(2008-01-12) Weder For Everyone A Garden

For Everyone a Garden. At Habitat 67, raw concrete catwalks and cantilevered blocks hover above, overlapping and interlocking; forms jut and recede in and out of your visual field like a cubist painting come to life. But Habitat was never touted to be something as trivial as mere art: this ten-storey apartment complex once promised an architectural revolution that would bring housing to everyone.

Built as the crown jewel of Expo 67, Habitat was Canada’s first truly ideological government-sponsored architecture

This faith reached its zenith at the opening of Expo 67, which celebrated architecture, particularly the American pavilion’s geodesic dome, by Bucky Fuller, and West Germany’s hyperbolically curved tent, by Frei Otto. But Habitat stole the show.

The visionary wunderkind was architect Moshe Safdie, who would eventually design showcase projects around the world

But in 1967, he was just another brilliant McGill graduate with a thesis in his backpack. Entitled “A Case for City Living: A Three-Dimensional Modular Building System,” Safdie’s architecture school thesis was even larger and more fantastical on paper. (pre-fab)

Each rectangular module would criss-cross over another, so the roof of the one underneath would bear the load of the one on top, with the non-overlapping areas generating patches of outdoor space. As Safdie memorably promised, “For everyone a garden.”

Ottawa, which struggled to brake the skidding costs of this “low-cost” model; and for the public, who were promised affordable housing but offered sky-high rents—when they were offered anything at all. It’s been a long and twisted road from there, and the fact that Habitat has now evolved into an enclave for the affluent is the final irony.

anyone with even a passing knowledge of construction or real estate could have foreseen that nothing with Habitat’s gardens and piazzas and catwalks could be anywhere near as affordable as a conventional construction

it eventually became clear that all that stuff would always cost a lot of money. As a world fair spectacle or as architectural research, Habitat was terrific. As a pilot project, it was a bust.

these days, Habitat is one of the most coveted addresses in Montreal. To buy a 1,200-square-foot two-bedroom unit will set you back around $500,000—about double the price of a townhouse in central Montreal. Maintenance fees alone (which include a shuttle bus to ferry residents to the city) run around $1,200 to $1,500 per two-cube unit per month.

When Ottawa put Habitat on the block in 1985, a tenants’ collective put in a bid of $9 million. It was swiftly trumped by Gatineau businessman Pierre Heafey, who offered the feds $10 million. Ottawa took it; then, in one deft move, Heafey flipped it back to the tenants for $11.4 million just three weeks later.