Movie: in the final video interview from our exclusive series, architect Moshe Safdie says that architects are also concerned with designing objects to create skyscrapers that operate with the city.
“They feel of towers as wonderful sculptures, twisting this way, twisting this way. But the tower is also a creating block of the city, it has to be – otherwise there is no city, since all we build is towers,” says Boston-primarily based architect Moshe Safdie.
Associated story: Marina Bay Sands delivers “a new type of public realm” says Moshe Safdie
“We have to find a way to deploy towers in a way that creates additively, collectively, public realm. We haven’t discovered how to do that. And we will not solve it so long as architects are focusing on this object thought of a constructing and not its connectivity.”
Downtown Dubai. Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Safdie, who was named the 2015 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient last week, rose to fame in his 20s with his extremely experimental Habitat 67 housing development, which combined high-rise apartments with urban garden residences.
Far more not too long ago, the 76-year-old architect has been back in the spotlight thanks to the good results of his 845,000 square metre Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore. At the centre of the improvement is a triple-tower structure connected by a roof garden with a 65-metre cantilever at 1 end.
London skyline. Image courtesy of Shutterstock
In an earlier interview in our series, he explained that he had designed the developing to propose a new sort of public realm, in opposition to developments of skyscrapers that have been disconnected from their cities.
Safdie was speaking to Dezeen at the Planet Architecture Festival in Singapore earlier this year, where he utilized his closing keynote speech to get in touch with for a “reorientation” of the way cities are created, saying that the vogue for skyscrapers and the privatisation of public space is creating cities that are “not worthy of our civilisation”.
New York skyline. Photograph by Iwan Baan
“The connectivity of a constructing informs its style. Something needs to connect,” he says. “Like a lego piece wants to have the clicking connecting prior to you can connect it to the next lego piece. Architecture wants to make cities have this connecting.”
“Think of a conventional city, you constructed individual buildings and they formed a boulevard, they formed a square, they formed a crescent. There could have been ten, 17, 18 buildings forming a crescent but they all subordinate themselves to the concept of constructing a crescent. Person buildings had an urban role, you could not separate a single from the other.”
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