Habitat 67

Habitat 67 was designed by Moshe Safdie as his graduate thesis while an architecture student at McGill University, and was later built to temporarily house workers, who came from all over the world, to work on Expo 67, the 1967 World’s Fair. The design is an experiment in modular architecture meant to imitate an organic growth, bringing together nature and geometric patterns. Safdie designed the Habitat for people in the middle class, as a way to improve quality of life in an urban environment. Each unit had access to a private garden, most of which were literally built on top of the roof of a neighboring apartment. Living in the Habitat has never been cheap. With a final cost of $22 million, it ended up running massively over budget, resulting in the government-owned building asking for unusually high rental rates in order to recoup the costs of construction. Many critics of the Habitat believe that the intended purpose of the community was to provide affordable homes for the lower classes and point to the extraordinarily expensive apartments as proof of its failure. In fact, Safdie has stated from the start that Habitat was built for the middle class as a way to provide suburban-type housing within an urban environment — a new model for city living. Habitat 67 is still home to hundreds of Montreal residents.