The Kibbitz
themselves who are doing all these improvisations. Some people would go further and say it’s because of the Jewish tradition of lo tase lecha pesel umesichah [the prohibition against graven images], that the desire to avoid representational art gets ex- tended to include all sorts of beautifi- cation. But I don’t buy that because, in history, it’s true that we were always impacted by local culture, but that’s inevitable. But there were buildings that people took pride in and care of. I did the national museum of the Sikhs in India. And I’d say India is not a great place for maintenance, gener- ally speaking, but I did it 20 years ago and it is absolutely impeccable be- cause there is this pride. It’s deeper than just aesthetic taste. It’s the cul- ture of caring for the environment. If you had an opportunity to talk to people who don’t think about ar- chitecture or design in this way, how might you get them to begin to appreciate it? When I look at the curriculum in Is- rael—I have grandchildren now of school age, kindergarten age, my one grandson is going to Grade 2 — it’s a pleasure to see what they do in the arts: drawing, observing, having trips to look at nature. I lament the fact that schools in Israel have less and less of that. And I think it’s a very important thing to try and introduce it in the Jew- ish school curriculum. And I know, people always say Jews are not much in the visual arts. But you come to the United States and how many im- portant architects are Jewish? Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, I can go on and on. And the same is true in the world of art — Rothko and others, there’s a good list. So I’d say that when the op- portunity and the education and the exposure are there, there’s no lack of talent and appreciation.
The Khalsa Heritage Centre (top) incorporates Sikh symbolism throughout the design; while not a religious site, it is a sig- nificant site for Sikhs worldwide and a hall- mark for how to build for a client’s culture while still retaining an architect’s signature. Habitat 67 (right) combied modular building techniques (units were prefabricated and then moved into place) with a striking design. Notre-Dame (opposite page), Paris’ iconic cathedral, recently had its nave restored after a devastating fire in 2019.
Moving from the haredi to the hiloni side, have you ever thought of the Habitat 67 housing complex as an urban kibbutz? Yeah, I think in many ways when I designed it, the kind of collective life of the kibbutz was there. I mean, there wasn’t the common dining room and the children’s house, but there was that sense of collective living. And in fact, what’s interesting is that Habitat, now 60 years later, is very much a communal place. They have a residence committee, they have sub- committees, they have a cookbook that they did, and they have news- letters and internal politics and I’m
very involved because, until recently, I owned an apartment so I would get all the stuff. So it is very much a com- munal place. Could you walk me through the pro- cess of completing a project? How do you balance the site, the program, the client — and how do they all in- form what the ultimate design is? A project is the outcome of a dialogue with a client. No great building can oc- cur without a great client. Clients have real impact on the outcome because it’s part of the dialogue. Good archi- tecture comes out of that dialogue. Sometimes it involves educating the
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