How a 23-Year-Old Solved Urban Sprawl

What if our cities didn't have to look like this? What if instead of being crammed into gigantic vertical glass boxes we had terraces with gardens, outdoor spaces and a real connection with nature? What if our skyscrapers saw diagonally and what if they were? There are no skyscrapers except stacked towns with flying streets between them and all the immunity you can dream of within a short distance. This is habitat 67 and may be one of the most important building ideas of the 20th century. It reimagined

urban

life and inspired. a generation of architects, but in many ways it is considered a failed dream that remains largely unfinished, only a small part of the original master plan was built, until now, some 56

year

s later, habitat 67 is finally being completed, but not the way anyone does.

I thought Habitat 67 is a big deal Habitat 67 Habitat 67. It seems strange, it's a very desirable place to live. Magnificent, it's incredible. Young Montreal designer Moshe Safety pioneered a new housing typology. Reinventing the apartment building, but this monumental piece of architecture had an unlikely beginning. In life, it began as the thesis of a sixth-

year

architecture student and then took shape at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair. A bold and very young Moshi presented his designs to the world's fair when he was only 23 years old and an apprentice. by American architects Louis Khan. with a trip I took through North America to study housing on a scholarship at McGill and I came to the conclusion that sub

urban

levittowns were not feasible in the long term, they simply consumed too much land, too much energy, too much transportation.

We have to bring people back to the city, but people prefer houses, that's why they are in the suburbs, so if we could reinvent the apartment building so that it provides the quality of life of a house, garden, privacy, access via an open street, people will do it. Be more willing to live in cities How will this fair be different from other world fairs? Well, it's bigger now. It is typical for world's fairs to build entirely new structures to host the events. The unisphere is being built by United States Steel. Others exposed before they built monument towers. and deceptive structures that would be torn down soon after, but Canada wanted to build something substantial, something that would make us rethink the way we lived, they found it in habitat 67. a program for a completely new type of housing that would not contribute to expanding or simply be another Soulless Tower, but to really understand why this was so innovative we have to look back to the 1960s.

Today you and I live in a period of tremendous growth. The growth of these regions presents one of the greatest challenges facing our nation. The problem of urban

sprawl

there were two very important things happening in urban planning at that time: the first was zoning. We began to divide our cities, separating them into their functions: residential in one part of the city, offices, employment in another part of the city, industry in another. part of the city was completely separate because the concept was that different land uses should not be mixed in one place. The problem is that people's lives are not divided as clearly as that.

Part of the reason Kane's popularity was due to the zoning that was suddenly due to the car. It is possible to separate these places by great distances, but then we are designing our cities for cars and not people. Habitat 67 eliminates this idea and instead puts everything in the same place. It was one of the first truly mixed-use developments. As we now see to describe almost all major new construction and development projects, it is one that takes all the ingredients of urban life and arranges them within one structure, so in its simplest form it is a shopping center with residential and office towers and other facilities, but at their most sublime are their residences with all the things that the community needs, such as schools and shops around them, as well as places to work, offices, workshops, etc., integrated into a unique development that developed into utopian ideas for architecture that began to emerge in this post-war era.

During that period, everything was being reconsidered and everything could be possible, so Canada took a chance on a 23-year-old recent graduate architect and his bold idea at the center of the security vision was prefabrication. Apartments made in factories assembled module by module and on site as the habitat developed. 67 came up with the concept of hillside safety. The original thesis had the modules stacked 20 to 30 stories high in a frame-like tower structure, but he realized that if he tilted them back as if they were on the side of a hill, they could all have gardens. . and other areas open to the sky, the slopes would hover over protected public spaces on the ground and would be intertwined with streets every four stories for access and so that everyone could garden each house with its own roof Terrace open to the sky not a balcony a Terrace open to the sky and that seemed to be the last kind of realization of quality of life in the high-density city that we could have conceived at that time, it cost 45 million dollars and represented a community of 1200 families with all the components of use mixed in today's dollars is probably $450 million, but Seguridad and his team couldn't get the $45 million in financing.

Instead, the government gave them a budget of only 15 million and when they said 15 million dollars, my first reaction was to go. screw it, it's all or nothing and then I started rationalizing and it took me 24 hours to go through a complete cycle of saying, I can't miss that opportunity, it's not going to be the ideal that led me to the habitat that we built, which is not the membranes, it's more of a village, an urban village rather than a community for 1200 families. The 30-story increase in air security habitat was reduced to just 158 ​​residences in three pyramids, less than half the original height it did not have. different did not reduce the quality of life inside your apartment or you still had your garden you still had your open streets but by reducing it it became more of a building than a community now we are in 1963 and we are still decades away 3D printers with technology Computer-aided design is more than half a century away and this immensely complicated design had to be developed entirely by hand through sketches and models.

