Who designed the Habitat 67 housing complex in Montreal?

Moshe Safdie designed the Habitat 67 housing complex in Montreal.

The project began as Safdie’s graduate thesis at McGill University and was developed for Expo 67, Montreal’s 1967 world’s fair. Its stacked arrangement of prefabricated concrete units proposed a middle ground between a detached house and a conventional apartment tower.

Construction began in 1964 at Cité du Havre, a peninsula in the Saint Lawrence River. The completed complex contains 146 residences assembled from 354 concrete modules, with terraces, gardens, and varied orientations giving many units qualities associated with individual homes. Structural engineer August Komendant collaborated on the project.

A common mix-up is to attribute Habitat 67 to Le Corbusier because of its modular, concrete-heavy design and relationship to postwar modernism. Safdie’s complex is often discussed alongside Metabolist architecture, but its architect was the then-young Safdie, who later designed major cultural and civic buildings internationally.