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 giant vertical glass boxes we had Terraces with Gardens air open space and a real connection to Nature what if our skyscrapers saw diagonally instead and what if they weren't skyscrapers at all but stacked villages with flying streets in between them and every immunity you could dream of just a short distance away this is habitat 67 and it may be one of the most important building ideas of the 20th century it reimagined Urban living and inspired a generation of Architects but in many respects it's considered a failed dream that remains largely unfinished only a small portion of the original master plan was ever built that is until now some 56 years later habitat 67 is finally being completed just not in the way that anyone thought [Music] habitat 67 is a big deal habitat 67 habitat 67. it looks bizarre it's a very desirable place to live in 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 start in life it began as the thesis of a sixth year architecture students then took shape at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair an audacious and very young Moshi safety submitted his designs to the world's fair when he was just 23 and apprenticing under American Architects Louis Khan it began with a journey I made through North America to study housing in a scholarship ahead at McGill and I came to the conclusion that the Suburban levittowns were not they're not feasible in the long term they just 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're in the suburbs therefore if we could reinvent the apartment building so that it gives you the quality of life of a house garden privacy access through an open Street people will be more willing to live in cities how will this Fair differ from other worlds fairs well it's bigger now it's typical for World's Fair Expos to build entirely new structures to host the events the unisphere being built by United States Steel other exposed before them built Tower monuments and gimmick structures that would be taken down soon after but Canada wanted to construct something substantial something that would make us rethink the way we lived they found it in habitat 67. [Music] a program for a whole new type of housing one that wouldn't contribute to sprawl or just be another soulless Tower but to really understand why this was so groundbreaking we have to put ourselves in the 1960s [Music] today you and I live in a period of tremendous growth the growth of these regions presents one of the biggest challenges facing our nation the problem of urban sprawl two very important things were happening in urban planning at this time the first was zoning we began dividing our cities up separating them into their functions residential in one part of the city offices in employment in another part of the city industry in another part of the city all separated because the concept was you shouldn't mix different land uses in one place the problem is people's lives aren't divided as cleanly as that part of the reason why zoning Kane's popularity was because of the car suddenly it was possible to separate out these places by vast distances but then we're designing our cities for cars and not for people habitat 67 does away with this idea instead it puts everything in the same place it was one of the first truly mixed-use developments words we now see to describe almost every major new construction projects and mixtures development is one which takes all the ingredients of urban life and accommodates them within a structure so in its simplest form it's a shopping center with towers of residential and offices and other facilities but in its most Sublime form its residences with all the things that Community needs like schools and shops around them plus places for work offices workshops Etc integrated into a singular development this folded into utopian ideas for architecture that started to emerge in this time following the post-war period everything was being rethoughts and anything could be possible so Canada took a chance on a 23 year old freshly graduated Architects and his bold idea at the core of safety's Vision was prefabrication Apartments made in factories assembled module by module and on site as he developed habitat 67 he came up with the concept of a hillside safety's original thesis had the modules stacked 20 to 30 stories high in a frame-like tower structure but he realized that if he leaned them back as if they were on a hillside they could all have Gardens and other areas open to the sky the hillsides would hover over sheltered public spaces on the ground below and would be laced with streets every four floors for Access and for everyone to Garden every house with its own roof Terrace open to the sky not a balcony a Terrace open to the sky and so that seemed to be the ultimate kind of realization of the quality of life in the city at high density that we could have conceived at the time it was 45 million dollars it's represented a community of 1200 families with all the mixed-use components in today's dollars it's probably 450 million dollars but safety and his team were unable to secure the 45 million dollars in funding instead the government gave them a budgets of just 15 million and when they said 15 million dollars my first reaction was go to hell it's everything or nothing and then I started rationalizing and so it took 24 hours to have me go through full cycle of saying I can't miss that opportunity it won't be the ideal which led to the habitat that we built which is not the membranes it's kind of more of a village an Urban Village instead of a community for 1200 families Rising 30 stories into the air safety's habitat was scaled back to just 158 residences across three pyramids less than half the original height it didn't make it different it didn't reduce the quality of life within your apartment or you still had your garden you still had your open streets but by scaling it down it became more of a building than a community it's now 1963 and we're still decades away from computer-assisted technology 3D printers are more than half a century off and this immensely complicated design had to be developed entirely by hand through sketches and models so many many models the work was labor intensive and the days were long at its peak safety was spending up to 14 hours in his Studio at a time then something amazing happened hey kids look Lego is here the habitat design team bought nearly every Lego set in Montreal when the little plastic bricks first arrived in North America Lego was a block but it was modular and it had the capacity to to connect but it had a discipline there was a system to it you could connect it through the clicking so it could be stacked or 90 degrees or in parallel shifted by increments and it was working with that system that I designed habitat