Montreal Off the Beaten Path Tips by kenHuocj

HABITAT by Moshe Safdie

i'd read about the amazing prototype Mass Housing solution being built for EXPO '67, amidst much controversy it emerged - decades later, it still stands still amidst controversy, but the architect has now to his list of completed buildings many more acorss the globe. [later will emerge an architectural travelogue]
**** '.....While there are other ‘temporary’ buildings surviving from that grand fiesta that was Montreal’s World’s Fair, Habitat is the only structure still used for the very purpose for which it was built. Its immediately recognizable form sets it in the company of other iconic buildings that arose as material and structural experiments in world exhibitions – the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace among them. It is the most researched building among some 150 projects Safdie has designed. There are American students investigating its plumbing and French art historians writing a dissertation on the Habitat ‘discourse’ at the Sorbonne.

Ultimately, for all its importance, the future of Habitat ’67 is not so much in preserving a single building, or securing its infrastructure, but rather, in promoting the values that had accompanied Habitat’s growth: the synergy between innovation and political will; the facilitation, on a public scale, of original thinking; the validation, in a built form, of community ideals.....' SOURCE: http://cac.mcgill.ca/safdie/Habitat/future.htm

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