Moshe Safdie
The architect and urban planner reflects on risks, hopes, and challenges for Israel
Moshe Safdie is an urban planner, a famous architect, and a citizen of the world with buildings and projects around the globe. He is a citizen of Israel, Canada, and the United Sates and has offices and designs in all three countries.
Safdie was born in 1938 in Haifa, Israel, then the British mandate of Palestine. His family moved to Canada, he was educated at McGill University, and later moved to Boston where he ran his firm, Safdie Architects, and taught at Harvard University.
He worked in the office of the renowned architect Louis Kahn, and then gained global attention for his habitat designs at the Montreal Expo in 1967. Safdie also began to work in Israel with a number of projects including the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem. His reputation spread with the Marina Bay Sands project in Singapore in 2011 and the Raffles City project in the Chinese city of Chongqing.
His story of a life in design, planning, and teaching is in his memoir: “If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture.”