Moshe Safdie designed Habitat 67 as a demonstration — specifically, as his McGill University thesis — that prefabricated concrete modules could produce dignified, affordable housing at urban scale. Built for Expo 67 in Montreal, the building consists of 354 identical prefabricated concrete boxes stacked and interconnected to create 146 apartments of varying sizes. Each apartment has a private roof garden formed by the top surface of the module below it.
The building was, by any technical measure, a success. It demonstrated that modular construction could achieve spatial complexity. It demonstrated that high-density housing could provide outdoor space to every unit. It demonstrated that prefabrication could produce a visually distinctive building that did not read as repetitive despite its structural repetition.
The Cost Problem
What it did not demonstrate was affordability. The original projected cost per unit was $22,000; the actual cost was closer to $85,000, in 1967 dollars. The prefabrication that was supposed to reduce costs instead generated them: each module required its own network of services, the stacking required complex structural engineering, and the system could not achieve the economies of scale that made prefabrication economical for simpler building types.
Habitat 67 was sold as condominiums in 1987. The units, originally intended as affordable housing, now sell for several million dollars each. The building is a protected heritage site. Its waiting list for purchase is long.
The Model That Wasn't
The tragedy of Habitat 67 — if it is a tragedy — is that the technical demonstration was real but the social premise was wrong. The building proved that modular concrete construction could create good housing. It did not prove that it could create affordable housing, which was the premise on which the demonstration rested.
Several architects have attempted to apply the Habitat principle at other scales and in other cities. None have achieved the same cost reductions that conventional construction already provides. The modular dream persists in architectural imagination precisely because the building itself is so convincing as image and so impractical as model.