The Kibbitz
F EW ARCHITECTS launch with the splash Moshe Safdie did: Habitat 67, the now iconic housing development showcased at Montreal’s world’s fair, grew out of his master’s thesis. In the half-century since that first project, Safdie has proven to be a versatile and prolific architect. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and the Khalsa Heritage Centre in Anandpur Sahib, India, all demonstrate the breadth of his abilities. We sat down this summer to discuss his many projects in Israel, Jewish aes- thetics, and the importance of light in architecture.
land that was cleared around the walls was kind of a no man’s land in terms of urban activity, and it created this very powerful bridge which is full of life almost all the time. Because of its position between different commu- nities, it also, by definition, attracts all the people. So Mamilla, when you walk around, there’s a lot of Ortho- dox, some haredi, the secular Jerusa- lemites, there’s tourists, there’s Arabs —and those who are visibly Arabs, walking around freely with the dress and head covers, etc. There are a sig- nificant number of Arabs serving and buying in the shops. So it is really a place where the public realm is mixed and cohabitated, and it gives it a cer- tain richness. It also created a flow between the Old City, between Jaffa Gate and the new city: on the chagim you get people going to prayers at the wall, during Ramadan you get a flow of people coming from Sheikh Jarrah. So it’s a mixer. In The Body of Faith , Jewish theolo- gian and philosopher Michael Wy- schogrod wrote about the Jewish community that “the level of taste in the Jewish community—and not only in the Orthodox commu- nity—is very low. Families that could afford the best live in homes decorated in the most pedestrian taste, lacking all individuality and personal statement. And when an attempt is made to express some in- dividuality, more often than not the result is merely weird rather than in good taste.” He went on to say that it’s a “very dangerous development, not mainly because our synagogues and homes exhibit poor taste, but because a totally bourgeois Juda- ism will be a dead Judaism.… A bourgeois Judaism is dead because it is out of contact with the explo- sive ferment of the religious spirit.”
We are living in a very polarized time. You have written about the Ma- milla district in Jerusalem, which you planned in the early 1970s as a phys- ical, constructed manifestation of an open society. It took over 40 years for it to be fully realized as a shopping district and bridge between the old and new cities, and Jewish and Pales- tinian areas. Can architects still play a role in mending a broken society? I think it’s important to distinguish between what architects can do, which is physical, and between what statesmen and politicians can do, which is create policy. Architects can create the physical setting to improve cohabitation, collaboration, interac- tion: they can have extraordinary im- pact as they design the public realm and how it relates to the urban fabric. But that can only be done via an op- portunity that has to be enacted one way or the other by policy. But, if there is policy in place, the architect can create the physical set- ting. To do that, they need to not just be a strong physical designer of the public realm, but to have their anten- nae out to appreciate various kinds of
forces: how people move in a city, when do they feel secure and inse- cure in a city, how you can mix cer- tain uses. Cohabitation by different populations in residential neighbour- hoods is very difficult, more difficult than commingling in, say, the bazaar, in the marketplace. Right now, I’m working in Singa- pore, which has an interesting mix of minorities: the majority are Chinese, but there are also Indian, Tamil, and Malay communities. The government, by design — and that’s policy plus ar- chitecture — has every one of the new towns mixed racially, because they had race riots in the early years of the state, and they were determined nev- er to let that happen again. They are socially engineering the population in housing projects. You can go far with that. The architect is a player, but not the sole player. Do you think that Mamilla actually fulfilled its function? I think Mamilla is a major success in three ways. First, it created a power- ful link between the Old City and the new city. Before it was done, all the
30 AUTUMN 2025
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