The Habitat 67 - Studio

Dear Lego Fans and Designers,

I am David.

Let's design a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit. Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors. They prefabricate it so they would achieve economy, and there, it is almost 50 years later. It's a very desirable place to live in. It's now a heritage building but it didn't proliferate. There are a lot of issues, low-rise environment, and with it comes congestion, and they lose mobility, and so on and so forth. So a few years ago, they decide to go back and rethink Habitat.

"Could we make it more affordable? Could we actually achieve this quality of life in densities that are prevailing today ?" And we realized, it's basically about light, it's about the sun, it's about nature, it's about fractalization can we open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior? They came up with a number of models: economy models, cheaper to build and more compact: membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens.

Habitat 67 one of the most unique and outstanding residential complexes in the world. It was located in a strip of land that was originally created as an icebreaker to protect the harbor of Montreal the st. Lawrence River on one side the old city in the old port Montreal on the other. It's an outstanding feature of the cityscape as well as a beautiful piece of architecture.

In the 60s, there was a general concern about how people are going to live in growing cities. Moshe Safdie and his students project at McGill University developed a thesis on three-dimensional housing complex to provide each family, each unit with outdoor space the original project was much larger and then they choose to reduce it to a prototype to rethink how people can live not just as a unit in a big compound but as part of the community.

Comprising a three-dimensional landscape of 354 stacked concrete "boxes", Habitat 67 pioneered the combination of two major housing typologies – the urban garden residence and the modular high-rise apartment building.

Moshe Safdie was awarded the project in spite of his relative youth and inexperience, an opportunity he later described as "a fairy tale, an amazing fairy tale." I think Habitat was important at its time because it had changed the architectural styles of the apartment building.

From the beginning, Habitat 67 has fascinated people. Today, it's still a marvel an architectural wonder but also a lesson for the future of the cities not just for the 60s but for today we hope you have enjoyed a visit of the Habitat 67 as well as building it with Lego Brick.