For Everyone A Garden

Daring — that was the quality that drew Habitat’s earliest residents. The complex’s radical appearance bespoke newness, verve, and progress. And yet the building turns out to be like a geode: its rough, plain crust gives no hint of the phantasmagoria you see when it’s opened up. For instance, Frank Motter’s complex is, like Safdie himself once wrote, “straight out of Playboy” — circa 1977. The living-room ceiling is coffered with hexagonal smoked glass framed by ornately carved wood. In the master bedroom, a large painting of a naked couple overlooks a rumple of sheets on the bed while, incongruously, the window opens onto a sober arrangement of concrete forms.

At Habitat, the contrast between the modernist, egalitarian exterior and the often-garish interiors is jarring. But this, according to Safdie, fits with the grand scheme of things, as he wrote after a 1986 follow-up visit: “Each resident had created his own world in his own image.”

Safdie’s own Habitat unit is a study in purity, boasting the architect’s original ideal of white-walled minimalism. From his balcony garden, you get a 360-degree view that reads like a history-in-the-round of modern Montreal. On one side, the once-expansive view of Mont-Royal is now crowded by a forest of office towers; on the other side is the graveyard of Expo, mostly razed except for America’s geodesic dome, whose skin burned off years ago, and the French pavilion, which has been transformed into a bustling casino.

The interior of Safdie’s penthouse has its own history: it was the vip unit at Expo, and later it evolved into a sort of guest house for visiting hotshots. As such, it has long served as a flagship, a symbolic reassurance for Habitonians. As one otherwise-content resident confides: “The day I hear that Safdie’s getting rid of his unit is the day I put my own on the block — because that means he knows something I don’t.”

Actually, it turns out Safdie may be getting rid of his unit after all, but not to make a profit or flee impending calamity. Studies are under way to restore his original unit to its 1967 perfection, with the aim of bringing it under the umbrella of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, though he has not commented on this publicly. But it would be a logical step for a Boston-based, globe-trotting architect, as he doesn’t spend much time there these days anyway. Maybe it’s time to move on.

Canadians have moved on, too, having long since packed up their faith in architectural determinism. On the social housing front these days, the paradigm is the transformation of Vancouver’s derelict Woodward’s building into housing “for everyone.” The affordability of Woodward’s, though, is predicated not on architectural wizardry but on dull workaday politics: tax breaks, subsidies, density bonuses, and finely calibrated ratios of robustly priced condos alongside “non-market” housing. It was designed by Henriquez Partners after a high-profile call for proposals. But it was the business savvy of developer Ian Gillespie and hyper-marketer Bob Rennie that sealed the deal. The free-market condominiums — already being flipped for profit — have effectively subsidized the low-income rental-housing units.

This is the new social housing paradigm, wherein the architect has been demoted in the public eye from visionary to a kind of amiable facilitator. As Woodward’s chief architect, Gregory Henriquez, puts it, “The program is the architecture.” Everyone knows that the downtrodden Downtown Eastside around Woodward’s will stay hospitable to lower incomes only if the government keeps pumping money and services into the neighbourhood.

But could Safdie’s paradigm find a place again in this architectural realpolitik? These days, new carbon-fibre technology could enable a new generation of Habitats on a wide scale, he says. Just as in old times, though, it’s way too expensive to make it worthwhile. But someday — who knows? “It’s too early for judgment day,” asserts Safdie. “Habitat’s day is yet to come.”