In Conversation with Moshe Safdie
This transcript is an informal conversation between Shovan Shah (MAUD '20) and Moshe Safdie on topics including his five-decade-long career, architectural expression and the broader urban vision, and his current studio at the GSD.
SS:
Moshe, you started teaching at Harvard in 1968, a few years after Habitat 67. The original Habitat design has been followed or used as a precedent by students and practitioners for over five decades and will continue to be studied for a long time. To which extent can you say that this project has mastered its own life? Has the design become a tool for construction, architectural expression and urban growth? Was that your agenda while designing the Habitat 67?
MS:
I think the agenda was multifaceted. My good fortune was to get this traveling fellowship to study housing in North America. And out of it, I came back with a paradox that, particularly in the 1950s, anybody who had the means aspired to live in a house, suburban or otherwise.
And everybody who didn't have means at the time lived in publicly built public housing [a high-rise and] hated it. The notion of luxury high-rise was just emerging in America.
So, I came back with a challenge of how do you solve the paradox? How do you make the apartment building as desirable to live as the suburbs? The underlying theme was to make the apartment into a house.
But then there were all these other multifaceted issues. First of all, “How do you make an apartment into house?” You open it in different directions, you give it a garden; outdoor space seems to be fundamental. To transform the access experience from a corridor, often a dark, double-loaded corridor, or even a gallery, which is not conducive to social experience to street-like experience; even open to the elements. You create amenities at different levels of the building, so children don't always have to go down to the ground.
There was also the question of identity. One of the things about a house is you can identify “there it is, my house.” The beginning and the end; even if you're in a townhouse, you can identify that.
“How do you do that in a multi-story building?” Well, you've got to pull it out from the mass. And even if you can't quite identify “that's mine,” you break it down into the sense that it's an assembly of houses, which is what a hill town is, which is what a village is. I mean, the village is a collective which is made up of individual habitations, and so get the apartment building to feel that way. So, it's the fractalization which had two purposes. One was to create the outdoor spaces and the gardens, the other was to break down the scale so you could identify the living unit within the whole.
Another part of the agenda was to build it in some new way that would allow industrialization techniques. And at the time, perhaps naively, I thought you create components in a factory and assemble them. And that led to the box, a three-dimensional-factory-installed assembly, with bathrooms, kitchens, windows, all installed on the ground.
That (industrialized units) introduced new issues of weight, of transportation. If it's truly industrialized, how do you transport them? If they get too small they're not very livable, if they get too big you can’t ship them on the highways. So, there were a whole set of issues and the idea was, “industrialize and create the module the system”. So, I called the thesis, “not a building”. I called it “the three-dimensional housing system”. It's like a kit-of-parts from which you can make different communities. The modules can be applied to a small scale, large scale and more high-rise, less high-rise with varied intensities.
SS:
This design then resulted in a few variations in “Habitat” designs around the world. What about that experience?
MS:
Yes, I was already doing various very diverse variations of it in different climates, New York, Puerto Rico, playing with different modules. Later, I compromised. I tried to preserve the environmental livability qualities of “Habitat”, without focusing on pre-fabrication. And that was because I was desperate to build it, and to build more. Yes, I realized that if I combined the two objectives, often the latter won't be feasible.
If you're building a 600-unit complex, nobody's going to be able to use a factory for it. And I didn't have a client who said, “build me how much familiar you are with.” So, I compromised on that, while focusing on the terracing and the factorization, etc.
SS:
Moshe, you are a global citizen. With the high-rise mixed-use projects that are coming up, where do you think our profession lies in the realm of the high-density high-rise developments?
MS:
Yes, well, the profession focuses on diverse things, right? I mean, you get architects who focus on institutions, on commercial projects… or don't do commercial projects as high as the profession tends towards specialization.
My own feeling is that while I personally, in my practice, always insisted on diversification (I want to work at a small scale, I want to work at the large scale, I want to do an institution I want to do housing and commercial mixed use, etc.), I recognize that the problem of the century, which is a challenge of our profession, is high rise of all uses of high density. How to preserve, how to reconcile it with an urban vision. The most important thing is how to preserve a quality of life, notwithstanding the pressures that come out of the impact of density.
And because that means that you're dealing mostly with business entities, like developers, or governments who behave as if they were business entities, same thing, how to be both an educator and a propagandist for the cause, because the natural inclination of the economic world is to compromise on all these issues. So, if you're a developer, the bottom line is your point of survival. You try and create the apartment buildings, which are, simply said, cheapest within what you can sell.
If you raise the quality of amenities and the quality of life, there's an economic impact.
So, what's the incentive? The market can be an incentive, but the market incentive is only driven by the wealthy 2% of 3%. It takes more than that to drive the market to create a quality city. So, we are in a very precarious position of providing a service, while trying to influence the outcome of that service from what we're normally contracted to do.
I've never expressed it that way.
One of the main difference that I've discovered through my practice of 50 years is that the difference between commercial firms, usually large corporate firms, and the firm's which are ideologically driven and not governed by simply economic ambition, is that the larger commercial firms tend to always follow the orders, and rarely challenge the client, or the program given to them by the client, or the density determined by the client. In contrast, I think ideologically driven firms tend to challenge the premise of the program if they believe that they can improve upon it.
I challenged on my first building, I challenged with Habitat, I challenge on every project since I began practicing.
