Montréal’s Habitat 67: An Idea Ahead of Its Time

“So… you’re going on the Habitat 67 tour on your way to the airport?” our son Andrew asked over FaceTime, laughing as he was making plans to pick us up from our flight to San Diego. “Yeah, that sounds about right!”

I’ll admit I’m guilty of over-extending when it comes to travel, but this was the only day of our three days in Montréal that Habitat 67 was booking tours. The afternoon tour would be too late, but the 10:30 a.m. slot offered a short window afterwards for Herb and me to pick up our bags at the hotel and catch a taxi to the airport. The opportunity to tour Habitat 67 was something I didn’t want to miss, a full-circle moment that would fill in the final piece of being here for Expo 67 all those years ago.

Habitat 67 sits on a century-old artificial peninsula in the St. Lawrence River called Cité-du-Havre and is the only completely intact original structure remaining from the Expo 67 world’s fair. Designed by architect Moshe Safdie, the complex is considered a landmark vision for brutalist architecture and urban housing. I didn’t get inside an apartment when I visited Expo 67 as a young girl – I’m not even certain if interior spaces were open to the public. But I do remember looking up at the array of cubes stacked and suspended in a most unusual way, imagining what it must be like to live there.

The Tour Begins

Our guide Fanny greeted us outside the Habitat 67 entrance. Except for mature landscaping, it looked almost unchanged from my old photo as well as my memory. While we waited for the group to gather, Fanny regaled us with tales of moving to Montréal from France. “I thought it would be so similar,” she said, “but there are many differences in how we do things. Even our accent is different!” Fanny’s enthusiasm for Habitat 67 was as delightful as her personality, and I knew we were in for a great tour.

Habitat 67 was designed with 365 modules, referred to as blocks or cubes, that were fabricated on-site, creating 158 residences and fifteen different housing types. Each block was about 600 square feet and included a private terrace. Moshie Safdie’s intent, Fanny explained, was that people could adjust the space to their needs, adding a block as their family grew or selling one if they wanted to downsize. “The circle of life,” she said.

Fanny also told us that Safdie wanted to incorporate three elements into his design: light, nature and services. He achieved his first two objectives, but Habitat 67’s isolated location on a peninsula across a bridge from Montréal prevented his dream of having shops and other services nearby from becoming a reality.

Inside a Habitat 67 Apartment

Habitat 67 is comprised of 12 floors, with a 13th floor housing the boiler and engine room. Elevators stop at every fourth floor, with hallways serving as “streets” to the residences. The apartment we were visiting was donated by Safdie to McGill University and was constructed with four cubes.

“The basic idea behind the project, the motto, was ‘for everyone a garden,’ which meant each apartment became a house, the corridors became streets. By breaking up the building and pre-fabricating the modules, you would get the garden for every house, you would get public spaces, you would get air and be able to move through the building.”
~Moshie Safdie, 50th Anniversary of Habitat 67, metropolismag.com

In 1985, Habitat tenants formed a limited partnership to purchase Habitat 67 from the government. Residences could be purchased as condos or continue as rentals from the limited partnership. The early owners, Fanny told us, were seeking community. But over the years, she said, people living here tend to seek privacy.

A Final Thought

Herb and I had to leave the tour shortly before it ended, taking an Uber back to the hotel and then heading to the airport. As we rode across the bridge into the Vieux-Port, I couldn’t get the images of my old photos from Expo 67 out of my mind. There was one photo each of the now taken-down pavilions that I must have especially liked…France, Thailand, Great Britain, Canada, the U.S.S.R. There were photos of the U.S.A.’s geodesic dome pavilion that is now the Biosphère. And there was one photo of Habitat 67, looking a little faded, but not too different from today.

For me, this time in Montréal was a precious chance to fit some long-ago images into a bigger picture. And I learned that these places from our childhood, however briefly we experienced them, are burned forever in our memories like film from our old cameras.