Saturday Night magazine  |  October 21, 2000

DESIGNS ON JERUSALEM

Moshe Safdie’s ambitious blueprint for a city in ruins

By Eric Siblin

Moshe Safdie's home, in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City, is built atop ruins — an architecture encouraged by the abundant supply of fallen empires here. The Ottoman vaults and domes that form its main floor date back a few hundred years. Its foundation, made of stones laid by Crusaders, is perhaps eight centuries old. One can only speculate on the subterranean remains of earlier civilizations.     Safdie climbs the stairs to the upper level of the three-storey house, a modern section entirely his own design. There, amid a minimalist decor of Persian rugs and Senegalese carvings, he makes his way to a glass quarter-dome. With a flourish, he thrusts open the sliding panel to reveal a sunburst of sacredness: the Temple Mount, spiritual nerve centre of Jerusalem, the site of ancient Israel's Temples, where Solomon ruled and Jesus walked, known in Arabic since 691 A.D. as the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, one of the holiest sites in Islam, where Muhammad embarked on his winged steed to heaven. It's home of the glowing Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque. And just below, the Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, the most sacred Jewish prayer site.      “Moshe!” roars a bearded visitor bursting into the Israeli-Canadian architect's house like some Old Testament patriarch. “How can you cope with so much holiness?”      In truth, it's not the holiness that is a challenge so much as the politics and conflict that surround it. This is disputed territory. Safdie's house, the Temple Mount, and the walled Old City are all part of Arab East Jerusalem, claimed by Palestinians as their capital, but which Israel conquered in the Six Day War of 1967 and incorporated into an allegedly united city. It is ground zero for Israeli-Palestinian differences, a postcard of irreconcilable conflict, the place where Camp David negotiations crash against the golden limestone of Jerusalem.      Last month, a visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon, the rightist Israeli opposition leader who stands for undiluted Israeli sovereignty over the city, triggered Palestinian stone-throwing just a stone's throw from Safdie's house. Israeli troops stormed the Mount, and the deadliest violence the area has seen since 1996 swept Jerusalem and the West Bank, shaking the peace process to its foundation.      Those who live in Jerusalem are well versed in such cycles of violence, but it is still a lot to cope with. Safdie, Canada's foremost builder of cultural institutions and the man who, more than any other, has redrawn the face of Jerusalem, copes largely by relying on idealistic notions of how architecture and urban planning can mend a city torn apart by religious and cultural antipathy.      As his bearded visitor, a legendary Israeli photographer, arrives Safdie is sipping Turkish coffee, capping an Arab-style lunch of sesame bread dipped in yogourt cheese dribbled with olive oil.      “Let's start coming to terms with the fact that we have two people coexisting,” says Safdie. “We're in bed; we have partners on the territory.”      Safdie pulls out his fountain pen, as he often does to solve an architectural problem. He is not a politician, but the problem of Jerusalem, the Gordian knot of the Middle East peace talks, is, in a sense, architectural: Where to draw the line?      A map of the city quickly takes shape on a stray napkin. Safdie sketches the Green Line that separated Jewish West Jerusalem from Arab East Jerusalem before 1967. In the centre is the old city, surrounded by its sixteenth-century Ottoman wall, which represents less than 1 percent of Jerusalem's total territory. Now he fills in the sprawling Israeli enclaves built in East Jerusalem since the 1967 war.      “There is today a total intertwining of Palestinians and Israelis in the life of the city,” he says. “So the notion of going back to two cities divided as in 1948 to 1967, where basically you could do it because there were two separate entities across one fairly straight line, is totally impossible.”      He adds to the napkin map some ancient Jewish landmarks that are located in East Jerusalem and Palestinian villages cheek by jowl with suburban Jewish neighbourhoods. Holy places from one side built on the rubble of the other side. Impossible angles. Overlapping geometry. Zigzags. His solution: no line.      Safdie, serenely straddling East and West in his persona and his politics, is mindful of the delicate balance required in Jerusalem. He has refused to build on the occupied West Bank, though he makes a crucial exception in the case of East Jerusalem, particularly the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. He has declined an invitation to start working on the messianic Third Temple, where Islam's Dome of the Rock stands. And for three decades he has soldiered on with ambitious plans to connect the Old City with newer neighbourhoods in a project called Mamilla, which would serve as a bridge between East and West Jerusalem, Arab and Jew, the Old City and new neighbourhoods.      