I'm relying on a failing memory here ... Anyway, once upon a time I looked into Safdie and Habitat quite a lot. Some random things I think I remember:

* He was amazingly young at the time of Expo '67 -- architects rarely get something as ambitious as Habitat made when that young.

* It was meant to be a vision that could be replicated at reasonable cost all over the world. It went wildly overbudget. I'm pretty sure a few more Habitats were built -- they were expensive too. Safdie got discouraged (I believe he even took some of the blame on himself), and moved on to have a large practice in Israel.

(An aside: the ideal of a manufactured prefab -- in approved modernist style, natch -- has been a dream of modernism for decades and decades. They just love the notion. If you follow the architecture press, there it is, every other year: some brilliant new scheme for a boxy prefab that's going to solve all our problems. Hard to explain the hold this dream has on the architecture-school crowd. Hard to explain how little respect they hold the mobile-home business in too, isn't it? I mean ... Prefabs for the masses, no?)

* To many people's surprise, Habitat '67 became quite desirable and even chichi an address. The spare cube-i-ness, the semi-random placing, the location out on an island ... A certain kind of person evidently likes the packagae. As modernism goes, it does strike me as more humane than most, but it's not like I've lived there. And though it does look like, as Charlton said, something dumped off the back of a truck.

Trying to remember here if I actually visited Habitat, or saw a film about it, or only read some really vivid books ... Lordy, what time and age do to a memory.

Anyway, Safdie's rep was as one of the men who wanted to humanize modernism. Then he got into doing modernism in Israel much influenced by "Jewish" forms. Then he started getting a lot of commissions back in North America. My old nearby home-city of Rochester NY seems to have commissioned him to do an ambitious attempt at downtown revival.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on October 8, 2008 12:17 AM

Looks pretty cool as modernist places go. I remember these seeming pretty Jetsons when I was a kid.

Having lived in a few modernist places myself, I would say the devil is in the details. They are invariably kind of drab/deppo on the outside - even these Safdi units, which have an awesome location, cool asymmetry and nice gardens, have a kind of brutal cookie-cutter grayness that doesn't say "home".

Buildings from the mid-sixties and earlier - at least where I live, which is Stockholm - often have good ceiling heights; nicely proportioned, well built doors and windows; and well designed interiors with beautiful details.

Modernist places don't welcome you from outside the way a nice Georgian does; their industrial, squared-off lines say "fuck off". But many of the ones we have lived in have felt cozy and even luxurious inside - a hidden oasis disguised as a bunker. Maybe keeping a low profile seemed like a good idea in the early to mid twentieth century, with great wars following on each other and socialist ideology gaining legitimacy.

Posted by: robert61 on October 8, 2008 3:53 AM

Tatyana: I have been asking similar questions of Montrealeans (ers?)

It's Montrealites, Torontassians and Ottawoons. We sound like Belgian aliens on Star Trek.

Ahem. "..ers", actually.

Habitat is apparently very livable, with a nice kind of porch/veranda/commons effect caused by the way the interlocking units create shared spaces. All this while preserving privacy quite nicely. The gardens are nice too. From what I've seen of Habitat, its resemblance to Middle Eastern old quarters is deliberate. And the views are internally oriented: you look out into this nicely unpredictable organic-feeling soukish kinda neighbourhood.

As for arcosanti, a friend visited Arizona recently, and spent time there. He said it was an eerie experience. The place was a shell of its former self, not very busy, almost uninhabitated, with the buildings rain-streaked and ugly. His time there was marred, however, by unusually wet, overcast weather for Arizona. But he did say the place had a "depressing vibe, almost like a high-tech ghost town".

Posted by: PatrickH on October 8, 2008 9:02 AM

So acrosanti was not cool (or rather was, in literate sense), huh?
I'm glad I didn't find a traveling companion in April, then.
I was planning a visit, but my boss (whose wife went there for a month 15 yrs ago) discouraged me - he said he doesn't approve of the notion of paying for the priviledge of working for someone - and on top of that, to live in a sort of monastic hippie quarters? Funny side: he's always foaming at the mouth about severance packages for Wall St guys...

Posted by: Tatyana on October 8, 2008 10:11 AM

I recall a comedy show in my youth (almost 30 years ago), that had a skit where they showed the Habitat 67 complex from the outside, and a voice over said something like: "I wonder what types of people live in apartments that look like this?" And then they showed the inside of an apartment, and then showed a family with "square" heads!

Posted by: Wade Nichols on October 8, 2008 10:07 PM

Tel Aviv has a lot of buildings that are as strange as Habitat 67. They're just not even as noticeable in that strange city.

Posted by: Omri on October 8, 2008 10:22 PM

Oh, I forgot to respond to the mention of Arcosanti.

The Wife and I made the pilgramage maybe 15 years ago, on a trip when we also hit Taliesen West and that Biodome place, what was it called? Anyway, Arcosanti ... For a place that's as cultishly legendary as it is it's really nothing -- PatrickH's "high-tech ghost town" is pretty nice, though it wasn't very high-tech, really. It was more like a half-built-then-abandoned, smallish progressive school from 1970, with maybe a few more swoops and oddnesses than most.

A few hippies here and there, puttering away ineffectually ... Vague memories of grand visions fluttering about in the air ... That whole annoying thing '60s people were keen on of reinventing the wheel all over again ...

I guess it's kinda cool someone went to the all the trouble to draw up a few plans and pour a little cement. But the size of the dream so massively exceeds what has been realized in fact that it is all a little depressing, like the day after an acid trip. (I say all this as someone who likes a lot of zany architecture, btw.)

All that said, Paolo Soleri strikes me as a very talented designer -- the ceramic bells that the place sells to raise a little cash are awfully nice.

Here's the Arocanti website, which makes the place look a lot more substantial than it is.

http://www.arcosanti.org/

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on October 9, 2008 12:24 AM






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