Safdie Architects, Epic Games, and the creative agency Neoscape have recreated the original vision for Habitat 67 in virtual reality. Using Epic Games’ powerful game engine Unreal Engine 5, the entire original master plan for the radical early 1960s scheme has been constructed, marking a significant expansion on the realized segment situated in Montreal, Canada.
Video courtesy: Epic Games
The genesis of Habitat 67 stretches back to Moshe Safdie’s master’s thesis at McGill University. At 23 years old, Safdie submitted the idea to the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair, with the goal of creating a pilot for a new type of housing that would not contribute to urban sprawl.
“It began with a journey through North America to study housing,” Safdie recalled. “I came to the conclusion that suburbs weren’t feasible in the long term. They consumed too much land, energy, and transportation. If we could reinvent the apartment building to offer the quality of life of a house, with a garden, privacy, and access from an open street, people would be more willing to live in cities.”
The original design for Habitat 67 called for modules of prefabricated apartments stacked 20 stories in a hillside mass, with each unit granted access to a garden. The structures were to hover over sheltered public spaces below, with streets placed every four floors. With a budget of only $15 million, the realized scheme was scaled back to 158 residences across three pyramids, representing less than half of the master plan’s original size.
“Every house had its own roof terrace,” Safdie added. “Not a balcony but a garden open to the sky. It seemed the ultimate realization of suburban life in the city. At the time, it would have cost $45 million for a community of 1,200 families. Today, that's probably $450 million.”
In an effort to demonstrate the qualities of the original Habitat 67, Safdie and Neoscape now recreated the master plan in Unreal Engine. Construction of the virtual world involved extensive mapping of the existing structure using LiDAR and high-resolution images, which offered the added benefit of preserving the current state of Habitat 67 for future study.
The resulting model was built in Rhino and 3ds Max before being imported into Unreal Engine, where trees, plants, and other set dressing were added. In addition to incorporating the scheme’s original 30-story leaning towers, the new virtual model also elaborates on other elements from the master plan, such as a hotel, school, workplaces, and public landscapes.
“Unreal Engine is more than just a tool for architects, it can open up whole new worlds and ideas,” Safdie noted following the project’s completion. “This is exactly what we need to rethink how our cities are made. I hope that making this model accessible to the public at large and the idea that you could live somewhere like Habitat 67 helps advance people's desire to have this realized.”
6 Comments
This is an amazing endeavor! This could be applicable to additional projects, too, such as Paul Rudolph's vision for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which is a particular aesthetic match.
The different responses to the Neom project and this vision strikes me as a bit disquieting. Safdie's megastructure is still hailed as a visionary masterpiece while Neom is being castigated as a crime against humanity. Is it their locations? The circumstances of their costruction? The nature of their patrons? Nostalgia for halcyon '60s retrofuturism versus the stark horrors of 2020s political-economic environment?
Neom and other similar garbage is just just like tech-bros peddling NFT jive. It's intellectually empty regurgitation of past megastructure ideals funded by ethically-poor and backwards countries with no real connections to reality.
Safdie's project is a visualization of very significant genesis in architecture and urban design; not a pastiche by some oil-barons taking a break from masturbating in front of gold-framed mirrors held up by dozen of slaves.
Some of the biggest controversies surrounding Neom include the displacement of local tribes, evictions of current residents and the human rights issues surrounding the laborers involved in the construction. monosierra - what are the similarities you see with Habibat 67?
You raise an interesting point. Safdie's vision was of course never realized in its entirety. It is thus saved from controversies and possible violence if it had been commissioned and constructed - assuming such a vision could be realized in a democratic society.
Could such a visionary megaproject been feasible in a democratic society at all? Or are they mostly confined to the kingdoms of totalitarian monarchies, where the King's word is law? If so, then these projects are doomed from the start. Someone has to impose this vision and then render it on concrete over the protests of millions to come.
Or can megaprojects be truly "utopian" in execution and outcome? Can a democratic society, with its contending voices and clashing interests, produce such a project. And if so, can it successfully maximize the collective benefits of generations to come?
As a point of reference, Robert Moses did manage to realize a significant chunk of his megalomaniac projects in NYC and Long Island. So there is an example of a power broker gone amok imposing his vision and displacing the livelihoods and homes of thousands deemed lesser, within a democratic society. Megaprojects are possible - until the bean counters say otherwise.
habitat 67 became what it did as a result of a budget cut. It is a brilliant development. It's setting is not so nice (isolated and not integrated with the city), but as a building very powerful. It is absolutely possible that the full development would have added vibrancy and energy to the area. It is also possible that it would have been dystopian because of the scale of it and the more obvious order that was part of the original design. As it is, the realized version feels human scale and satisfying, as if it developed organically - an effect that is not clear from the renders of the first design. Cant help but feel the pushback that Safdie overcame with this built version was for the better, all things considered. Neom shares very little with this project, other than the utopian (dystopian) dalliance. Even then I am not so sure. NEOM reads as cynical more than utopian.
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