Safdie was born in Haifa, moved to Montréal at fifteen, and finished his architecture degree at McGill in 1961 with a thesis on a three-dimensional modular housing system. Four years later, at twenty-eight, he was building it: Habitat 67 remains the only case of a student thesis realised at full scale as a national exhibition pavilion. After a year in Louis Kahn's office he opened his own practice and moved it to Jerusalem, where he worked on the Old City restoration, Mamilla and Yad Vashem. His later work is large, public and geometrically ordered — the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Marina Bay Sands and Jewel Changi in Singapore, the Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. The prefabricated repetition of Habitat has never quite been repeated: the cost per unit that the Expo 67 budget could absorb has kept the system out of ordinary housing.
