Habitually Daring

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 $15 million. The disappointed but unbowed architect went back to the drawing board, scaled things down, and produced Habitat, the Lego-like building that has stood beside the St. Lawrence River for more than fifty years. “There was a lesson in this, one that I’ve found myself remembering throughout my career,” Safdie writes in his new memoir. “Sudden duress doesn’t have to mean the end of the story — sometimes it gives you the material for a different story.”

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture