least some of us now inhabit.
Now 84, Safdie is thinking about his legacy. He has donated his flat at Habitat 67 (for he did the thing that architects are often accused of not doing, which is to live in their own developments) to his alma mater, Montreal’s McGill University, along with his archive. He has written a memoir, If Walls Could Speak, which goes back to his birth in Haifa, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, to Jewish parents, his mother from Manchester and his father from Aleppo. Now, sitting in the London home of the restaurateur Ruthie Rogers and her late husband, the architect Richard Rogers, old friends of his, Safdie reflects on his career. “For a building done by a bunch of kids it has stood up amazingly well,” he says of Habitat.
