Habitat '67 Commentary

"Safdie's dwelling complex 'Habitat' was designed to give 'privacy, fresh air, sunlight and suburban amenities in an urban location.' It was designed as a permanent settlement and consists of 158 dwellings, although originally it was intended to provide 1,000 units. The resulting ziggurat was made up of independent prefabricated boxes with fifteen different plan types."

 Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History . p281.

"Of the 900 apartments planned for this gigantic building block, 158 were completed. 354 prefabricated individual containers are stacked in a confused order and connected by steel cables. Projections and recesses are organized in such a way that each apartment has a balcony on the roof of the apartment immediately below."

 Peter Gossel and Gabriele Leuthauser. Architecture in the Twentieth Century . p265.

"This extraordinary housing development comprising 158 units of from one to four bedrooms, with many small gardens and decks, was planned as a prototype for a system that would streamline the building process and cut costs. It was assembled from 354 reinforced-concrete building modules, ingeniously stacked so as to give privacy and views to each unit. Unfortunately, construction costs proved to be prohibitive."

 from Sylvia Hart Wright. Sourcebook of Contemporary North American Architecture: From Postwar to Postmodern. p118.

"Habitat is a model community constructed along the St. Lawrence River in Montreal, composed of 354 prefabricated modules which combineto form a three-dimensional space structure. The modules, or 'boxes' as they are known, are connected in varying combinations to create 158residences ranging from 600 ft2 to 1,700 ft2. Pedestrian streets serve as horizontal circulation throughout the entire complex. Habitat '67 wasthe realisation of Moshe Safdie's thesis titled "A Case for City Living, A Study of Three Urban High Density Housing Systems for CommunityDevelopment" and was also the major theme exhibition of the 1967 Montreal World Exposition. "

from the Moshe Safdie Archives at McGill University, Montreal.