When a major retrospective of Moshe Safdie's work opens at the Skirball Cultural Center next month, visitors to the museum near the top of the Sepulveda Pass won't just get to see the architect's designs in the form of models and sketches under glass. They'll also be walking through one of Safdie's most extensive projects: the Skirball campus itself.
Safdie, who made a brash name for himself as a young architect with the Habitat residential complex built for the 1967 World Expo in Montreal, designed the Skirball's original buildings, which opened in 1994.
He returned to add wings in 2000 and 2003; this fall, his firm's latest additions to the campus, Herschel Hall and Guerin Pavilion, will be complete. Located on the northern side of the museum property, the new construction covers 80,000 square feet and includes classrooms, conference space and gardens.
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The retrospective, "Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie," is organized by New York curator Donald Albrecht. It is an expanded version of a show that ran three years ago at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, a building that Safdie designed.