When the architect was just 23 and starting out his career in the office of Louis Kahn, his former tutor Sandy Van Ginkel suggested he submit his design for the Montreal Expo. It became his first ever built project.
Moshe Safdie, an Israeli-born architect who moved to Canada in the 1950s, first developed the concept as part of his thesis at McGill University in 1961, entitled “A Case for City Living”. Inspired by Brutalism movement.
Habitat 67 comprises 354 identical, prefabricated concrete forms arranged in various combinations, reaching up to 12 stories in height. Constructing total 158 residents, but several apartments have since been joined to create larger units, reducing the total number. Together these units create 146 residences of varying sizes and configurations, each formed from one to eight linked concrete units. Each unit is connected to at least one private terrace, which can range from approximately 20 to 90 square metres (225 to 1,000 sq ft) in size. These range in size from 600-square-foot one-bedroom dwellings to 1,800-square-foot four-bedroom dwellings. In all, there are fifteen different housing types. The interlocking forms are connected via walkways and include landscaped terraces. By creating a series of properties that each feature its own roof garden and access from an external ‘street’, the idea was to combine the urban garden residence with the modular high-rise apartment building.
All the parts of the building, including the units, the pedestrian streets, and the elevator cores, participate as load-carrying members. The units are connected to each other by post-tensioning, high-tension rods, cables, and welding, all of which combine to form a continuous suspension system.The composition of stepped modules provides every dwelling with access to sun and air, as well as a private garden terrace. A factory on the site fabricated the box modules, each roughly 600 square feet in size. They were lifted and stacked by cranes and post tensioned to create the stepped form.
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