So many models that the work was labor intensive and the days were long at their peak. Security was running out. to 14 hours in his studio at a time, then something surprising happened. Hey kids, look, Lego is here. The habitat design team bought almost all the Lego sets in Montreal when the small plastic bricks first arrived in North America. Lego was a block, but it was modular and it had the ability to connect but it had a discipline, there was a system that you could connect it by clicking so that it could be stacked or 90 degrees or move parallel in increments and I was working with that system that I designed with The habitat.

Legos turning these blocks into reality required an engineer with immense skill in finding insurance and ended up poaching an engineer from his former boss, architect Louis Cohn. It promised to be one of the most challenging construction projects in decades and pyramidal structures with huge holes underneath. It worried many traditionalists, in fact, both McGill University and the University of Toronto produced a report on a station that if the habitat were built as designed, it would collapse and if it didn't collapse on its own, it would likely be toppled by an earthquake. . and their engineer had to convince the city of Montreal that they knew what they were doing when the first module was put into place.

Safety's wife christened it with a bottle of champagne as if it were the maiden voyage of a great ship before the buildings were completed. They began to stoke controversy in 1965 critics called for a royal commission to investigate why something so silly was being built in 1966 a new minister wanted his funding strips and the units were dumped in the St Lawrence River but the project was already too far along There was also a shortage of labor and the construction team had to rush to get everything ready for Expo 67. In the end, a third of the interiors were left unfinished to be completed at a later date, slowly but surely, each module It was melted down at a factory operating on the site at the time. lifted into place by a crane safdi was proving to the world that prefabricated housing could work with the things that appear on the street these days sometimes nothing to be a really cold hand on the day of the Expo more than 50 million people came to the Canadian city During the duration of the Universal Exhibition, a record that has not been surpassed.

Security moved into one of his apartments with his wife and two children and lived there for the duration of the events. By all accounts, Habitat 67 was a Triumph. Suddenly, Safdee became what we would be now. call for a tough attack, offers from all over the world came to visit him and give a lecture, he had set the architecture scene on fire. Well, in that sense, it's like living happily ever after because the habitat is a vital, successful and very desirable community, and the fact that the people stayed there for decades the fact that their medication is second generation and even third generation lives there which has the longest occupancy of any building in Canada that shows that people love it they want to be there during the 1970s the waiting list to rent an apartment at Habitat 67 lasted more than five years but as As the decades passed, his legacy while he inspired was that of an unfulfilled dream, the architectural revolution he promised never came.

I am you and you are me, it is these buildings that embody the two greatest. words of human imagination, two words that were not so correct have changed the course of the creative movements of civilization and have opened minds. What would happen if a very young and emboldened security dared to oppose the establishment and ask that these buildings continue to ask for it to this day? Today's architects and designers are doing the same. What if Habitat 67 had been completed according to its original design? Would this dream of housing be available to everyone? Could it still be Neoscape?

The architects approached safety to model Habitat 67 digitally to preserve and share the design with the world. It was Safety Architects who then proposed completing Habitat 67 virtually, but this time everything using epic games is Unreal Engine technology that safety kids had only imagined in the 60s. This could now be done overseas. I kept coming back to it. I kept coming back. to those ideas The Habit on which it was built I also knew that the habitat was never built as it was designed to be built every time we were presented with the challenge of bringing Habitat 67 to life we ​​were super excited, it was an important project In the architectural world , the team worked confidently to complete the original master plan, this included the massive 30-story A-frame towers that sloped back from the riverbank.

Working with Softy on this particular project was interesting because he was working on a design that was thought to have been conceived over 50 years ago, which set him back a bit. He sat in his chair, leaned back, held his head and said yes, let's do it, so when a neoscape and an epic came to us and said what about the original habitat. I was very excited because I had never experienced what this is like in three dimensions, so the question of what it would be like if we really had that $45 million, what it would have been like as a community, has always been on my mind.

There are hidden issues that we didn't realize, but yeah, that's it, this is the final product, it's amazing. We show you the entire project for the first time. His reaction was, uh, something you would have to do. I guess it was a lot. uh, happy with that, he said, imagine if I had had this in 1964, I would have convinced them and we would have built it. It was an immediate reaction. I would love to live there and that is the definitive proof. I mean, I would love to live there and still. at the same time I realized that he was ahead of his time, today he is ahead of his time and I hope that making this accessible to the general public as an image as an idea that could live like this now would help promote people's desire for I have realized that this model has been painstakingly created by those passionate about the Security Vision, just like their original physical models in the 60's.

That is my hope. My hope is that people can see it, learn from it, and play with it. What if our tempting words? can change the mountainshillsides ideas of safety have returned to the architectural Zeitgeist a new generation is discovering them and instead of letting them rest on the banks of the St. Lawrence River they want to do something with them this video was made possible thanks to epic games that you can explore the model of the hillside for you in the link below that it is really worth doing, plus you will also be able to continue this story in the second part and discover how this generation of architects worked with safd to fully realize their vision that we delve into.

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