Moshe Safdie: Buildings and Projects, 1967–1992 ed. by Irena Zantovska Murray (review)

332 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 towards tills synthesis [of imagination and experience], a formula that was at last successfully produced in Sarah Bastard's Notebook.' This neat 'line,' however, is belied by Verduyn's thoughtful readings of individual texts. She seems to signal awareness of this by invoking the idea of meaning 'between the lines,' but this leads her into an amusing circle: if a position in 'the space between' is postrnodern, then Engel's work, she concedes, might be postmodern. Luckily, she does not waste time spinning her wheels mthis circle. rt is true that the book is marred by the wobbly theoretical context. After citing feminist theory to support an anti-essentialist view of the self, for example, Verduyn goes on to write without irony about Engel's search for her 'real true self.' Verduyn's unpretentious and even eccentric method, however, yields surprising dividends. She explores archival material and unpublished work, remaining open and receptive throughout. The book that results is neither a conventional 'writing life' nor conventional literary criticism. Neither fish nor fowl, it is a moving tribute to Marian Engel precisely because it evades the categories. To do her justice, Verduyn does work towards a conclusion that breaks out of the New Critical formula - something to do with a "'sisterly" alternative to society's traditional dualist vision.' But this is never fully articulated. Since her chronological agenda does not leave Verduyn space to do justice to Engel'sparticular kind ofexcellence, Ifound myselfwishing for a final close reading of an exemplary text that might have acted as the missing conclusion. 'Madame Hortensia, Equilibriste/ for example, is a dazzling story that contains all the ingredients Verduyn has touched on: smallness, balance, motherhood, etc. But then again, maybe the best reader is not always an equilibriste. In the end it is Verduyn's willingness to be off balance that serves us welL Engel herself (despite being a perfectionist) favoured an aesthetic of imperfection. I think she would have enjoyed Verduyn's delicious footnotes, which are like long tendrils resisting the order of things. These tantalizing loose ends will surely be too tempting for more perfectionist and rigorous scholars to resist. It is to be hoped that when they do, the results will be as engaging, as open-minded, and as readable as Verduyn's book. (MAGDALENE REDEKOP) Irena Zantovska Murray, editor. Moshe Safdie: Buildings and Projects, 1967-1992 McGill-Queen's University Press. 332. $65.00 including CD-ROM , Since the much-publicized opening of the National Gallery in May 1988, Israeli-born, Canadian-trained, American-based Moshe Safdie has emerged as the architect ofchoice for public Canada. Besides the NGC, recent projects include the Musee de la civilisation in Quebec City (1981-88), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1985--91), the unbuilt but winning design for the HUMANITIES 333 Toronto Ballet Opera House (1987-90), the Ottawa City Hall (1988-<)4) and Vancouver Library Square (1992-95). In the summer of 1997 Safdie announced two new projects; a terminal for Pearson airport in Toronto and the expansion and redevelopment of Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Safdie's work remains controversial- the Colosseum-inspired design of Vancouver Library Square had a mixed reception - but there is no denying that the twenty-six-year-oldwho convrnced CMHC tobuildhis McGill thesis project as Habitat 67 for the Montreal exposition has fulfilled the remarkable promise of his salad days. Accordingly, Moshe Sa/die: Buildings and Projects, 1967-1992 is much welcome. It helps us understand Safdie's extraordinaryprofessional journey from unknown wunderkind to Harvard professor and card-carrying member of the international architectural establishment. Despite its title, this book is not a monograph. More to the pornt, its publication has a specific context and purpose. In 1990 Safdie donated the bull< of his archive - drawings, sketchbooks, models, files, photographs, personal papers - to the Canadian Architecture Collection at McGill University. Over the last decade this institution has produced a steady stream ofexpertlyproduced catalogues and guides which havebroughtthe range and depth of their collection to a wide audience. This volume does the same for the Safdie archive. Beautifully produced, it makes a contribution in its own right to the study of Sadie and architecture generally. As one might expect, the bulk of this volume is devoted to an exposition of theSafdie collection. This is done through a chronological review ofeach project in the archive. The first is Safdiels university thesis of 1960, the last a 1992 design for a museum of industrial design, architecture, and contemporary art in Munich. Each project is briefly discussed in a text of one or two pages, supported by thoughtfully chosen illustrations and a breakdown of the CAe's holdings by record type (files, transparencies, etc) and purpose (planning drawings, dev'elopment drawingsl etc). This in turn is augmented by an inventory on CD-ROM, an extensive bibliography and three indexes which organize the material by project title, location, and type. The result is,an introduction to the Safdie archives and also a comprehensive introduction to Safdie's work; from what we can see here it has been consistent and remarkably wide-ranging. If this volume has a limitation it is the obvious one that it does not provide the kind of critical review and analysis that Safdie's work deserves and needs. Still, editor Irena Murray has gone some distance towards filling this gap by including two short essaysl both stimulating and highly readable. The first, 'Moshe Safdie: A Profile' by John Bland, professor emeritus at McGill, chronicles Safdie's intellectual and ideological development. The second, 'Safdie in Israel' by Robert Oxman, professor of architecture at the Israel Institute of 334 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Teclmology, exammes the role which Safdie's Israeli projects have played in the formulation of the architect's mature style. At a timewhencollecting institutions areincreasingly reluctant to accept architectural collections and funds to support publication are increasingly difficult to obtain, this volume is testament to the important work being done by the CAC. By virtue of its publication, the sheer range of Safdie's creative output is broughtbefore the public eye - an output stimulated by the Canadian experience of modernism and now happily claimed by three countries. It is no criticism to say that Irena Murray and her team have stimulated an appetite for more, more about Safdie and more about his buildings which have collectively become our own. (KELLY CROSSMAN) William Aide. Startingfrom Porcupine Oberon Press. x, 122. $14.95 Porcupine is an area in northern Ontario which encompasses the town of Timmins and other - mostly-mining - towns. Canadian pianist William Aide begins this book playfully proclaiming himself Ithe greatest pianist ever produced by the Porcupine.' The author, who is head ofpiano at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, has been a lifelong student of literature. In fact, reading and writing (he has published a volume of poetry) seem to have occupied a place in his life as central as does music. It is therefore not surprising that this volume is not a straightforward chronological reminiscence: it tells many interwoven stories. To begin with, there is his personal and musical development. I wonder if anyone has given us more vividly the flavour of private music training in small-town Canada, with its reliance on conservative English models for instrumental and vocal training, the proliferation of part-time teachers armed with nineteenth-century pedagogy and pre-Wagnerian tastes, and - not least- its festivals. For any child studying music in Canada, festivals are an inevitable rite of passage; the rows ofself-conscious participants, the anxious family members, the long silences between performances violated only by the noisy scribbling of the adjudicator's pencil, the handbell signalling the next contestant, the.endless performances of Bach's Prelude in C minor or of Mousie in the Coal Bin by a series of earnest eight-year-olds. Such memories do not easily fade. But for young William Aide they were an exciting event: JPerhaps I was the only Timmins child ever to have been transfixed by Festival magic.' It was an opportunity to hear a great deal of music for the first time. But it was also an opportunity to compete and to win - which he often did. Perhaps it was this early experience of the joys of competition that has flavoured his professional life. Indeed his discussions about repertoire as well as his pedagogical concerns seem to have ...