Still, in divided Jerusalem, Palestinians would regard Safdie as an Israeli usurper, residing on Arab property in a home he built on wreckage that followed the Jewish state's capture of Jordanian-held territory. Israelis would counter that the Jewish Quarter had been Jewish for some 3,000 years, with a few forced interruptions from the likes of Nebuchadnezzar and Hadrian, until the Jordanians took the area in the war of 1948 and proceeded to reduce it to rubble and bar Jews from entry. Israeli hard-liners, however, would deride Safdie's readiness to compromise with the Palestinians and share sovereignty over the holy city.      “This is shifting ground. . . . It can explode at any moment,” Safdie says. “You never take it for granted. At a rhythm of every couple of months, something major happens to remind you that it's not just a view.”      Safdie's graduate thesis at McGill University was titled “A Three-Dimensional Modular Building System,” and proposed a housing cluster of Lego-like geometry that was propped up by some heady notions of how to make high-density urban living more human.      It drew on his childhood in Haifa, in northern Israel, where his family lived in a penthouse on Mount Carmel with a spectacular view of the Mediterranean and the mountains of Lebanon. Safdie's father, Leon, had moved to Haifa from Aleppo, Syria, in the mid-1930s, establishing himself as a textile merchant when the town was in the British Mandate of Palestine. Safdie's mother, Rachel Esses, one generation away from her own Aleppo roots, was born in Manchester. She travelled to Palestine in 1937 to visit her sister and, while waiting for the bus to Jerusalem, met Leon Safdie at a Haifa café. Within a month they were married; within a year Moshe, the first of four children, was born.      As a boy he occupied himself with a beehive on the family's rooftop garden, and tended to his private vegetable plot and henhouse outside the hillside home. The line between city and country, apartment and garden blurred, and an ideal imprint was formed.      Less idyllic memories came from the fighting in 1947 and 1948 that brought Israel's nationhood and sent stray bullets into the family home. When the fledgling Jewish state nationalized its textile industry, Leon Safdie left Israel for Canada. The family arrived in Montreal in March, 1953, the height of “dog-shit season,” as Safdie gloomily remembers it. Uprooted from a rich social life, he became a good student for the first time. Still, his life retained an Israeli undercurrent: many of his friends were Israeli expats; he defiantly kept his Hebrew name, resisting pressure to Americanize it to “Morris”; he grew a decidedly Middle Eastern moustache. When he was twenty-one he married a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who had moved from Israel to Montreal.      By then he was studying architecture at McGill University and working out his thesis with philosophical rigour. His idea for prefabricated concrete modules was meant to bring gardens, light, open air, and individual space to the urban apartment building. As Safdie continued to tinker with the Lego blocks and pieces of wood that formed his “obsession,” architects increasingly took notice and he got his early break: in 1963, at the age of twenty-five, barely out of architecture school, Safdie saw his radical design chosen as the housing pavilion for Expo 67, the world fair in Montreal. When Expo opened, Safdie, twenty-eight years old and the father of two children, moved his family into Habitat, his whimsical experiment. “It is an adventure in architecture,” enthused The Montreal Gazette, “equal in importance and far overshadowing in concept and construction such ancient wonders of the world as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” Catapulted to world fame, Safdie showed Nelson Rockefeller around Habitat; Charles de Gaulle spent the night there; Indira Gandhi dropped by one day.      As the intoxication of Expo 67 washed over Canada, the Six Day War erupted in the Middle East. Israel smashed three Arab armies and captured the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. For the first time since Rome's destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., the Old City came under Jewish control.      There was a neat symmetry between the young architect in his glory at Expo and the triumphant Jewish state. Safdie had not been back to Israel since he'd left in 1953. When war broke out on June 5, he called the Israeli consul general and said that he wanted to volunteer. The war ended swiftly, but the expat architect's interest in his homeland had been revived. Later that year, Safdie returned to Israel to speak at a conference about harmonious housing in a world of ballooning populations. The theme was especially pertinent to Israel, with its heavy immigration and its slapped-together housing; it was only natural that Safdie was soon commissioned to build “Habitat Israel.” He chose a site on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Malcha (also known as Manchat), an Arab village that had been taken over by Jewish refugees after the 1948 war. It was a hillside cluster of stone buildings, domes spiralling upwards, and terraces, dotted with almond and olive trees, topped with a mosque. Habitat was returning to its inspiration.      