BENTONVILLE -- Moshe Safdie, an international architect, has learned as much from his works that never made it past the design phase as he has from the finished projects spanning his nearly 50-year career in architecture.
A temporary exhibition at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, "Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie," showcases the architect's work on cultural, civic and mixed-use urban centers, though nearly half of the works in the exhibition never came to fruition. Safdie is the architect who designed Crystal Bridges.
One of those abandoned projects was the National Art Museum of China, for which Safdie's firm competed but did not win. Now two years after Safdie's firm submitted its design, the project languishes without an architect. Safdie said that his team spent a year on the project and that it was one of the firm's greatest designs.
Defeats aside, there's gold in those projects that never emerged from the design phase if you know how and where to extrapolate it, he said.
"In terms of one's personal development, some of these competition designs end up being very important steps in one's own development and evolution of concepts," Safdie said during a recent telephone interview from his world headquarters in Boston. "Even though they don't get built, they somehow have an impact on what you do later on."
Touted as the most comprehensive retrospective of Safdie's work to date, "Global Citizen" debuted in 2010 at the National Gallery of Canada, which Safdie designed, before traveling to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and then finally to Crystal Bridges, where it will be on display through Sept. 1. Admission is free.
The collection entails nearly 200 objects, including models, original sketches, project photos, books, and multiple projections and slide shows.
"The goal of the show was really to show the trajectory of the career, and to me, the unbuilt projects are just as interesting because they reveal his thinking," said Donald Albrecht, an independent curator and curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York.
The exhibition takes up about 7,000 square feet in various spaces throughout Crystal Bridges and is divided into five phases of Safdie's career -- North American works, the Habitat projects that helped launch the first phase of his career, New Global Centers I and II, and his native Israel.
The New Global Centers sections are devoted to his most recent work in the world's emerging markets, from India to China, and from Singapore to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
The Habitat area includes Safdie's Habitat '67, which was unveiled at the 1967 World's Exposition in Montreal and entailed prefabricated boxes overlapped haphazardly on top of one another. It was originally intended as a possible solution for high-quality housing in dense urban environments.
The project is well-known in architectural circles, though there were similar housing projects that Safdie conceived but were never erected.
"Even if they weren't built, they show a tremendous creativity that they spawned," Albrecht said.
Two were planned for New York, along with one each in Puerto Rico and Jerusalem in the late '60s. The New York Habitat projects were put off indefinitely because of the city's growing financial crisis. In the case of the Puerto Rico project, construction was started, but "due to the government's withdrawal of financial support, the developer abandoned the project with only 30 modules produced and in place," according to information on the Safdie firm's website.
Those losses were big disappointments, Safdie said.
"This was hoping that the idea of Habitat would then proliferate immediately after we built the Montreal project," he said.
Also in the 1960s, he created a design for the San Francisco State College Student Union that was never built. Though the project had the support of students, the school's board of trustees rejected the design, believing that it was not in line with the campus's character. Safdie's rendition was situated and landscaped in a way that would have allowed students to walk over it. The board's rejection incited student riots.
In the early '70s, Safdie designed the Western Wall Precinct in Jerusalem, another project that fell to the wayside. The space in front of the Western Wall, the remnant of the Second Temple built by Harod and destroyed by Titus in 70 A.D., was cleared in 1967 for pilgrims who went there to pray. Safdie proposed excavating the praying area down to its original Herodian street level, 9.8 yards below the existing terrain.
Albrecht said the project was costly, and aroused religious and political issues that worked against it.
"One of the things I tried to show is that unlike most architects, Moshe taps into these social/cultural issues," he said.
Also included in the exhibition is the 2008 design for the Palm Jumeirah Gateway Mosque in Dubai, another one lost to deteriorating economic conditions.
Across the architecture profession as a whole, Safdie estimates that ratio of built to projects that never evolve past the design phase is 2-to-1. It can be difficult to sustain a career through heartfelt rejection.
"It's always good to remind ourselves in projects that were built, through competitions, to go back five years later and visit all the other schemes that were submitted," Safdie said.
Metro on 07/26/2014