Moshe Safdie

In 1985 Safdie, who had by then resettled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teamed up with Boston Properties and Solomon Brothers to propose a 5-million-plus-square-foot mixed-use complex to replace the old New York City Coliseum on Broadway and 59th Street. The project was certainly far too large, but then again developers often, or even usually, initiate a proposal for a major project that includes much more square footage than they realistically expect to wring out of a city’s zoning and public appeals boards. The Columbus Center became the target for an almost unprecedented public outcry, and was killed, but the venom with which it was received was owing to reasons other than its design, which was urbanistically advanced. The Columbus Center project was published with the kind of purplish nighttime views that are standard promotional fare for developers but, for the by-then-thoroughly-academicized American architectural elite, were deemed “Oh! Such Bad Taste!”  Safdie’s reputation plummeted. This architect — this man — had bad taste, or perhaps he just had no taste.

Since then, Safdie’s reputation among architectural critics and the so-called avant garde in the academy remains frozen in 1980s time despite his many impressive and publicly admired projects, including civic and academic buildings, museums, airports. In light of the dismayingly plebeian Time Warner Center that stands at Columbus Circle today, Safdie’s condemned Columbus Center project looks very, very good. This alone should be enough to encourage proponents of the built environment — at least, those willing to take public positions that are deeply uncool — to look again. But it has not.

Now Safdie’s nearly completed Mamilla Alrov Center in Jerusalem, the last portion of a 28-acre mixed-use development, more than thirty years in the making, indisputably establishes him as one of today’s very best urban designer-architects. Forget, for a moment, the lightly etched lintels and structural arches of the architecture if you don’t like them — we can talk about style later — Mamilla reveals that the seventy-plus-year-old Safdie, two fingers on the pulse of contemporary culture, continues to be gifted with an unusual mix of cultural savvy, political pragmatism and social progressivism. Here is a complex that ought to become an exemplar for a 21st-century public realm. This erudite, dogged social activist for the built environment is no has-been at all.

The Mamilla Center, built in the Hinom Valley, a large, riverine, 28-acre swathe of land in central Jerusalem that traces the former 1967 green line that had plowed through the heart of the city, contains retail, office and residential spaces, an ultra-luxury hotel, and a two-level open-air pedestrian mall walkway culminating in a small multitiered landscaped park adjacent to the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City. Most of this is built atop a Safdie-designed 1600-car multistory parking garage and bus terminal, one of the best parking garages I know, with natural light falling from skylights into every level. From every vantage point that matters this transportation facility is nearly invisible: it just looks like landscaped terracing, or a series of progressively diminishing buttresses supporting the adjacent foundation walls of the Old City. Greenery (sustainable, of course) cascades down from planters on each tier.

In judging any urban development, one must consider what it replaced, what it is and what it might have been instead. As to the first and the second: Mamilla is superb. What was formerly a politically contested, no-man’s slum land is now a lively, thoroughly contemporary, mixed-use neighborhood where new buildings and spaces lace quietly through meticulously preserved, historically significant buildings to create a variety of vibrant, appealing indoor and outdoor public spaces. From Jerusalem’s politically charged, polycentric, multiethnic, torn and fraying fabric, Safdie has created a fistful of a “public realm” in the classic sense of the term. (Let’s just dismiss out of hand the so-called theoretical positions, both despicable and ridiculous, that maintain the public realm is dead, or can be resuscitated only by the architectural hyperstimulation of shop-o-philiacs.) As high-end jewelry stores cohabit with mid-range eateries, popular (and populated) cafés, a supermarket-style CVS and the Gap, Mamilla invites and is used by people of different classes, ethnicities and political persuasions. On mild-weathered days, black-hatted religious and bare-headed secular Jews, robed Armenian monks, Christian locals, a glut of backpack-toting tourists and a smattering of Palestinians can be seen brushing shoulders, mingling, prospecting, interacting. (More Palestinians would be nice, but even extraordinary urban design isn’t up to solving that one.)

Mamilla offers an object lesson in two related but distinct professional practices and disciplines: architectural urban design and historic preservation (which is a more fraught subject in the United States than elsewhere, at least if one judges by the seemingly nonstop debate sparked by the now-completed adaptive reuse of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City). As to the latter: when the Israelis won east Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967, the Mamilla site contained only one building of indisputable historic and aesthetic significance: the magnificently austere 19th-century French Hospice of Saint Vincent de Paul. Safdie’s office initially bowed to the developer’s disinclination to shoulder the costly prospect of preserving more. But ultimately, his office did the right thing, and recommended the preservation of other valuable but less monumental buildings on the site, including two stretches of small, masonry, arched cave-like spaces and a 19th-century two-story, masonry block residence known as the Stern House where the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, once slept.