TRUTH IN ARCHITECTURE.(architect Moshe Safdie)(Interview)

Moshe Safdie is an architect who dislikes artistry. This is not to say that he objects to frills and curlicues, although, being an old-style modernist, he disapproves of those, too. His position is more extreme. In his first book, "Beyond Habitat," he wrote, "It is inconceivable that something which is not functional should be beautiful." He quoted a seemingly banal remark made by Philip Johnson--"There are no rules, surely no certainties in any of the arts. There is only the feeling of a wonderful freedom"--and responded, "I absolutely disagree with him. We have very few alternatives to the right solution. . . . A solution is a process of moving toward the truth, which is the complete opposite of freedom from rules."

In his early twenties, Safdie worked for Louis Kahn, and, like Kahn, he believes in contemplating what a building "wants to be." While another architect might experience the design process as a search for inspiration, in other words, Safdie experiences it as a search for constraint. When he sketches, Safdie conceives of himself not as creating but as channelling: channelling nature (the geography of the site), channelling culture (the spirit of the people who will use the building), and channelling the character of his materials. This is not a matter of modesty. On the contrary, it is as though Safdie aspired to be not an artist but a natural force, like evolution, producing not originality but truth. When he talks about the buildings he has built in Jerusalem, he says that he wishes them to appear "as if they had always been there": not so much brilliant as inevitable.

Safdie's aversion to arbitrary beauty is such that he has railed against art, especially contemporary art, which he often finds incomprehensible and self-important. Responding to a friend's objection to this view, he wrote:

I asked her to imagine that she was going to Mars, she was in a space ship built and designed in the best tradition of space ships. It had elaborate controls and dials and watches and warning lights, and it had TV screens, and it had apertures focusing on the sun and the moon and the planets, and it had sleeping compartments molded out of the wall. . . . I said, "Could you think of a Mondrian on the wall?" and she said, "No, it would not be right there. . . . You wouldn't need it because the entire space ship, the dials and the controls and the screens and the panels, they would all form kind of a Mondrian." This was, of course, precisely what I had meant.

One might expect someone of such severe aesthetic opinions to be dour and humorless, but in fact Safdie is exceptionally charming. People who have tried in vain to oppose one of his projects talk about his charm and the way he uses it to convince people that he is right. He is warm and gracious in an Old World way, always guiding and gesturing with his hands. He has an unusually high tolerance for eye contact. His voice has a rich timbre, as though layered on itself. He looks more Middle Eastern than American (he was born and grew up in Israel): he is tanned throughout the year, and he still wears the thick mustache he wore when he was a student. He can be joyful, but he is not lighthearted. He is not one to indulge in playfulness or eccentricity in his work. He is urbane, but not cool in his demeanor: he can be contemptuous of those who disagree with him. And, despite his success, there often seems about him an air of distracted dissatisfaction, of ambition irritated by circumstance.

Obtaining architectural commissions requires diplomacy, and Safdie is very good at that. He knows when to listen and when to speak. He makes clients feel that he cares about them, and that he is not the sort of architect--not an impetuous auteur, not a stern snob--who would hijack their project in the service of an intimidating aesthetic agenda. He knows, too, that a skillfully crafted model is crucial to inspiring faith, especially in clients who find it hard to picture a building from drawings. Safdie employs five full-time modelmakers, and he examines every detail of their productions. Is the grain on the plywood too large? That could break the illusion. Are the model's tiny trees the right kind of trees for the location of the building? Robert Saarnio, who was a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, at the time Safdie proposed to the board of trustees his design for a new wing, still remembers the effect Safdie produced at that meeting. "He brought in two gorgeous de-mountable wood models," Saarnio says, "and the trustees were like kids with a new Christmas toy. The power of the beauty of those models was amazing. And then there was Safdie's own incredible demeanor. I mean, he walks into the room and he is suave and debonair and worldly and cosmopolitan. He's articulate, he's relaxed. By the time he set his model down and demonstrated with all his charisma how it came apart and could be refitted to show three different schemes, he had half the battle won."

Safdie is inundated with commissions, and he employs sixty-five architects to elaborate his plans. He designed the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and a Colosseum-like public library in Vancouver. For Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, he designed the Children's Memorial, the Memorial to the Deportees, and the new complex now being built. He is currently working on two airports (Tel Aviv and Toronto), seven museums (Jerusalem, Punjab, Salem, Savannah, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Washington, D.C.), one performing-arts center (Kansas City), three government buildings (including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms headquarters, in Washington), one corporate campus (Tel Aviv), two college campuses (Newton, Massachusetts, and San Diego), and one hunting lodge (Scotland). Last year, he was commissioned to design his most visible American project so far, the U.S. Institute of Peace, to be built on the Mall in ...