Skirball Center presents career retrospective 'Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie'

Source: Daily News, Los AngelesOct.mini storage 24--Walk through Skirball Cultural Center's new "Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie" exhibition, and you'll see building designs loaded with cultural, social and religious meaning. A museum to the Sikhs of Anandpur Sahib, India. A library that has become a popular wedding site in Salt Lake City. And in Los Angeles, one of the nation's largest Jewish cultural institutions 30-plus years in the making.Yes, Safdie built the Skirball too.What he calls a "quintessentially California" campus -- an intertwining of gardens, landscape, terraces, outdoor rooms and architecture -- is prominently featured in the exhibition's U.S. debut. The exhibition was sponsored by Skirball and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Betonville, Ark., and had its world debut at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottowar in 2010.Last week, it opened at the Skirball in tandem with the completion of the campus. While it enjoys its own gallery space and outdoor guided tour, Skirball is just part of Safdie's great body of work in North America, Israel and more recently in the countries of China, Singapore and India.Chronologically organized in five chapters that occupy all of the Skirball's galleries, it retraces the last 45 years of the architect's career through 3-dimensional scale models, drawings, photographs and film, starting with his breakthrough, Habitat 67.This groundbreaking urban housing project, inspired by the hillside villages of his native Israel, was unveiled as an exhibition pavilion at the 1967 World's Exposition in Montreal, his adopted homeland since childhood. Its unusual stacked, concrete structure of modular forms that made use of prefabricated materials spawned a series of projects using these experimental building techniques.None were built, but the concept i儲存 regularly reconsidered and updated."Every 10 years it becomes a touchstone for a symbol of the future, for a symbol of modernity," says Donald Albrecht, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York who conceived and created the "Global Citizen" exhibition. "It's a very happily settled community now, but it went through some dark times."Visitors can get a taste of the controversy surrounding this and other Safdie projects, including the Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum's triangular, concrete tunnel.The building was completed in 2005. Its dimly lit, narrow tunnel takes people through the rise of Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust before opening up to a panoramic view of a sunlit Israel. Critics argued it suggested a positive ending to the Holocaust. The metaphoric dimension of the walls opening up was seen by others as somewhat corny."Sometimes with Moshe's work there is a feeling that in the attempt to be meaningful and reach the public, there's a too populist approach that does not go with architecture. Architecture should pull back," Albrecht says, summing up the criticism that runs throughout the show.And yet, metaphor is a popular component of Safdie's work. The roof on Washington D.C.'s United States Institute of Peace Headquarters, completed in 2011, features dynamic translucent forms that suggest the wings of a dove.Daylight and the merging of landscape, gardens and architecture are also found in much of his work, from Habitat 67 to its 21st century reimagining seen in four designs specifically built for the exhibition, as well as at the Skirball where "Global Citizen" runs through March 2.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Daily News (Los Angeles) Visit the Daily News (Los Angeles) at .dailynews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