But Safdie's first Jerusalem project never materialized. Politics intervened and not for the last time. Elections brought Golda Meir to power in 1969, and her government pursued a strategy of building in key areas of East Jerusalem annexed from Jordan in the Six Day War. The plan was to create “facts on the ground” — a series of neighbourhoods encircling the city in a way that would prevent its ever being redivided. Malcha was located in the western part of Jerusalem, a predominantly Jewish area, and therefore of little strategic value. Building in the holy city, Safdie discovered, had three extra dimensions: the political, the religious, and the historical.      Jerusalem, set on a steep slope surrounded by rugged hills, far from the sea, rivers, and main trade routes, is not an obvious location for a capital city. Various theories exist as to why the Jebusite predecessors of Israel chose the location some three millenniums ago, but it is generally assumed that King David made it his capital around 1000 B.C. to unite the tribes of Israel, selecting a place on the border between the northern and southern tribes and belonging to neither. The site took on a religious function when David had the Ark of the Covenant transferred to his new capital and housed in a special tent. It was later enclosed by Solomon in the First Temple, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. and rebuilt as the Second Temple.      The sole remnant of the Second Temple, the Western Wall, was one of the first stops Safdie made upon his return in 1967. Safdie remembered the site from his childhood as a narrow space crammed between Arab buildings and jam-packed with Jewish worshippers. It had changed. Within forty-eight hours of Israel's conquest of the Old City in 1967, the densely built-up Palestinian area adjoining it was demolished. Touring the vast area, Safdie noticed the ruins of a Sephardic rabbinical college that had been blown up in 1948. “Something clicked inside me,” he wrote in Jerusalem: The Future of the Past, one of six books he's written on architecture and urban design. “I had a curious feeling that all of my life had been leading up to this. The Western Wall . . . the Old City.”      The commission to rebuild the college eventually went to Safdie, along with other restoration projects, and in 1970 he set up an office in Jerusalem. His work in the Jewish Quarter was dogged by some run-of-the-mill difficulties in the area, such as ultra-Orthodox Jewish objections to anything seen as secular, and the trouble of constant archaeological finds when building in a city that is a multi-layered necropolis. Still, his work in the quarter was largely completed.      The projects that did not get built reveal much about Jerusalem, beginning with his redesign for the Western Wall plaza. Safdie had been asked by the municipality to submit plans for the permanent remodelling of a plaza that can accommodate 100,000 people. By any measure, this was an awesome invitation; he would reshape the holiest site of worship in Judaism. He did his homework by poring over ancient histories, imagining the battles that obliterated the Temple, and researching the archaeology beneath the Old City. He mused at length about Herod, the Roman-appointed ruler who built the Western Wall as a retaining rampart for the Second Temple two decades before the birth of Jesus. As a creative exercise Safdie imagined he was Herod's architect and hit upon his idea: the Western Wall that is visible represents less than half of its true height; he would excavate the buried nine metres of beautifully chiselled stones down to the 2,000-year-old Herodian street. Sloping up and away from the Wall, now twice its height, would be a terraced amphitheatre with intimate prayer spaces, archaeological gardens, and an arcaded street. Safdie has submitted at least four plans, each a variation on the theme, all of which have been vetoed by the rabbinate as being too grandiose.      This may be a great misfortune. The current plaza, the work of a snap political decision and bulldozers, is like a vast “preparation for a parking lot,” observes Safdie. Hammered by a merciless sun, without shelter or greenery, visitors seem lost in its bare vastness, a striking contrast to the Temple Mount, which boasts exquisite architecture, shade trees, and an elevated air of meditation.      Although the thirty-five-acre Mount is the foundation stone of Jewish history, Israel has in fact wielded sovereignty there more in theory than in practice since annexing it in 1967. According to Jewish Halachic law, the Third Temple shall only be built by God after the coming of the Messiah; and quotidian control has rested with the Muslim clergy, the Waqf. Israeli law applies on paper, but in practice the Mount enjoys an undefined extraterritorial status. The de facto policy worked out between Israel and the Waqf is that Jews are allowed to visit the Mount but not pray there. