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Whatsapp Montreal's Habitat 67 is made of modules stacked in a seemingly random way.

Envisioned as an alternative to the monolithic apartment blocks dotting the urban landscape, Montreal's Habitat 67 was a mesmerising utopian vision. Colin Bisset takes us to a residential complex ahead of its time.

In 1967, landing on the moon was still a few years away, but the Habitat housing complex looked like something from Mars.

It was a mesmerising utopian vision, and it remains one of Montreal's most fashionable addresses.

It was designed by Moshe Safdie and built for the World Expo in Montreal. Safdie had travelled around North America after graduating and come up with a new idea after being appalled by the monolithic apartment blocks that dotted the urban landscape.

With Habitat he designed two concrete modules—one with kitchen and living spaces, the other with bedrooms and a bathroom—which he connected in different combinations to create 146 homes of various sizes.

They were stacked in a seemingly random way like a huge housing molecule, with dramatic gaps and overhangs.

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Whatsapp A terrace at Habitat 67 in Montreal.

Despite its futuristic look, Safdie thought of the complex like a medieval town tumbling down a hillside. The community could enjoy plenty of natural light, as well as leafy garden terraces, and decent noise insulation due to the lack of shared walls.

It showed there was a clear alternative to the slab apartment building that lacked any sense of human scale.

It was a mesmerising utopian vision, and remains one of Montreal's most fashionable addresses—although it's provided easy fodder for those who dismiss modern architecture as being nothing more than little boxes.

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Whatsapp Habitat 67 designed by Moshe Safdie in Montreal

Other architects have aimed for something similar, most notably Le Corbusier with his Unite d'habitation of 1949, where different sized apartment modules were slotted into a mainframe like bottles in a wine rack.

And yet the idea of modular living didn't really take off. There was a capsule hotel in Tokyo in 1972 where the bedroom modules were clearly visible from the outside of the building, but architects seemed wedded to the traditional idea of a single structure with an obvious front and back.

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Safdie wowed the world again in 2010 when his design for the Marina Sands Bay resort opened in Singapore, where a stunning three-acre park is held up by three hotel towers that curve elegantly upwards from a leafy podium.

Now we've become used to buildings with irregular shapes and gaps. Technology today means that structures can be suspended, cantelievered and hung in ways that were not common in the 1960s. Even redundant shipping containers are now being used to create housing structures not dissimilar to Habitat.

It all shows how ahead of its time Habitat was and how contemporary it still looks.