Moshe Safdie on If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture: Nonfiction

Moshe Safdie is one of the greatest and most innovative architects of the past half-century, and a recipient of the prestigious Wolf Prize – considered, along with the Nobel Prize, as one of the most important honors bestowed upon an individual in the arts. A citizen of the U.S., Canada, and Israel, Safdie is primarily based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Across five decades, he has built some of the world’s most influential and memorable structures – from the 1967 modular housing scheme in Montreal known as “Habitat” and the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas and the Marina Bay Sands development and extraordinary Jewel Changi airport interior garden and waterfall in Singapore. Safdie is deeply committed to architecture as a social force for good, and believes that any challenge can be addressed with solutions that enhance community and uplift the human spirit. He frequently refers to the “silent client” an architect must ultimately serve: the people who live in, work in, or experience a building. If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture (Atlantic Monthly Press) takes readers behind the veil of an essential yet mysterious profession to explain, through Safdie’s own experiences, how an architect thinks and works.

Victor Deupi is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Miami School of Architecture. His research focuses on the Early Modern Spanish and Ibero-American world, mid-20th-century Cuba, and contemporary architecture. His books include Architectural Temperance: Spain and Rome, 1700-1759 (Routledge, 2015), Transformations in Classical Architecture: New Directions in Research and Practice (Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, 2018), Emilio Sanchez in New York and Latin America (Routledge, 2020), and Cuban Modernism: Mid-Century Architecture 1940-1970, with Jean-Francois Lejeune (Birkhäuser Verlag, 2021). Dr. Deupi was also the President of the CINTAS Foundation dedicated to promoting Cuban art and culture from 2016-2018.