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews, however, have had grander designs on the place. The former chief rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren, once approached Safdie in this regard. “Rabbi Goren came to me and said I should start working on the Third Temple,” recalls Safdie. “And I said to him, 'Rabbi Goren, this site isn't vacant,' “ recalls the architect. “He said, 'Well, you know, just design it. Maybe it will become vacant.' “      It is the hottest July 30 recorded in half a century in Jerusalem, and Safdie is touring a battlefield of precast concrete. He is showing a delegation from India the construction site for the gigantic arrival terminal he has designed for the new Ben Gurion International Airport, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Everything — cranes, dump trucks, stacks of reinforced metal, concrete columns, dust, and dirt — is baking under a forty-two-degree sun. Jets roar overhead. The workers resemble a United Nations peacekeeping force in a rough situation: goggle-wearing, trowel-wielding Chinese labourers bent over concrete moulds, burly Russian foremen with missing teeth, Israeli engineers, Turkish contractors — a ragtag mercenary army of builders for whom every country is just so much concrete, steel, and earth.      Floating among them is Safdie in his usual garb of white shirt and light pants, dabbing perspiration from his face with a hand towel. Everyone trudges in the heat. Safdie glides, the towel over his head in the style of an Arab kaffiyeh. There is a bit of Einstein in his handsome face. His white hair has made way for a dome; lines arch his grey moustache; his eyes provide both softness and fierce energy.      “This is beautiful concrete,” says an Indian architect.      The delegation is in Israel to visit Safdie's buildings because he has designed the Khalsa Memorial Centre, a Sikh museum being built in the Punjab. The delegation knows nothing of Israel but everything about precast concrete.      Safdie slips away for a meeting and the delegation troops into a trailer for soft drinks and a video about the project. Then Ori Edelsburg, the Israeli representative of the Turkish contractor, takes a seat to answer some questions. The Indians want to know about precast techniques. It's been tough, Edelsburg says, extremely tough — hell, actually.      Why? Safdie. The man is an artist, with “zero tolerance” for precast concrete. “You're going to pour what you think is the best column in the world and he'll go, 'Psshhht!' It has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. . . . If there is an air bubble, he'll reject it. A scratch — reject it. Colour — reject. Zero tolerance. He'll check it. And he means what he says.”      The Indians have specific questions about the methodology, but Edelsburg insists that they should know what they're getting into with Safdie. “He doesn't compromise. It's either what he wants — or what he thinks he wants — or nothing. He's an artist... . He is a brilliant man; he's probably one of the greatest architects walking on the planet,” continues Edelsburg, “but what hell he has put us through — a million dollars go up — boom!”      Finally a member of Safdie's office pipes in: “But look what you've achieved with the Safdie process.”      You call it the Safdie process,” replies Edelsburg. “Is that what you call it? We're going to need our own Yad Vashem [Holocaust memorial centre] for what we went through.”      One cannot build in the holy city, Safdie says, without showing either arrogance or humility. In Jerusalem, Safdie learned the importance of moulding buildings to their environment.      It was both an aesthetic imperative and a law. In 1917, Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, decreed that the use of anything other than local limestone for building exteriors was illegal. Despite the turbulent times, the law has remained in force on both sides of Jerusalem to this day, giving the city a monolithic cladding that softens conflicting, eclectic styles, helps fuse the old with the new, and camouflages various architectural sins. The effect can be suffocating, producing a dull sameness — an overdose of stone, as if the city's accumulation of bloodshed has left a facade of sadness. It can also make the city feel blessed, especially when sunset graces every stone with a sweet golden light.      In the decade that followed Expo 67, when Safdie was dividing his time between Montreal and Jerusalem, his career in Israel flourished. His early works were more restoration than starting from zero, particularly two rabbinical colleges and housing projects in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. In the mid-seventies, he constructed his finest work in the city, the Yad Vashem children's memorial and the Hebrew Union College. Both are imaginative works that manage to be simultaneously eloquent and restrained. The children's memorial in the Yad Vashem complex is carved out of stone, allowing the visitor to enter a dark cave in which one candle is multiplied infinitely using mirrors while the names of children who died in the Holocaust are intoned. In the case of Hebrew Union College, trellised skywalks move with serene beauty from inside to outside spaces amid courtyards, arches, loggias, a sheet of water, and hanging gardens that bring to mind the Moorish palace of the Alhambra in Spain.      