Moshe Safdie
b. Haifa, 1938.

Moshe Safdie, a Canadian/Israeli famous architect whose design for a prefabricated “Habitat” at the Montreal Expo 1967 brought him instant fame. Moshe Safdie was trained at McGill University, Montreal (1955-61). He spent two years in Louis Kahn’s office before commencing in practice on his own account in 1964. Moshe Safdie has had offices in Montreal, from whence came the remarkable “Habitat” housing experiment for the 1967 Expo, in Jerusalem and more recently in the USA, where he now lives and holds a Harvard professorship. “Habitat” was the result of a way of thinking about cellular housing initially developed as a student thesis, but after its maturation at Montreal - which proved horrendously expensive and diffi?cult to construct - Safdie introduced it to other parts of the world, including two unbuilt projects for New York and a com?pleted more economic “Habitat” unit in Puerto Rico (1968-72). His Israeli period produced a number of impressive urban insertion projects, including a Rabbinical College, Jerusalem (1971-9), and various town-planning schemes for quarters in Jerusalem. In 1982, Moshe Safdie commenced work on the prestigious Canadian Government project for the country’s new National Gallery, which opened in 1988 in Ottawa.

List of major buildings / works:
Habitat, Expo 67, Montreal, Canada (158 flats), 1966-7.
Habitat Projects: New York, 1968; Puerto Rico, 1968-72;
Tropacao Tropaco, US Virgin Isles, and a further New York Project, both 1970.
Yeshivat Porat Joseph Rabbinical College, Jerusalem, 1971-9.
Desert Research Institute (and Ben Gurian Archives) in the Negev, 1974.
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Parkin/Safdie), 1982-8.

Bibliography
Moshe Safdie, Beyond Habitat, New York, 1970;
For Everyone a Garden, Cambridge, Mass., 1974.