CI - GAR

04/07/2026

C

G. Grassi

03/07/2026

A-B

Habitat 67 — 354 concrete boxes and one radical idea about how we should live 🏛️✨

Designed by Moshe Safdie as his McGill University thesis project and built for Expo 67 in Montreal, Habitat 67 remains one of the most audacious housing experiments ever realized — a building that asked a question few architects before or since have answered as boldly: what if urban density and suburban quality of life were not opposites?

The answer was 354 prefabricated concrete boxes, stacked, interlocked, and arranged in a three-dimensional puzzle that gives every unit its own private terrace — the roof of the apartment below — as well as garden space, cross-ventilation, and natural light from multiple directions. No two units share the same configuration. No resident looks directly into a neighbor's home. Each apartment, despite being part of a dense urban structure, feels as private and spatially generous as a house.

The prefabrication system was as radical as the architecture itself. Each module was cast off-site, craned into position, and post-tensioned together — a construction logic that Safdie believed could be scaled to solve housing shortages in cities worldwide. The economics never quite worked out at scale, but the spatial idea proved enduringly compelling.

More than half a century later, Habitat 67 still stands on the banks of the St. Lawrence River — now a highly sought-after address, a protected heritage site, and a building that continues to define what ambitious social housing architecture can aspire to be.

📍 Montreal, Canada

📸 Nora Vass, Gergely Vass, Denis Tremblay / Parcours riverain — Ville de Montréal

💬 Do you think Habitat 67's vision of combining urban density with suburban quality of life is still the most important unsolved challenge in contemporary housing design?

26/06/2026

D

26/06/2026

F

26/06/2026

A

A building appears to defy gravity.

The Edificio Celanese Mexicana, a masterpiece of Mexican modernism completed in 1968, is an architectural marvel that seems to challenge the laws of physics.

Designed by Ricardo Legorreta, the building is celebrated for its daring structural design, in which a massive tower appears to hover, balanced precariously atop a modest central cube.

If it wasn't constructed, you would probably call it Ai 🤩

26/06/2026

e