Chapter 61
The Cold War was still set on “broil” after world’s fair officials placed the Soviet Union and the United States pavilions across from each other at Expo ’67 in Montreal, as if hoping for a rematch of the 1937 dramatic face-off at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. The strife between the superpowers seemed everlasting, but would not outlive the surviving two pivotal structures, of 90 pavilions total, that defined the expo.
If architecture is “frozen music” as Goethe said, then these were “Ode to Joy,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and maybe “Bolero,” too. None of the fair’s structures had the megaton impact of Buckminster Fuller’s and Moshe Safdie’s pavilions at Expo ’67.
With a diameter of almost 250 feet, the Americans’ twenty-story Fuller–designed geodesic dome, aka the Biosphere, dominated the expo skyline like a blue whale in an inflatable pool. In the fair’s six-month run, the Biosphere drew 5.3 million visitors curious to see Elvis Presley’s guitar, Andy Warhol’s paintings, and Raggedy Ann dolls. Meanwhile, the Soviets furnished their modernist pavilion with models of a hydroelectric power station and a thermonuclear reactor—plus dozens of furs, six tons of caviar, and 13,000 bottles of vodka. But for all their capitalist-like consumer goods, the Russians’ $15 million, thirty-five-foot-high stylized hammer and sickle celebrating their revolution’s fiftieth anniversary served as a stark reminder of tensions between the superpowers that lasted until the “evil empire” crumbled into history twenty-four years later.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
What did not crumble were two of the expo’s most defining constructions. The first was polymath Fuller’s above-mentioned Biosphere itself. Even after similar versions served at the Jeshyn International Fair in Kabul, Afghanistan, and American National Exhibition in Moscow, the latest incarnation of the dome possessed the freshness of a newly opened bottle of champagne. Almost a decade after the expo shut its doors, a fire in 1976 scorched off the domes’ acrylic skin, leaving only the skeleton of steel trusses underneath. The Biosphere lay dormant, gorgeous in its decay, until the dome was purchased by the Canadian government in 1991 and repurposed as an environmental museum in 1995, focusing on the ecosystem of the Great Lakes. Anticipating the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of Expo ’67, New York–based Studio Dror Inc. proposed building a 500-foot-diameter dome to complement Fuller’s original, with flora that would spread over an aluminum frame like a green fog.
No less iconic than Fuller’s Biosphere was the sole other pavilion to live on after the expo closed: Habitat 67. Designed by the then-up-and-coming Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, Habitat 67 was his home-run swing of a design that would reinvent the apartment building. Originating in Safdie’s 1961 thesis for his master’s degree at McGill University, it would reconnect city dwellers used to the rigid regimentation of concrete with the disheveled pleasures of nature.
The fledgling designer submitted the project to government organizers for the upcoming world’s fair in Montreal. Radical and far-sweeping, its design could best be described as a honeycomb built by bees familiar with Legos. Its look ricocheted off Metabolism, a post-war Japanese architectural trend in which buildings were designed connected to each other like human cells or insect colonies.
The original plan projected 1,000 housing units as well as a school and shops, but the administrative overseers whittled some of the ambitiousness down to save money. All the same, the government accepted Safdie’s proposal eagerly in an era that believed you could literally build utopia. Habitat 67, people understood, would let urban inhabitants get, as Joni Mitchell phrased it in dulcet tones, “back to the Garden.” The finished complex comprised 354 identical and prefabricated 600-square-foot modules, aka boxes, divided up into 158 residential units, connected by high-tension rods and steel cables. Each box had access to the ballyhooed roof garden built on top of pedestrian walkways (otherwise called “skystreets”) on multiple levels which linked the homes and led to landscaped open areas.
And that was when the snakes slithered into this modular Eden.
Habitat construction ended up running about $15 million, nearly twice as much as expected—more than $110 million in today’s dollars. With a mountain of money as tall as the Biosphere sunk into Habitat 67, the government agency that ran it, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., determined it was a good idea to get some of that money back by charging rents as high as $1,000, five times what it might cost for a mid-level townhouse in Montreal.
It got worse: Exposed walls made Habitat 67 apartments twice as expensive to heat as other buildings in Montreal. The elephant-skin-gray concrete cracked often, allowing water to seep in. Heavy with moisture accumulating in their fissures, the walls acted like an incubator for mold.
Millions admired Habitat 67 at the expo, but for more than a year it stood vacant of tenants. As a tryout for alternative housing it was on par with Thomas Edison’s grand experiment with concrete houses sixty years before. That is to say, an Irwin Allen–level of disaster. The ideal of affordable housing that pampered the wallet but also uplifted souls would stay in the realm of daydreams.
But things change. Eventually Canada Mortgage and Housing sold it to a private developer who flipped it to a tenants group from the complex for about a third of the units’ construction cost. Its location, Cité du Havre, a man-made peninsula, became a coveted address. “Habitat will go down in history as a flawed, but extremely important, twentieth-century exercise in housing design,” wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, the doyenne of architecture critics. It influenced the Lloyd’s building in London and Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo.
For Safdie, Expo ’67 and Habitat 67 propelled a career designing more than eighty-five projects built and yet to be built, from Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance center to Salt Lake City’s Main Library. He was director of the Urban Design Program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and his work has appeared on Canadian stamps. In 2015, the American Institute of Architects awarded Safdie its AIA Gold Medal. To some, Habitat 67 was a “failed dream,” but it remains a standing symbol of its era, no less than the Eiffel Tower in its own time, when architecture might have saved the world.