PS29 Habitat 67 and Post-War Architecture

Often described by architectural theorists and historians as one of the most emblematic projects of the 1960s, Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie challenged postwar housing design through the paradigmatic reiteration of cellular modules of prefabricated reinforced concrete. Among the young Expo 67 staff architects, Safdie obtained the housing design commission after graduating from McGill University (1961) and working for Daniel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel on the project for Meadowvale new town (1960-62) near Toronto. Under the supervision of Daniel van Ginkel, in particular, Safdie had investigated the idea of repetition as applied to Canadian and non-Canadian models and developed a vertical, modular housing system, which he called “A Case for City Living.” He explored similar topics in the proposal for Meadowvale in which the vertical organization transformed in more detailed elaborations of massive pyramidal housing, commercial, and industrial sectors set along a transportation system. 

Originated in these two projects, a similar but more articulated fascination with foreign iterative models informed the proposal for Habitat 67. Retracing Van Ginkel’s interest in African models and Safdie’s deep-rooted concern with its Northern examples, this paper examines Safdie’s fascination with the concept of repetition as part of a larger postwar movement of expansion beyond Western established practices and discourses. Through the investigation of Safdie’s thesis, his design and sources for the project of Meadowvale, and the relationship of both proposals with Habitat 67, the research challenges the idea of repetition as physical recurrence and speaks of it as a forward movement that carries knowledge between places, people, and times. Results illuminate original connections between Habitat 67 and non-Canadian traditions and disclose unexpected movements that trouble consolidated understandings of origin, exchange, and transmission as related to postwar housing design.

Why did Moshe Safdie believe that Habitat 67, the landmark housing complex built for the Expo 67 world’s fair in Montreal, promised the ultimate statement on middle-class life?  Safdie’s “King Kong Blocks”, as Progressive Architecture put it, continued the grand tradition of housing exhibitions that stood to confront and to reshape the tastes of liberal bourgeois societies.  The stakes remained the same: to free genuinely modern people from hidebound conventions of domestic comfort.  Safdie’s dream of the mid-century nuclear family in communion with nature and technology depended entirely on a polemic, in fact the propaganda, of prefabrication.  Habitat 67 drew authority from a parallel exhibition of its nearby factory.  Unfinished concrete units heroically hovering in midair from a mammoth derrick crane served to popularize industrialized building, the great modernist fantasy, as the true work of a capitalist welfare state.  Safdie’s initial studies had found support in the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a crown corporation behind the annual Small House Design booklets promoting soft modernism palatable to suburban markets, municipal needs, and developer profits.  Such policy prescription, especially in an era of government-sanctioned urban renewal, suggested just how contemporary large-scale thinking united artistic and bureaucratic elites imagining Canada as an “affluent society”.  This and more – including stylishly furnished Habitat apartments with all mod cons – presented an enviable future.  There was one problem.  Expo 67 built another middle-class house.  It was commissioned by a women’s magazine and the Canadian Lumbermen’s Association.  It championed wood paneling.  It celebrated the driveway, the backyard, and the rec room.  It was also cheaper than Safdie’s precast ziggurat with its discomfiting reality – rent.  No one, save a New York Times journalist with an expense account, could afford to live in Habitat 67.  Even Safdie moved out.  Where could the middle class go?

“I have a great respect for him ― I know him ― but I can’t tell you how I disapprove of Habitat [67] … In my opinion, this is a case in which the architect, not even being conscious of it, is imposing his faith in a super-building on the vast anonymous crowed of people it houses … How can he know whether his faith can be theirs? … to my mind it cannot be the most important thing in a housing estate to realize the architect’s vision of what the people ought to want.” ― This was what Sir Nikolaus Pevsner said of Moshe Safdie in 1972.

At the time, Safdie was a colleague of Pevsner at the Jerusalem Committee, an advisory body to the Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, set up in 1969 to solve multiple pressing problems in the city through modernist approaches in housing, transport, and commercial redevelopment. 

While Pevsner, a German-born Russian Jew, widely regarded then as a titanic apologist for Modern design, was the chair of the Town-planning Sub-committee of the Jerusalem Committee, Safdie, a young Jewish-Canadian, still in his early 30s, was a prominent architect and fellow member of the Committee, along with Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, Denys Lasdun, Edward Maxwell Fry, Lawrence Halprin, and Buckminster Fuller. Interacting with these world-famous giants in architecture with all their different ideologies, Safdie, in his own native land, was in a good position to refine his own Modernist ideals.

This paper intends to explore both the dynamic Modernist vison of Moshe Safdie from his pioneering design of Habitat 67 onward and the impact of the strenuous debates amongst, and criticism from, other members of the Jerusalem Committee on his own version of Modernism, most remarkably demonstrated in his 1989 design of the 8000-acre city of Modi’in, Israel.

In late 1977, the first residents of Baltimore’s Coldspring New Town moved into their homes. The national media praised Moshe Safdie’s latest project but had questions about a public-private partnership that built housing for the middle class. Originally, that partnership was simply a conduit for Federal funding in the wake of HUD’s “New Communities” legislation. But other, more complicated aspects of the public-private partnership were also tried and tested over the course of Coldspring’s development. At issue was the unique integration of public infrastructure within architectural design, derived from Habitat 67’s earlier example.

Like Habitat 67, Coldspring’s architecture brought together elements usually excluded from the architect’s palette: roads, structured parking, pedestrian decks, and pubic open spaces. Both projects' small- and large-scale space-making threaded these elements together in visibly dramatic ways. Unlike Habitat, however, Coldspring had first of all to compete in Baltimore’s conventional housing market. The project’s first phase was, therefore, financially possible only through improvised cost-sharing agreements between the project’s financiers and certain city agencies. Ultimately, public criticisms of those agreements were among the key factors preventing Coldspring subsequent development. 

In retrospect, the balance of Coldspring’s successes and failures defined the limits of Habitat 67’s heralded feasibility as a model for North American housing. With recourse to Baltimore’s municipal archives and to interviews with local architects and planners who helped shape Coldspring’s history, this presentation will provide an account of those successes and failures. Key to this account is how Baltimore’s leaders – politicians, planners, and even architects – variously interpreted Habitat 67’s lesson for urban development at that time.