In 1978 he became director of the Urban Design program at Harvard University. Safdie now occupies a triangle between Boston (where his main office is based, and where he lives with his second wife and their two children); Jerusalem (where he spends about one-quarter of his time); and Canada. (His mother and siblings live in Montreal, he has an office in Toronto.) A superstar international architect without a signature style, he commutes between projects that are scattered from Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, to Wichita, Kansas.      Only after he took up residence in Boston did his big Canadian commissions start rolling in. First came the Quebec Museum of Civilization in Quebec City in 1981, followed by the National Gallery in Ottawa, both triumphs expertly in the key of their surroundings. By the mid-1990s, his portfolio also boasted the extension of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Ottawa's City Hall, and the Coliseum-like Vancouver Public Library. A new terminal at Toronto's Pearson International Airport that he has designed is under construction.      Still, in no other city has Safdie's impact been more profound than in Jerusalem, and it is only becoming more so. His firm is currently adding a wing to the Hebrew Union College and rebuilding the entire Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial complex. He has also designed from scratch Modi'in, the country's first “planned city,” on rolling hills halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It features strict design codes that attempt to unite city vitality with suburban comforts. It is slated to ultimately be home to 250,000 people.      Elsewhere, in impressively configured neighbourhoods like Malcha (site of the stillborn Habitat Israel), Safdie drafted the urban-design master plan dictating zoning and building rules. He is now working on a similar master plan for all of West Jerusalem. Add to that a memorial centre for the slain Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv (he also designed the peacemaker's tombstone) and there's no doubt Safdie has altered the landscape, whether with arrogance or with humility.      One place where critics have not found Safdie to be humble enough is in his Mamilla project, a massive plan to develop the valley that in biblical times gave its name to hell (Hinnom). It is located in a key part of the city, just outside the sixteenth-century Ottoman wall that majestically encompasses the Old City, where Route One, a key traffic artery, casually divides Jerusalem between East and West.      When the line dividing Jerusalem was drawn in 1948 it was not with architectural precision. Moshe Dayan, commander of Israeli forces, met with his Arab Legion counterpart, Abdullah al-Tal, to sign the armistice agreement. Dayan sketched his front lines with a green grease pencil; al-Tal used a red one. The grease pencils formed lines that were three to four millimetres wide, which on a map with a scale of 1:20,000 ended up creating strips of land that were sixty to eighty metres in width. The result was a wide swath of territory separating what became two cities, two countries. Within the grease-pencil line, amid barbed wire, trenches, concrete pillboxes, and regular sniper fire, Israeli and Jordanian soldiers faced each other for nineteen years. This was where the “Green Line” ran through Jerusalem, laying waste to Mamilla.      When Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967 the line was erased and Mamilla was ripe for an urban renewal project. Safdie's plan is to create a combined pedestrian marketplace, public gardens, office space (all unbuilt), and two hotels (one built), luxury condos, pedestrian bridges, and an underground parking lot topped with an instant olive grove (all built). Yet it has been a bitter struggle. From the time Safdie first began working on Mamilla in 1972, critics have battled his plans and forced the project to be more conservationist and scaled down. Mamilla is now back on track, Safdie says, and will be complete in three years. By connecting the ancient walled epicentre of Jerusalem to the newer neighbourhoods, bridging East and West, Arab and Jew, Safdie hopes Mamilla will help unite a fractured city. “To me it's clear that if anything even resembling the Camp David discussions takes place, Mamilla is going to thrive,” he says.      Not everyone is convinced. “I don't think architecture can make the connection between the two nations,” says Esther Zandberg, architecture critic for the leading Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz. “It is so naive. Maybe it belongs to some 1960s belief that architecture can make a better world.”      