David Shribman is a journalist, author and lecturer at the Max Bell School of Social Policy at McGill University in Montreal.
It was a special time for Canada and Montreal. In 1967, thousands flocked from all over the world to the city for the “Expo 67” exhibition. The celebration marked 100 years of the country’s independence and the establishment of the city as one of the cosmopolitan centers of the world. It was a moment of excitement, pride, innovation and unity.
The unity proved to be temporary. In a short time the city was caught up in a debate surrounding the rights of its French speakers and the separatism of Quebec, Canada’s second largest province. Soon the excitement and pride also faded, and disappeared with the outbreak of the “October Crisis” in 1970, during which the extremist separatist organization “Front for the Liberation of Quebec” murdered a minister and kidnapped a British diplomat in Canada, which led many residents and businesses to relocate from Montreal to Toronto.
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The 354 housing units that make up the project
But the sense of innovation still surrounds the 354 housing units that make up “Habitat 67”, a revolutionary residential project that grew out of the doctoral thesis of an architecture student from McGill University in Montreal, and was presented at “Expo 67”.
Although water stains “decorate” the concrete boxes today, the ’67 Bitat is still standing. In fact, it still attracts the attention of both the residents of the project who see the old Montreal from the window, and the researchers, who interpret it as an attempt by the Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdia to fill the void left by the deaths of Frank Lloyd Wright (in 1959) and Le Corbusier (in 1965).
The void left behind by the fallen architects
“Their death set architects free,” said Franklin Tooker, a Montreal resident and architectural historian at the University of Pittsburgh. “Their absence left a void, into which Spadia stepped.”
The kings died, and within two years two other aristocrats of the world of architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Walter Gropius, also passed away. At the heart of this important period of transition was the question of how to create new forms of architecture. Indeed, no project was as innovative as the ’67 Bitate, which looks like a collection of Lego bricks. Or as the Canadian historian Pierre Breton described it: “a collection of game dice scattered by a boy from the kingdom of the giants in the book ‘Gulliver'”.
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The interior design of the apartments
Modules weighing 70 tons were pre-built, and moved into place by specially built cranes. The “Frigider” company produced by special order kitchens that included a dishwasher, and several Canadian companies produced fiberglass bathrooms.
“I was aware that I was a revolutionary,” said Safdia, who is responsible, among other things, for the design of the Yad Vashem Museum (2005), “Natbeg 2000” and the offices of the Peace Institute in Washington (2011), in an interview I conducted with him in 2016. “I knew this was a new way to do things”.
The collapse of the dream of public housing
In the 1960s, Safdia thought that the suburbs were rotting, that public housing was not humane, and that family homes were in danger of extinction, and yet he incorporated features of all of these into the project. It took a few years for the ’67 Bitate to develop from a pavilion (a temporary structure at the exhibition) into a residential neighborhood. Today, many of the elements that Spadia incorporated into this concrete project are highly valued.
In its 56 years of existence, the ’67 Bitate – which earned this name because the meaning of the word is the same in English and French – suffered from financial difficulties and mold problems. In addition to these, the dream of integrated housing for families with different income levels collapsed.
When the project was launched, many people hated it because it seemed heavy and dark to them. Spadia’s ethos, “A garden for every man,” sounds a lot like the 31st US President Herbert Hoover’s campaign slogan, “Chicken in every pot.” Everyone remembers what eventually happened to Hoover’s economic vision: a few months after taking office in 1929, Wall Street collapsed. And of course the fact that the ’67 Bitate was sensitive to the harsh weather in Montreal could not be denied.
The structure still inspires excitement
About half a century after its construction, there are still huge empty spaces within the loose chain of housing units, and passageways that create a feeling of open space. The ’67 Bitate, which resembles a Cubist painting more than anything else, is perhaps the only concrete project in the world that looks as if it is soaring. It’s still exciting, just because it’s so experimental.
A penthouse unit that was renovated and sold a few years ago, for just over a million dollars, has two balconies (one with a sauna), two skylights and a spiral staircase. And while Franklin Toker, the Montreal architectural historian, described the apartments’ interior design as “remarkably unremarkable,” today the natural floors still gleam and drop-shaped light fixtures still hang from many of the project’s ceilings. The ’67 Bitate, for all its housing units, remains an unusual project in Montreal.
This project has fascinated the city’s residents for several generations. Safdia’s son, Oren, a playwright and screenwriter today, grew up in Habitat in ’67. As a teenager, he worked locally as a newspaper distributor. Because the elevators in the 12-story building only stopped at floors 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, and 10, he had to distribute the newspapers in a slightly odd way: either drop them four floors down or throw them three floors up.