with Legos foreign these blocks into reality required an engineer with immense skill to find one safety ended up poaching an engineer from his former boss architect Louis Cohn it promised to be one of the most challenging construction projects of the decades and the pyramid structures with gaping holes underneath them worried many traditionalists in fact both McGill University and the University of Toronto produced a report a station that if habitat was built as designs it would collapse and if it didn't collapse on its own then it would probably be brought down by an earthquake safety and his engineer had to convince the city of Montreal that they knew what they were doing when the first module was lifted into place safety's wife christened it with a champagne bottle as though it were a maiden voyage of a grand ship before the buildings were even finished they started stoking controversy in 1965 critics called for a royal commission to investigate why something so foolish was being constructed in 1966 a new Minister wanted their funding strips and the units dumped into the Saint Lawrence River but the project was already too far along there were labor shortages too and the construction team had to rush to get everything ready for Expo 67. in the end one-third of the Interiors were left unfinished to be completed at a later date slowly but surely each module was cast in a factory operated on site then lifted into place by crane safdi was proving to the world that prefabricated housing could work [Music] the things that turn up in the street these days times nothing to be a real cool hand the day of the Expo arrived more than 50 million people descended on the Canadian city throughout the duration of the World's Fair a record that's not been beaten safety moved into one of the apartments with his wife and two children and lived there throughout the duration of the events by all accounts habitat 67 was a Triumph suddenly safdee became what we would Now call a stark attack offers from all over the world came in to visit and lecture he'd set the architecture's scene on fire well in that respect it's uh it's like living happily ever after because habitat is a vital successful and very desirable community and the fact that people stayed there for decades the fact that their medication is the second generation and even third generation live there that it has the longest occupancy of any building in Canada that shows you people love it they they want to be there during the 1970s the waitlist to rent an apartment in habitat 67 was more than five years long but as the decades passed its Legacy while inspiring ore was that of an unfulfilled dream the architecture Revolution it promised never came I am you and you are me [Music] it's these buildings that embody the two greatest words of the human imagination two words that were not as correctly have shifted the course of civilizations creative movements and opened Minds what if a very young and emboldened safety dared to stand against the establishment and ask just that these buildings ask it still to this day and today's Architects and designers are doing the same [Music] what if habitat 67 had been completed to its original design would this dream of housing be available to everyone could it still be neoscape approached safety Architects about modeling habitat 67 digitally to preserve and share the design with the world it was safety Architects that then proposed completing habitat 67 virtually but all of it this time using epic games is Unreal Engine technology that safety kids only have imagined back in the 60s this could now actually be done [Music] foreign I kept going back to that kept going back to those ideas The Habit that was built on I also knew that habitat was never built like it was designed to be built whenever came to us with the challenge of bringing habitat 67 to life we were we were super excited it was a project that is important in the architectural world the team worked with safety to complete the original master plan this included the enormous 30-story A-frame towers that leaned back from the riverbank working with softy on this project in particular was interesting because it it was working a design that was thought of concepted 50 plus years ago that took him back a little bit he he sat in his chair leaned back held his head and and said yes let's do it so when a neoscape and epic came to us and say what about the original habitat actually I was very excited because I've never actually experienced three-dimensionally what it's like and so it's always been a question in my mind what would it be like if we really had those 45 million dollars how would it have been as a community are there hidden issues there that we didn't realize but yeah that's this is it this is the final product that's amazing we showed him for the first time the whole project his reaction was uh something that you would have to blip I guess it was a very much uh happy with it he said imagine if I 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's the ultimate test I mean I would love to live there and yet at the same time I realized boy was that ahead of its time it's ahead of its time today and I hope that actually making this accessible to the public at large as an image as an idea you could live like that would now help Advance people's desire to have this realized this model has been painstakingly created by those who are passionate about safety's Vision just like his original physical models in the 60s that's my hope my hope is that people can see it learn from it and play with it what if our tantalizing words they can shift mountains hillsides safety's ideas have returned to the architectural Zeitgeist a new generation is discovering them and instead of letting them rest on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River they want to do something with them this video was made possible by epic games you can explore the hillside model for yourself at the link below that is really really worth doing in addition you'll also be able to continue this story in part two and find out how this generation of Architects worked with safd to fully realize his vision we dive deeper on this and the other topics on our Channel over on the world's best construction podcast available right now wherever you get your podcasts and as always if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction make sure you subscribe to the b1m

Channel: The B1M

Views: 2,003,912

Keywords: B1M, TheB1M, Construction, architecture, engineering, The B1M, Fred Mills, building, habitat 67, 1967 Montreal World’s Fair, Montreal, canada, Moshe Safdie, Louis Kahn, World’s Fair, urban village, utopia, LEGO, McGill University, Saint Lawrence River, Neoscape, Epic Game, Epic games

Id: Qwbp9T-WS-I

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023