The camera flies like a bird through an apartment complex unlike any you’ve probably seen. It is a pyramid of concrete cubes with overflowing gardens hanging from endless stepped rooftop terraces. Cantilevered concrete arms hold up the inclined walls of apartments, walkways fill the gaps in between, and pedestrian plazas replete with fountains occupy the spaces underneath.
This is a place of pleasant paradoxes and complimentary contradictions. The drab concrete is balanced by the explosive color of the plants and flowers; the heaviness of the apartment cubes is counterpoised against the gravity-defying way in which they’re stacked overhead. What seems like a solid mass from the outside is actually open to cooling breezes and ample sunlight.
And best of all, there isn’t a car in sight.
What I’m describing is simultaneously real and imagined. An apartment complex somewhat like this exists: It’s an idealized urban housing project, known as Habitat 67, that the Somerville-based architect Moshe Safdie designed for the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair. Recently, it has been meticulously rendered in an immersive digital environment dubbed Project Hillside, in hopes of reviving interest in the fullness of Safdie’s vision for affordable and sustainable urban housing.
Habitat 67 remains one of several pavilions from that world’s fair that are still being used, though it’s the only one to be serving its original purpose. Along with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome — which served as the United States pavilion — it remains one of Montreal’s iconic architectural landmarks. It has stood the test of time on a windswept jetty that shields Montreal’s Old Port from the swiftly flowing waters of the St. Lawrence River.
Expo 67 was an international celebration of world culture and cutting-edge technologies, attended by more than 50 million people over six months. The pavilions and the fairgrounds represented a potential future city — one designed to overcome the problems faced by major cities in the 1960s.
Safdie wanted Habitat to serve as a model for a new kind of big-city living.
“Fifty, 60 years ago, you had to make a case for why people should live in the center of cities,” Safdie, 85, told me in an interview last year. “People were generally reluctant, the suburban push was still very great, and the case one had to make was that apartment living might not be terrific, but it could be made better by design.”
Unlike the then-dominant “towers in a park” trend for affordable or subsidized urban housing, Habitat sought to re-create the feeling of a close-knit village. Whereas housing projects stacked residents in impersonal towers lacking privacy, not to mention communal or green spaces, Habitat aimed to provide its residents with several advantages of suburban living — such as private entrances, unique and customizable layouts, and one’s own garden — in a high-density arrangement.
“You can rethink apartment buildings so that they at least respond more effectively to people’s dreams of how they want to live — hence the gardens, the community spaces, etc.,” Safdie said.
Habitat was not completed to Safdie’s original scale. He had wanted to create an entirely new self-contained neighborhood of 1,200 residences, along with all the shops, offices, and civic infrastructure needed to support it. The cost-conscious Canadian government, which was funding Habitat, offered Safdie a fraction of his desired budget. Safdie reworked his original idea and shrank it down. The extra work delayed completion of the project, but viewing the construction became part of the experience Expo visitors would have. Because Habitat was intended to be a mass-produced housing solution, its constituent cubes were created and assembled on site and then lifted into position with cranes. Approximately 136,000 people visited Habitat every day for the six-month duration of the fair.
Canada never adopted the Habitat model for a national affordable housing strategy, though it wasn’t because of any defect in the design. Habitat has actually become one of Montreal’s most prestigious addresses, even though it’s not near the charming old quarter or one of the city’s hip neighborhoods. The apartments are rarely available for sale, but in 2020 one of the three-cube models went on the market for just over 1.3 million Canadian dollars, close to $1 million US at the current exchange rate. It isn’t uncommon for residents to pass their apartments on to family members or swap apartments with other residents as their needs change. This is in keeping with Safdie’s original idea — that a Habitat resident’s apartment size (and the number of cubes they’d require) would grow and shrink over the course of their life.
The only noticeable change to the exterior over the decades, something done with Safdie’s approval, has been the conversion of some of the terraces into solariums, a sensible improvement given Montreal’s harsh winters. As for the inside, one apartment remains essentially as it was in 1967 — it belongs to Safdie — and it’s remarkable how modern it still looks, with the floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors that provide every cube with ample natural light.
The question remains, however, whether ultradense housing like Habitat could play a role in addressing today’s housing shortages in cities like Boston.
In its favor, Safdie noted, is that “living in city centers has become super desirable for a very wide area of the population, and of all incomes.” And urban density now is even higher than planners of the 1960s ever imagined. That means there should be a market for apartments that achieve what Safdie intended with Habitat: “residential membranes that hover over a mixed-use urban area that is part of an integrated city.”
“I do think that the idea you see in the simulation is still very valid today,” he said.
Prefabrication, Habitat’s other major innovation, presents certain challenges. Habitat’s modules were created on site. At 17 1/2 feet wide, they’re too large to be shipped on highways, which would make it difficult to mass-produce Habitat modules in a central location. The idea of building something much larger (like Habitat’s original intended design), would work only at a parcel that either has room for a manufacturing plant or has water access so the modules can be brought in by barge. A potential workaround would involve smaller modules and/or a different approach to fabrication and assembly.
That said, Safdie cautioned that the current housing crisis cannot be solved by better design alone, as the problem is rooted in the high cost of land in major cities. “That is a deep problem of our body politic and our economic structure,” he observed.
“In Singapore, they solve the problem by making public land available for housing development, and that housing is at a different price range than the rest of the land in the islands,” he pointed out. “And every Singaporean can afford the housing because they’re basically getting it on free land and then benefiting as it appreciates. Other countries solve the problem with favelas and self-built housing. We solve it by having lots of homelessness.
“In our most desirable cities, there are thousands, tens of thousands, of units bought by people who don’t even live there. They are pieds-à-terre or investments or whatever. So you end up getting thousands of uninhabited units, but they’re still driving the price up, and the local middle-income families get completely priced out. These are very deep problems that are more difficult today than they were 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, at least we recognized that we have to build public housing and subsidize it, and we accepted it. That’s not even accepted today.”
Aspects of Habitat pop up across Safdie’s body of work: The Eling Residences project in Chongqing, China; Qorner Tower in Quito, Ecuador (under construction); and the Altair Residences in Colombo, Sri Lanka, all demonstrate conceptual links rooted in Habitat 67. Now the faithful creation of his original 1967 plan in a virtual environment is meant to inspire new generations of architects, planners, and designers who have a chance to create truly integrated, mixed-income urban housing.
Good ideas are often hard to come by. Let’s not overlook those that have come up before.
Taylor C. Noakes is a public historian and independent journalist originally from Montreal. He is a frequent contributor to the Toronto Star and Jacobin and reports on environmental issues for DeSmog.