This extraordinary housing development comprising 158 units of from one to four bedrooms, with many small gardens and decks, was planned as a prototype for a system that would streamline the building process and cut costs. It was assembled from 354 reinforced-concrete building modules, ingeniously stacked so as to give privacy and views to each unit. Unfortunately, construction costs proved to be prohibitive. Habitat is a model community constructed along the St. Lawrence River in Montreal, composed of 354 prefabricated modules which combineto form a three-dimensional space structure. The modules, or 'boxes' as they are known, are connected in varying combinations to create 158residences ranging from 600 ft2 to 1,700 ft2.
Pedestrian streets serve as horizontal circulation throughout the entire complex.
Resources Sources on Habitat '67 Muriel Emanuel, ed. St. Martin's Press, 1980. Kenneth Frampton and Futagawa Yukio. Modern Architecture in Color. The Viking Press, 1971.