Safdie's belief in Mamilla also taps into his own family history. In the 1920s, his great-uncle, Eliyahu Shamah, purchased the southern section of the Mamilla area, thinking that it would be prime territory for Arabs and Jews to do business together. Shamah constructed a new commercial centre encompassing workshops and offices located between the Arab markets of the Old City and the nascent business district in downtown Jerusalem. But not long after it opened, Arab-Jewish tension reached a fever pitch. On one August day in 1929, after the Mufti of Jerusalem delivered a nationalistic sermon, his followers flooded out of the Temple Mount in a violent demonstration. Mamilla was one of the areas hit. As a result, the project was abandoned and Shamah lost his fortune. He declared bankruptcy, succumbed to deep depression, and fell off a roof in what was presumed to be suicide.      Safdie left Jerusalem last month, a few days before opposition leader Sharon ignited Palestinian rage by taking his symbolic stroll on the Temple Mount. The blood that followed in Sharon's footsteps, however, has not dimmed Safdie's belief that the two sides are heading for an inevitable compromise. “It just might be the kind of bloodletting that needs to occur before the whole thing settles down,” he says. “It's very serious, obviously, but it could be a lot of pent-up emotions before people can digest what's happening.”      What is happening, he maintains, is a deal to share sovereignty over a city of 400,000 Jews and 200,000 Arabs that in essence is no more united today than it was when the Green Line separated two armies. “Is Jerusalem united? Only in terms of legal sovereignty. Certainly not in terms of its functioning as a city,” he says. “Could you have divided sovereignty or shared sovereignty and have a united city? Of course you can. If the Arabs and the Israelis crossed the border freely and worked and shopped and did anything they wanted across the border freely, and you had either separate or shared sovereignty, it would be a united city.” Palestinian administrative control over many East Jerusalem neighbourhoods outside the Old City appears a done deal, Safdie says: it's just a matter of where the line is drawn exactly.      The cartography gets more complex in the case of the Old City, the Jewish Quarter within it, and the Temple Mount. The hair-splitting array of solutions that has recently been floated includes dividing the Old City in two; entrusting the Temple Mount to the UN, which would then hand over control to the Palestinians; granting “horizontal” sovereignty on the Mount to the Palestinians (everything built above the ground) and “vertical” to the Israelis (which would cover the underground ruins of the Jewish temples that presumably exist). Another idea faithful to the fabric of the city would give God sovereignty over the Mount, though some skeptical observers have questioned which divinity would get the lease — Allah, Christ, or Yahweh. “I think a shared sovereignty over the Old City is okay,” says Safdie. “In fact, in that case I wouldn't draw a line and say they have the Muslim Quarter, we have the Jewish Quarter; I would say, no, we share the whole thing. We share sovereignty over the entire Old City.” Such a plan for joint Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty for the Old City would devolve administrative responsibilities — Jewish control over the Western Wall, Palestinian administrative control over the Temple Mount, just as Christian groups are in charge of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.      And the Temple Mount itself? “One side of me says this should be internationally administered,” says Safdie. “Maybe this is so important to so many groups that we should accept what the United Nations said fifty years ago, that the world should own it. Maybe it would be good for the city. More preserved. It might be more prosperous, God knows what. Another side of me says, well, this is the geographic heart of a great four-thousand-year story of civilization and we have every right to be in charge of it. Here we are, back after thousands of years. So it's complicated. I'm not giving you a clear answer because I'm not clear about it.” The answer Safdie would give as an architect is gathering dust in the stone entrance to his office at the crossroads of East and West Jerusalem. It is a small wooden model of his redesigned Temple Mount plaza, with its enchanting terracing and Western Wall descending to the original Herodian street level. If the plaza were built — giving Jews a more permanent place for their history, one that could stand its own ground in an architecturally compelling way rather than wait for the Messiah at the unfinished anteroom of the Temple Mount, in the humble shadow of the Muslim spiritual oasis — then perhaps peace might prevail until the Divinity overlooking Jerusalem decides otherwise.      “It's too good an idea. I used to think that I'd get it done sooner or later,” says Safdie with a rare hint of sadness. But these days, any digging in Old City holy places tends to be cause for rebellion more than rapture. Safdie is sixty-two years old and no longer waiting.      “Look at this,” Safdie says, pointing to his wooden model on his way out of his office. “What am I going to do with it? Every time I look at it, it breaks my heart.”