Moshe Safdie, one of the world’s leading architects, met me for lunch at his headquarters, the shell of a century-old factory that’s now a white, clean, brightly lit place, in Somerville, Massachusetts, a few minutes’ drive from Harvard Yard. “We should go upstairs and nibble,” he suggested in his relaxed, gentle way.

The cosmopolitan Safdie has an unusual trilogy of citizenships. He’s an Israeli-Canadian-American who was born and raised in Israel, the son of secular Sephardic Jews with roots in Aleppo, Syria. When he was 15, his parents immigrated to Canada, where his pioneering design for housing that he named Habitat ’67 made him a legend in his 20s. Now 74 and possessing the earthy look of a peasant who shows no sign of slowing down, he has lived with his family for some 30 years in Cambridge, where he taught at Harvard.

The “nibble” upstairs turned out to be a banquet of many simple, delicious vegetable dishes that his wife had prepared. It was all set before us at the maple table in an airy conference room that seemed to be floating in space above the city of Somerville. “Truly, your wife shouldn’t have gone to such trouble,” I said. “I’d have been happy enough with a tuna sandwich.”

“But what about me!” he replied, and offered wine. “If you will, I will.”

He opened a bottle of dry, cold Chardonnay. “L’chaim!” he said, making the traditional Hebrew toast to life.

Why, I asked him, does there appear to be only one woman among all the renowned architects of the world—the British-Iraqi Zaha Hadid? “Architecture is changing faster than some other professions,” he responded. “But I suspect there’s more talented women architects today than there are women conducting symphony orchestras.”

“This is little consolation,” I said.

“But, you know, if you walk round my office, you’ll see that about 45 percent of the 60 architects who work here are women.”

They’re a prolific team. Among Mr. Safdie’s major buildings are museums and performing-arts centers in Salem, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Punjab, and Tel Aviv. He designed the National Gallery in Ottawa; the Children’s Memorial and the Memorial to the Deportees at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem; the U.S. Institute of Peace, on the Mall in Washington; a $5.7 billion futuristic resort in Singapore; and the recently opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, for Walmart heiress Alice Walton.

He’s currently working on a vast waterfront project at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers, in China—a country he first visited in the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution. “In China today, there’s the ambition and desire and the financial capability to experiment even though a lot of its landscape is as depressing as hell,” he said. “Our landscape is low-density blight, and they specialize in high-density blight. But there’s a great opportunity to create an oasis.”

Yet Mr. Safdie appears to be a modernist who’s skeptical of modernism. Though he was on the cover of Newsweek when he was 33, he resists the phenomenon of “starchitects,” who have become almost as famous in the U.S. as celebrity chefs. The theorist-teacher within him opposes the unquiet architecture of Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind and what he terms, ominously, “the Bilbao effect.”

“I don’t think I have a signature style that announces, ‘This is a Safdie,’ ” he explained. “But I think star architects have seized an opportunity to go anywhere in the world to produce meaningless buildings. You know?”

While his own work can be spectacular, Mr. Safdie’s school of architecture amounts to an artless art when compared with the showy geometry of the fashionable starchitect. He’s constantly asking what the purpose of a building actually is—as his early mentor, Louis I. Kahn, once asked, “What does a building want to be?”