Habitat 67 began as Moshe Safdie’s master’s thesis at McGill University’s School of Architecture, a stack of interlocking cubes modeled with Lego that failed to win the Pilkington Prize. After a stint with Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, his former thesis advisor Sandy van Ginkel brought him back to plan Expo 67, the Montreal World’s Fair themed Man and His World. Safdie pitched the thesis as a pavilion, and it was approved by cabinet minister Mitchell Sharp and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, with Edward Churchill making him lead architect. Safdie called it an amazing fairy tale. The result used 354 identical prefabricated modules, each almost 12 meters long and about 90 tons, held in cantilevered stacks by August Komendant’s prestressed concrete and assembled by Anglin Norcross.

The original 158 apartments, now 146 after owners combined units, each span one to eight cubes, came with molded fiberglass bathrooms, and use the roof below as a private garden terrace of 20 to 90 square meters. Safdie wanted 1,200 homes with schools and shops for about $45 million, but the government approved only the smaller version, which cost 22.4 million Canadian dollars, or roughly $140,000 per unit. Losing scale wrecked the economics of the on-site factory, and in 1985 tenants bought the building from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation as a private co-op on a peninsula that got direct bus service only in 2023. Christopher Alexander called its repetition banal and deadening, yet in 2023 Safdie’s firm and Epic Games built the full 1,200 unit vision in Unreal Engine.

• How steel cables tensioned inside each block let concrete handle cantilevered loads
• The metabolism movement’s idea of buildings as cells that can grow and adapt
• Why a prefab factory spread over 158 apartments made the housing unaffordable
• Leonard Cohen’s In My Secret Life video, a 2017 Canada Post stamp, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
• Safdie’s later career of more than 75 major buildings and master plans worldwide