Architecture: Habitat for Humanity

Originally published in Sharp. Read the full text here.

50 Years On, Habitat 67 Has Never Been More Important

in 1963, Sandy van Ginkel, a McGill professor and Montreal urban planner, was tasked with picking a team to design Expo 67—the iconic, $283 million world’s fair, held mostly on reclaimed land in the St. Lawrence and featuring exhibitions from 120 countries. Van Ginkel, favouring youthful energy over credentials, opted for a crew of 20- and 30-somethings, many fresh out of undergrad.

He approached a 25-year-old former student, Moshe Safdie, to offer him a job and found himself haggling with the young architect. Safdie would accept van Ginkel’s proposal in return for a $10,000 salary (nearly $80,000 in today’s money) and a promise that his McGill thesis project, a radical new proposal for urban living, would be featured at the exposition.

Four years later, the fair welcomed 50 million visitors, who came to see international soccer tournaments, rodeos, operas, and multiscreen movies—and to marvel at Buckminster Fuller’s 76-metre-high geodesic dome and Arthur Erickson’s arboreal pyramid, made of Douglas fir. The biggest attraction, though, was Safdie’s Habitat 67, an apartment complex that, in its sprawling, multipart structure, evoked the bee hives the architect tended as a child in northern Israel.

Habitat, now a condo complex, has since been admired, dismissed, fought over, commemorated on postcards, and immortalized in a Leonard Cohen music video. When it opened, its proponents described it as a milestone, a design intervention that would force us to reconsider how we live together. Its critics dismissed it as an expensive indulgence. Today, as the Expo’s 50th anniversary approaches, Habitat 67 is looking better than ever. The building’s best defender? Safdie himself, who insists that the project was ahead of its time.

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