[URBAN NOTE] The Globe and Mail on Montreal's Habitat at 50

[rfmcdonald]

In an article written by Kristina Ljubanovic with photos by Alexi Hobbs, The Globe and Mail looks at Montréal's innovative Habitat complex, built for Expo 67, has evolved in the past fifty years.

In 2017, as Canada’s confederacy turns 150 years old, Montreal will be celebrating its own milestone – the city’s 375 th anniversary. Plans are underway to mark its almost four-century-long history, including projects like the illumination of the Jacques Cartier Bridge. The party starts in December, affording Montrealers a full 375 days of arts, culture and entertainment.

But beyond the pomp of the three-digit celebrations, another big birthday is coming down the pike (or the St. Lawrence Seaway, as it were). Nearly fifty years ago, Montreal hosted the Universal and International Exposition, Expo ‘67. The six-month event was the crown jewel of Canada’s centennial and, some claim, the most successful World’s Fair of the 20 th century.

Habitat 67, the radical experiment in prefabricated, stacked city dwelling, is the city’s most iconic built legacy from that heady time. The idea for the housing complex, which developed out of architect Moshe Safdie’s thesis at McGill University, is as intriguing now as it was then: All the amenities of suburban life (openness, privacy, access to greenery) within a modular system of units set in an urban context. It was a prototype for a new way of living in cities, “but it did not proliferate,” admitted Safdie in a talk at the 2014 TED conference. Still, visiting the complex today and seeing how its mix of design-savvy residents have both adapted and maintained its spaces, it’s clear that Habitat continues to inspire new ways of living.

Perched on the edge of Parc de la Cité-du-Havre, with views to Montréal and the river, Habitat is a building that’s all exterior. “Each house was an entity in itself, recognizable in space,” said Safdie in his 1970 book Beyond Habitat. But deconstructing the housing block to reveal open-air pedestrian streets, communal plazas and private gardens proved an expensive enterprise that the dream of prefabrication could not offset. So the project was scaled back, from the originally planned 950 modules, or cubes, to 354, resulting in ten storeys and 158 apartments, some of which have since become conjoined, reducing the number to 148.