Moshe Safdie

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Moshe Safdie

Habitat 67 in Montreal, Quebec
Personal information
Name Moshe Safdie
Nationality Israeli/Canadian/American
Birth date July 14, 1938 (1938-07-14) (age 70)
Birth place Haifa, Palestine
Alma mater McGill University
Work
Practice name Moshe Safdie and Associates
Significant buildings Habitat 67
Awards and prizes Order of Canada
Vancouver Library Square is one of Safdie's most recent Canadian commissions, and one of his most popular
Model of the Marina Bay Sands
The Children's Monument at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem designed by architect Moshe Safdie

Moshe Safdie, CC (born July 14, 1938) is an architect and urban designer. He was born in the city of Haifa, British Mandate of Palestine now Israel. He moved with his family to Montreal, Canada when he was a teenager.

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[edit] Career

An excellent student, he studied architecture at McGill University and apprenticed under Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. At age 24, his master's thesis was selected to be constructed as part of the Expo 67 celebration. The Habitat 67 project, a complex of cellular residences that could be lifted into place like LEGO blocks, propelled him onto the world stage. In 1967, he returned to Israel, where he was part of the team that refurnished Old Jerusalem. He lives in a renovated home in the Old City and has Israeli, U.S., and Canadian citizenship.

In 1976, he became a professor at Harvard University and set up his firm's head office in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts, where it remains today. In 1986, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 2005. His company, Moshe Safdie and Associates, Inc. is based out of Boston with branch offices in Toronto and Jerusalem.

His son Oren Safdie is a playwright.

His daughter Taal, is an architect in San Diego, and partner of the husband-wife firm, Safdie Rabines Architects.

His nephew is Dov Charney, founder of the clothing company American Apparel.

[edit] Architectural projects

Moshe Safdie's works are known for their dramatic curves, arrays of simple geometric patterns, and usage of windows and open spaces.

[edit] Publications

[edit] Safdie

  • Beyond Habitat (1970)
  • For Everyone A Garden (1974)
  • Beyond Habitat by 20 Years (1987)
  • The City After the Automobile: An Architect's Vision (1998) [1]
  • Yad Vashem - The Architecture of Memory (2006)[2]

[edit] Others

  • Moshe Safdie Volume I (1st edition 1996/2nd edition 2009) [3]
  • Moshe Safdie Volume II (2009) [4]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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