Moshe Safdie.

  The reason I went to the NGC last evening was because there is a special exhibition going on  about the architect, Moshe Safdie. To be honest, I never heard about the name before and I even had to look up the spelling on Google to write this. Apparently, Moshe Safdie is an Israel born Canadian who studied architecture at McGill University. His first project was the Habitat 67, which was built as part of the Montreal Expo 67 celebration. Through the decades, he applied simple geometric patterns on designing various buildings in Canada such as the National Gallery of Canada, the former Ottawa City hall, and the Vancouver Library Square. Furthermore, there are more than 30 structures designed by him standing around the globe. Even though this exhibition was the first chance to know about his works, I've already seen documentary of one of his creation before. One of the Discovery channel program that I watched last summer, was about the construction of Marina Bay Sands, which is his recent work in Singapore. At the time, I didn't pay much attention to the name of architect, so I would've never knew he was the same person who designed the Gallery in Ottawa. One of the interesting idea was found on his idea note about the ideal urban concept. According to his note, the modern city structure consists with the three different elements, which are residential, commercial, and recreational. The average distance between the three is about 20 minutes on transportation and causes a lot of social problem such as traffic and less leisure time. In his note, he marked that living of individual would be more essential if the city consists with the numbers of complex high rises with three aspects at the same time. He is probably not the first one to have this thought, but he is definitely an architect who tried to apply the urban concept. I especially enjoyed this exhibition since it's related to my personal interest and the potential area of study.