Revisit: Habitat 67, Montreal, Canada, by Moshe Safdie

When the snows melt, and the St Lawrence River is in spate, the surge of water coming off the Great Lakes creates a standing wave in one spot near the bank off the old Mackay Pier, an arm of Montreal’s harbour. A wave of sufficient height and volume to draw surfers from around Quebec is created when the water races over a sudden depression and is thrown back on itself and thrust upwards. In April and May, you can stand and look east with Habitat 67 at your back and watch the miracle of surfers, suspended in the onrushing flow as waters pass through a narrow section and charge on to the Atlantic. If you turn around and look at Habitat 67, you see another apparent miracle of suspension, the crest of a utopian urge meeting a profound reality and throwing up … what exactly?   

This view from the river side is radically different from the artful ziggurat seen from the city. From here you can see into the guts of the building and it is clearly not the thick jumble that it appears from the west. From the east, one can see into the courtyard spaces and realise that the pile of 354 precast concrete boxes, each measuring 11.8m long, 5.3m wide and 3m high, is not a solid mass or even a curtain on all sides. From here, the predominant features are the three central double cores and four further lift cores, around and against which the array of blocks are stacked. Its architect, Moshe Safdie, was initially working on the masterplan of the great Montreal Expo of 1967 and was able to place his own project at the end of the pier furthest from the city by road, but closest in terms of view. Habitat 67 is a display of urban density, designed to be visible as such from the centre of old Montreal. 

We tend to look at the project from the wrong direction. Safdie’s early motivation in his degree thesis, from whence Habitat emerged, was a fundamental unease around incipient suburbia. It is astonishing in a country as vast as Canada that this fear of sprawl should be so dominant and yet the cultural disdain for it remains so, as Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs attests. Yet if his goal was to help arrest suburban drift in Canada, Safdie failed. When it was built he compared the density levels of Habitat 67 favourably with the suburb of Westmount. Today Westmount’s density is 4,952.8 persons per square kilometre and Cité du Havre, the area in which Habitat stands, is only 575.4 per sq km. 

‘Safdie’s early motivation in his degree thesis, from whence Habitat emerged, was a fundamental unease around incipient suburbia’

Canada has oodles of cheap land and has not been a victim of the restrictive planning policies of other Western countries to the same degree. Thus 67 per cent of its population live in suburban areas. In addition, Canada’s suburbs are not the monocultures of popular record. Surveys of the cultural, ethnic and economic make-up of the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York have shown that these are now more diverse spaces than the wealthier urban core. Canada is no different. 

If it is judged in terms of the architect’s ambitions to address suburbia, then it falls short. Yet as David LA Gordon notes in a chapter in Infinite Suburbia, although Canada is indeed a suburban nation, there is a far finer grain of densities than the nominal distinction of urban and suburban allows. He notes: ‘Standard land-use planning procedures have called for a mix of dwelling unit types in suburban communities since the 1960s.’ What Habitat 67 does most successfully is resist the lazy distinction of high-rise inner city and low-rise suburbia. The drift of history may have been against it in terms of city-centre dwelling, but it still acted as an exemplar of how apartment buildings might operate in a suburban setting, even if the reality is depressingly bland. Still, Habitat 67 shows what a suburban core might look like. 

Of course, this influence works both ways and one of the major impacts of Habitat has been to create a benchmark for luxury high-rises. Although far less innovative in terms of structure and plan, 8 House by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in Copenhagen is just one of the progeny of Habitat 67. Included in an artful stack of different housing types are apartments with small walled gardens designed to seduce potential suburbanites to high-rise living. Safdie’s own work, such as Raffles City Chongquing, has often been for a luxury residential market where the use of gardens has become even more performative and spectacular, rather than personalised and discrete. His luxury development Marina Bay Sands in Singapore runs the garden along the roof. The fact that Habitat has become an exclusive enclave isn’t necessarily Safdie’s fault, although the architect recently claimed this tendency is proof not of Habitat’s failure, but its success. 

The social function of a building, particularly one built as an exemplar of a particular construction technique in an Expo, is often well beyond the role of the architect. It had a social purpose but its ongoing function is picked over far more readily than other buildings and distorts its value and impact. In its presence, the way architecture expresses the material ambitions of an age through structure is as palpable as the rarefied social status of its current inhabitants. As one climbs up Habitat, one notes that, yes, the building has become home to Montreal’s creative elite, but also, in respect of the building, that more than one system keeps the apparently random pile of blocks aloft. The prefabricated boxes themselves are loadbearing but only partially. The pedestrian streets at sixth and 10th floor levels operate as beams, while the lift and stair towers transfer this load to the ground.  

