Moshe Safdie, the architect of Sri Lanka’s paradigmatic high rise edifice Altair, has been named the Laureate in Architecture by the jury committee for the 2019 Wolf Prize, considered the second most important in the world after the Nobel Prize.
To be presented by the President of Israel Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) in Jerusalem in May, the celebrated Wolf Prize honours Mr Safdie for “a career motivated by the social concerns of architecture and formal experimentation.”
Announcing the prize, worth US$ 100,000, the jury said: “Over a long and distinguished career spanning 50 years, Moshe Safdie has produced a body of work of great originality and artistry in the field of architecture and urbanism. The projects undertaken by his architectural studio consistently seek experimentation and can be understood as an evolving form of research. He is also a distinguished educator and in his numerous publications he has articulated a clear and coherent position as an academic and critic.”
A citizen of Israel, Canada and the United States, Safdie is an architect, urban planner, theorist and author. He was born in Haifa in 1938 and relocated to Canada with his family in 1953. He graduated from McGill University in 1961 with a degree in architecture.
After apprenticing with Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia, Safdie returned to Montreal to oversee the master plan for the 1967 World Exhibition. In 1964 he established his own firm to realize Habitat 67, an adaptation of his thesis at McGill, which was the central feature of the World’s Fair and a ground-breaking design in the history of architecture.
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