Moshe Safdie, the executive architect of UCSD’s new facility for Eleanor Roosevelt College, spoke about the artistic and social-serving goals of architecture and the specific design and aesthetic considerations of the ERC project in a lecture on Oct. 10. The lecture was part of ERC’s week-long grand opening.
College pride: International House resident advisors sell baked goods and I-House T-shirts as part of Eleanor Roosevelt College’s opening week Street Fair.
Safdie traced the presence of public space in communities throughout history, eventually moving to explain how his extensive list of designs fit into an “”architecture of interaction.””
“”The history of urbanism is the evolving form of community,”” Safdie said. “”Within building types, there are spaces for interaction, which define a building.””
Safdie listed the overwhelming use of cars, a change in scale ‹ meaning skyscrapers and high-rise buildings ‹ and the tendency for strip malls to serve as places of interaction over libraries or city plazas as what has influenced major shifts in architecture over the past century. The problem for architects, then, according to Safdie, is to “”explore how to craft places where people feel good interacting with one another.””
Bounce: Students partake in the Eleanor Roosevelt College Street Fair on Oct. 11 as part of the college’s grand opening week.
Safdie’s extensive experience is largely centered in universities and libraries. During the lecture, he covered his work on Community 57 in Montreal, a planned city that has been the most successful in Canada as far as retaining residents. He also discussed considerations of the Vancouver Library square, the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, the Manila District in Jerusalem and the construction of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, the Salt Lake City Library and the Performing Arts Center in Kansas City, Mo.
Considering universities in particular, Safdie spoke of the specific aims architects have when planning a facility for education, noting that it required understanding buildings as “”program spaces, and within them the life of university students can carry on.””
Referring specifically to Hebrew Union College, Safdie mentioned the “”incorporation of landscape and architectureŠ which was also a concern in San Diego.””
Speaking on specific preoccupations and strategies regarding construction on ERC’s new campus, Safdie said that “”ERC was a place, a community, that wanted to present itself within another community.””
Preserving an individual atmosphere within a larger space with its own identity was a key concern for Safdie, who said that the six-college system required an architect to “”take various facilities and plug them into the main public pathsŠ to sustain and develop student life.””
Safdie concluded by discussing over-arching themes of architecture.
“”Values of architecture do not change, regardless of changes in fashion,”” Safdie said.
In addition to the projects mentioned in the lecture, Safdie’s firm has undertaken a prestigious list of projects including the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, Harvard Business School’s Morgan Hall, the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Safdie directed the new college’s development of 12 acre, which includes residence halls, apartments, dining facilities, administrative and ancillary services, and the International House. Taal Safdie and Ricardo Rabines, of Safdie Rabines Architects in San Diego, were partners in the project.
The $106 million ERC project was the first time an entire UCSD college was designed and built at one time; the other five colleges were constructed building-by-building over the course of several years.
Safdie has been the principal officer at Moshe Safdie and Associates Inc. since 1987.