Back in 1967, the Montreal Expo was a test-bed for new technologies in building: Frei Otto’s steel-cabled pavilion for Germany and Buckminster Fuller’s steel-tubed icosahedron. It was also an attempt to adapt that staple of Modernism, the high-rise block, using prefabricated modules arranged in novel configurations. It bears some re-stating that for a highly speculative architectural statement, Habitat 67 is incredibly well built. Originally there were 158 apartments, some of which have since been knocked through, reducing the number to 148. There are more than 14 different apartment configurations within that however – making for an unparalleled and unrepeatable level of complexity. Each thick-walled apartment is secluded from its neighbour and the gardens provide incredible views of the city, the St Lawrence or both. 

Very little structural work has been required to maintain it, no small miracle in Montreal which is plagued by crumbling concrete work. Habitat instead survives as a sculptural expression of the elastic possibilities of the material – pre-stressed together with prefabricated. Safdie – far less interested in Brutalism than at first appears – saw it as a serious test case for prefabrication: a fact that has been forgotten but might be remembered again. In the UK, the housebuilder Berkeley Homes is building a facility where builders will work to produce up to 1,000 prefabricated houses for conventional use in suburban development. Habitat 67 might now be looked at as a pressing example of how that system of building can be used in daring fashion and that because something is factory produced, it must not be arrayed as such. 

As one walks its upper walkways, the main and lasting impact of the building is the importance of utopian thinking in built architecture. Indeed, the brilliance of the Habitat is the confluence of this aspiration with hard reality. Inspired by avant-garde architects such as Constant and Archigram, who advocated plugging in factory-made modules into massive space frames, Safdie’s university diploma from whence Habitat emerges proposed rows of prefabricated houses racked on a 20-storey-high A-frame. The scheme he presented to the Expo organisers was similar: 950 units stacked on inclined rhomboidal planes leaning on each other. But the key aspect is how this played once it hit the ground. Safdie sought the advice of Louis Kahn’s favourite engineer, August Komendant. He advised that the units would need to be strong enough not to break when they were being lifted into place and thus they would also be of such rigidity as to make them loadbearing. A separate superstructure would be excessive. 

The reality of the building is a fundamental rejection of some of the myths that have emerged around it. Although it is often said that the Habitat ran out of budget, the truth is it didn’t have a budget and shouldn’t have been built at all. It was only because of Safdie’s absolute faith in the idea, his doggedness and the enlightenment of key figures in the Expo’s senior management that it was completed. Safdie effectively smuggled his big idea onto an arm of the Expo site and it was signed into law by parliament without the government being fully aware of what they were committing to. They were largely compelled to give it funding retrospectively once they’d realised what they’d done. Safdie made it clear that the economies of scale would not kick in within the budget he was offered and that without the shops and community facilities of the earlier scheme it would no longer be self-sufficient for its inhabitants. His warnings have proved to be correct with tenants today forced to rely on cars or a daily minibus to ferry them into town.

‘As an alternative architectural system it is a compelling building, even if it has been bastardised by luxury developments the world over’

And yet as an alternative architectural system – a rejection of received wisdom – it is a compelling building, even if it has been bastardised by luxury developments the world over. One should remember that the model for incorporating industrialisation into buildings was Corbusian Modernism which found its apogee in the USA in the Miesian tower. In the Americas, no other building confounded that model more than the Habitat and, after it, extruding the plan was no longer the default architectural means of capitalising on Fordian economies of repetition. Safdie successfully broke from the orthogonal orthodoxy that he and his generation found inspiring in a social and technical sense but soulless in aesthetic terms. This is a building that – within its own envelope – succeeds in having its cake and eating it. 

And it hides how it does so cleverly and seductively. Even after several visits it is impossible to appreciate the arrangement, although at lower levels there are more modules facing into the plan than across it. A certain spiralling symmetry can be discerned from across the dock. Yet the visitor is still left with an appreciation of structure not just as an act of engineering but as a social necessity. The way the singular arrangement – the street or the core – has been jettisoned in favour of multiple structural solutions applies the logic of the counterculture to mass housing. Emerging from the lift back on the ground floor, surrounded by the irregular stacks of blocks, it is this articulation of a sophisticated social ambition through a complex physical arrangement that makes it a masterpiece.