This page was created by Jaclyn Legge. The last update was by Maegen Sargent.
Moshe Safdie, the Architect
More interested in architecture than art itself, Safdie actively sought to push the limits of the role architecture can play in a gallery setting. If “the ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art’” (O’Doherty, 14), then the Water Court is a feat of careful, simplified sophistication wherein “the new whole emerges as more than the sum of individual parts” (Safdie, 9).
Safdie, unlike many contemporary architects, speaks of his architectural visions with a “vocabulary of religious experience” (Ord, 26). The National Gallery is celebrated for the Colonnade, one of the longest and steepest ramps in a gallery setting in recent times, which “creates an agreeable sense of anticipation” (Gallery CITE) for what lies ahead. The Colonnade helps create an atmosphere of an ascent and of procession which characterize the ancient religious architecture that inspires him (Safdie, 10). Throughout human history, ramps have been used “to cultivate in the visitor who slowly mounted them a mood of awe, of reverence towards the zone of special holiness which would greet them at the summit” (Ord, 21). If the Colonnade is the procession, then the Water Court is just one of the ‘sacred destinations’ one is marching towards.