It's either there or not there.
Right, you get more power with time. You get more after you've proven that you can achieve certain things, and you've done so successfully. It gives you ammunition and certain authority.
So certainly, it's easier for me to make the case, today 50 years after I began my practice to a client that we should do ABC, but I similarly had done so on my first building, the Habitat.
I mean, I certainly didn't provide something I was asked to provide. I believe that must be a moral obligation from the beginning. And you start at the smaller scale of issues and you build up your authority, but it's an attitude, it's part of you.
SS:
This is a good transition to our studio here at GSD. We are designing for a humanist skyscraper city. How do you project your ideology to the students? How is architecture and urban design interrelated?
MS:
I would say that when I was studying architecture 60 years ago, it was inconceivable to think about a building design or particularly an urban typology, particularly housing and office buildings, without the association of what kind of urbanism it would yield.
In other words, the two are intertwined. I mean, you can see it in the writings of Le Corbusier, the writings of Mies van der Rohe and Wright. Wright had an architecture vision, and its urban equivalent was Broadacre-City and Le Corbusier had an architecture vision and its urban expression was Le Ville Radieuse and the towers in the park, etc.
Well think today about the avant-garde in architecture, and how many architects have an associated equivalent urban vision. And so, the first step in the curriculum is to recognize that there is an intertwining interdependency between urbanism, typology and urban transportation, all three. Urban transportation, because, as it changes, it changes the city.
Typology is impacted by the urban vision, but also dictates it.
If your typology is a very large footprint of office buildings, say an acre footprint, and you know you need extrusions and certain amount of space around them; that assembly of spaces, you're going to get a particular kind of urbanism.
And if they come down to the street in particular way, that implies a certain urbanism. If they have podiums or don't have podiums creates an impact; I'm just saying it impacts the urbanism. And so, I think the urban vision and architecture vision are interdependent and the curriculum and education have to recognize that.
SS:
Your theory is rooted in three elements, the tectonics, the purpose & the place. With the current hubris of society, does this approach change, when lifespans of buildings are decreasing constantly?
MS:
If you think of ancient ruins, that tectonic of masonry construction, whether it's column and lintel reconstruction of the great vaults of Roman construction, or the brick Romanesque construction, as a building deteriorated and aged, they left behind the footprint of the tectonic with all its beauty. And so you think of today, buildings made up of clumsy steel frame that's hidden by veneer, materials, and a series of floor plates that have pipes behind them and wires and whatever hidden out of sight. And then think of it as a ruin. It's got to look like a garbage dump, because none of these leave an imprint of anything lasting. I mean, they don't leave the imprint of an ordered structure.
And so I think it's a fascinating test of whether one has ordered the construction in a way that would create a beautiful ruin.
I mean, habitat would make a beautiful ruin. Of course I don't want to see it as a ruin, but it would make a beautiful ruin, even if a few boxes fell off it.
SS:
What do you see are the big drivers of architectural expression? Especially when architects try to be novel or strive for “starchitecture”.
MS:
Let's talk about the big forces. The tension between originality and individual expression on one hand, and the collective expression, the sort of common denominator that makes the city on the other. That tension and the balance between them has very thorough history. To take extreme example, in certain societies take “the Sari” (Indian women’s traditional apparel). The “Sari” had many variations, but for centuries women wore saris. It was an evolutionary dress form that got embraced, and that was individuality by the choice of fabric or pattern, within that common denominator. Architects in the 19th century generally built with the materials available, with masonry, brickwork. They varied within that, but that common denominator was substantial, and gave cohesiveness to the city.
Well compare the “Sari” to the world of dozens of fashion designers competing with each other. What they do is obsolete within a few years because they come up with something new, which is quite different.
So, individuality and expression increase at the expense of the common denominator collective. We have to seek that balance.
Again, we have now gone full pendulum; that individual expression, that impact of fashion. You know, I go to certain countries, for example, Israel, my own country, and I see young architects building glass towers in the middle of Tel Aviv, in the middle of the tropics in a hot climate, twisting the building and what not. And that way, they just looked at the magazines and they saw twisted glass towers and that's what they did.
Moreover, the globalizing economy allows them to import the curtain wall from Germany and get its workmanship. And so, I think we need to seek the common denominators. And it's not easy, because there’s too much choice of technology and materials. At the same time, I'm all for the capability of individual expression in a democratic society, but there has to be a balance.
For example, if an architect is passionate about harmoniously relating to what’s there before him, he will tend to do building that is responsive “urbanistically” to setting. If he or she thinks they’re kingship, conquering and rediscovering the world, they won't care. And you see both examples out there in the field.
SS:
What do you hope that you will be able to build or wish that will be built in your lifetime?
MS:
I hope it is my original habitat with its three ingredients; the house assembly, the biggest scaled mega structure, and many layers of urbanization. So, the membranes bridging across form a space below them, and that becomes a potentially communal space. That was never realized. What was realized was a 12-story assembly of houses without the urbanism at all, without the idea of the three-dimensional city.
The original got abandoned, and I never had the chance to realize that idea in the habitat of the future studies. When we did the research fellowship, we revisited that issue. But I've never built a three-dimensional city, with streets bridging and multiple uses at different levels, mixing offices and housing in the way I had proposed them in several projects. I hope while I'm still practicing, I could realize one such project.