In my day job, I work as a computer programmer, and one of the recent projects that I participated in was the revamping of the CBC Digital Archives (and its sibling, the Archives de Radio-Canada), unveiled this week. I was already a end-user of the website before working on it, but while coding and testing it, I discovered how much more contents the site in fact had beyond what the original design allowed the average user to see. For instance, what would be interesting for this weblog are perhaps the clips that have been regrouped under new categories on Architecture or Transport.
One of the topics that I was most hooked up on was the one on Moshe Safdie, the conceiver of Montreal’s Habitat 64. In 1971, the CBC visited Israel with Safdie, and captured a very encompassing interview with the architect:
Born in the hillside city of Haifa, Palestine, Moshe Safdie spent his childhood summers on kibbutzim, or communal farms, where he lived, worked and played with 50 other children. The social and political mood of the time had a profound impact on him. It was here that he developed the strong community values and humanist ideals that inform his beliefs and his architecture. CBC accompanies Safdie on a tour of his homeland as he discusses architecture, the environment and his roots.
In another video of the same “package”, Evan Solomon, in full 1990s style, interviews Moshe Safdie on the book “The City After the Automobile” that he published 11 years ago.