Witold Rybczynski

Moshe Safdie was a freshly minted architect in his mid-twenties when he proposed a visionary housing scheme, based on his McGill undergraduate thesis, to the corporation that was building the 1967 Montreal world’s fair. Against all odds, the unconventional project was accepted. But the Canadian government, which was footing the bill, told him that the estimated cost of $42 million (almost $400 million today) was too high and that he would have to make do with…