Habitat 67 Interiors

May 12, 2018 6:10 PM

Everybody knows the outside, but now you can see inside the apartments.
posted by MovableBookLady (17 comments total)

relevant American Chopper meme.
posted by mullacc at 6:28 PM on May 12, 2018 [13 favorites]

Ooo! A Habitat 67 post! Photos of the interiors! A chance to share my amusing (to me at least) Habitat 67 related(-ish) story!

So on one of my earlier trips to Montreal, not knowing what Habitat 67 was, I saw this bizarre cluster of stacked boxes down by the waterfront and decided to investigate. It's private property and fenced all around, but there's a path on the outside of the fence, along the river, that can be accessed from a corner of an adjacent parking lot. While parked in the parking lot to gawp at the buildings, we saw people walking along the outside of the fence... then more people... with... surfboards?! But this isn't the ocean! We went to investigate. Trees block the view until you round a corner, and see this pretty cool bit of fluid dynamics.
posted by eviemath at 7:01 PM on May 12, 2018 [22 favorites]

I’m actually a fan of habitat 67 despite not usually living the style/ethos, it fits perfectly in the expo 67 playful modernist Utopianism and the idea of giving everyone equally bright, airy spaces - it’s just places way out of the way with poor connections to the rest of the city - it was built, one thinks, more to be looked at from across the river then a place people live in and want to get to easier.
posted by The Whelk at 7:01 PM on May 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

Love these frickin things. Pretty much the only specific thing I wanted to see when I went to Montreal. Old City? That's where we stood, don't remember much beyond that. If I was ever insanely rich I'd want one for maybe my...8th domicile.

Pretty conventional on the inside!
posted by rhizome at 7:02 PM on May 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Once upon a time I worked in a place in Toronto with two full-time workmates: one had grown up living in Habitat ‘67 and the other lived in the David Croll apartments, which had been Rochdale College in the late sixties. I felt dismayed that I alone had never lived anywhere which had been iconic in 1967.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:03 PM on May 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

Brutiful!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:22 PM on May 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

I love the exterior, but the interiors (at least what's shown) are surprisingly dull, and don't really evoke the look of the exterior. I was hoping that the apartments would be filled with late-60s "futuristic" furniture, but it's a lot unattractive scroll wood.

I'm from/live in Buffalo and went to the University at Buffalo, and The Elliott Complex (a series of connected buildings, mainly dorms) is very much in the same vein, although it's made of brick, not poured concrete.


posted by jonathanhughes at 7:24 PM on May 12, 2018

I'm from/live in Buffalo and went to the University at Buffalo, and The Elliott Complex (a series of connected buildings, mainly dorms)

Legoland!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:41 PM on May 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

I remember being eight years old, going to Expo 67, my engineer dad pointing at some strange looking buildings in the distance, saying "... and that's that Habitat place." Like I should've known what he was talking about. I guess they ended up just dovetailing with everything else I took in that week. All weird pieces of the puzzle known as The Future. I think I was more impressed with the orange chairs.
posted by philip-random at 10:37 PM on May 12, 2018

Really hoping that this weird reboot of 227 is gonna work out
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:10 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

They are less stark inside than I would have guessed -- I had assumed more exposed concrete indoors as well.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:03 AM on May 13, 2018

They've had 50 years of habitation to knock off the rough edges, Dip Flash. The few pictures of the interiors at time of construction I can find show little, if any, exposed concrete inside. That stuff's tiring to live with.
posted by scruss at 6:54 AM on May 13, 2018

I toured Habitat in '67. I remember the walls inside as white and the place quite bare because it was unfinished. I remember my Mum was intrigued by the built-in-the-wall vacuum cleaning system, something she had never heard of before, and us theorizing how you would have to walk around the house reconnecting your hose to the outlet in each room as you did it.

I remember the grown-ups discussing how it was meant to be affordable but instantly became luxury homes, in part because it was built on inexpensive waste land which meant there was no walkable neighbourbood and in part because that concrete construction instantly raised the heating bills to astronomical during a Montreal winter. We all agreed that it was cool to look at, but lacked livability.

It was like the geodesic dome and the monorail. Impressive, but way too impractical to actually be useful. I mean, that geodesic dome - it would turn into a blisteringly hot green house on a deep cold sunny day in January, and then on a "warm" windy over cast day at -15 be impossible to keep warm without spending tons and tons of money on heating all that empty air space. On a small scale that's what it's like living in Canada in winter, unless you dispense with windows and sunlight.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:05 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

When I was a kid I really thought that the future would look like this.
posted by octothorpe at 7:59 AM on May 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

When I was little, we lived down the road from a dome house. It was all done in wood, with octagonal windows and a huge deck all the way around. We knew the kids who lived there, but not well enough to be invited over. I would have loved to see the inside.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:49 AM on May 13, 2018

99 percent invisible did a two-part story on the Dutch building project Bijlmer. It's strange to me that so many of these building projects (that required government permits and funding to be built!) all seemed to suffer from the same issues with public transportation and walkability.
posted by grandiloquiet at 10:18 AM on May 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this - I’d never heard of it and I found the article and pictures interesting. Then I went and looked for a picture of the exterior and it is truly astounding to me - what a gorgeous building.
posted by hilaryjade at 5:43 AM on May 15, 2018