Fun fact about Habitat 67, you can surf on the river just there. A few people live there, put their wetsuits in their condos and go surf for an hour or two, which is kind of unexpected in Montréal.
Yep. It's a standing wave pretty close from the bank right behind H67. People surf there pretty much all year round, summer[1] or winter[2], it's pretty mental seeing them come out of the river with ice picks dangling from their beards.
There's a standing wave in a creek in Munichs central park. It's not an uncommon sight to see people in wetsuit and with a board crossing the central square. Freaks out non-locals every time.
I just thought it'd be a good idea to give a warning as having some unexpected music blast in your ears when you're just there to see a guy surfing a winter wave looks like might annoy some.
It's a really nice wave, I've surfed it in a kayak. The water is quite clear (at least when I was there) so as I was surfing, I had a pretty clear view of the underwater ledge that forms the wave.
There's an even better wave upstream near the Lachine neighborhood.
He probably means Big Joe and Pyramid, not many surfers go there it's really dangerous and a .5km paddle just to get to.
I was one of the OG habitat kakayers, there was no surfers back then, none. I saw maybe 1-2 kayakers a month, usually the guys from the old riot factory, no one knew about it. I found it only because my friend happened to live at habitat.
To be honest once people found out about it and the surf school started it was ruined, I never go anymore, Big Joe is still empty though most of the time, you have to be nuts to bring a suft board way out there, I think in 5 years I saw maybe 3 surfers out there and 2 arrived by jet ski.
Awesome to hear, it's not too bad in a kayak although really big waves. I've been there quite a few times even though I live in the UK, it is well worth the trip to combine Ottawa and Lachine/Montreal partying.
First time out I followed a Riot paddler who was keen to take me out as the rest of my crew didn't want to go. There was a massive thunderstorm and I noticed that everyone else had gone so I paddled back alone, riding the lightening.
I'm not the one who went on the front page of la presse and in the national news, nor was I part of any of the drama that followed. It was a cool spot and then I moved on to other places, my friend also moved out of habitat so I had no place to park my car lol.
The island Habitat 67 is built on was constructed from the rubble excavated from the Metro then dumped in the St. Lawrence River. Current environmental policy would not permit this sort of development.
The hope of Habitat 67 was mostly the construction of the building itself. The island where it is built is mostly incidental, and the vast majority of it is unrelated.
I still think it's a gorgeous building. With more than a half-century's improvement in materials and process, I wonder how if it would turn out differently if someone were to try it again?
Assuming Canada has similar rules to Europe on energy efficiency now: It would not be such an elegant slender looking structure as there are stricter requirements for insulation which, for a structure like this, would require some major gymnastics to prevent cold-bridging through major structural elements. You would either need to insulate the whole structure making it all look 'fatter' and over engineered or you would need to control interfaces between outside and inside structure carefully to be sure that you are not transferring major moment loads near thermal boundaries so that you don't have huge structural elements crossing thermal boundaries. Where you can't avoid this, a typical strategy is to insulate along a beam or column until the length of steel and or concrete structure has the equivalent U-Value to the surrounding typical construction, whilst taking care to ensure that its all sealed up to prevent vapour migrating through the insulation and condensing on the cold structure thereby creating corrosion problems later.
While it absolutely is a beautiful building, much of the appeal is also down to location. We can't build every building on the water front, and the land requirements would be enormous if all apartment blocks where to have equally beautiful vistas from three side.
Something like the Barbican in London tries to provide it's own views by having a courtyard. That only works on one side of the building, and your other views depends on what London have decided to built. Habitat 67 have some of this, by having multiple terraces and an interesting shape, but mostly gets its views from being on an peninsula.
It's a pretty sad thing to think that building 'odd-looking avant-guarde, expensive and dysfunctional architecture has anything to do with building a functional future and helping to improve social conditions.
Can we look at that project and assume for a moment that anyone was actually trying to 'alleviate poverty'?
The 67 project is actually an interesting sight to see, and a worthy attempt at 'something' - just not in the context with which it was initiated.
It's more likely it was a giant expression of creative hubris, which is fine, but not with the price tag or hypocritical lamentations.
Can anyone see how all of these dramatic projects, borne of the minds of 1960's progressive thinkers, mapped into every artifact of social life may have had unsurprisingly bad consequences?
This project is straight out of Trudeau Sr. era - and there are many more - please have a look here [1] the famed Olympic Stadium, which was never finished and is effectively dysfunctional.
These projects should be giant lessons in self awareness more than anything. When we look at them in retrospect and ponder 'what were think thinking they were trying to do?', the reaction should be 'I wonder what we think we are trying to achieve now?'.
Habitat 67 is a monument to what happened when progressive idealism met the Quebec construction industry, imo.
The few examples of modern "sustainable," neighbourhoods that emerged organically were the result of a community (often illegally) adapting industrial buildings for mixed use, and then a cycle of gentrification that makes them desirable. Letting owners convert residential to mixed use also does it. The central planning route just creates subsidized luxury housing for the politically connected.
Architecture expresses economics, and Habitat 67 was an artifact of using federal largess to bribe Quebec to stay in confederation in an age of naive social engineering. When I last saw it in the 90's, the way it continued to absorb subsidies to maintain it on behalf of people who worked in publicly funded culture industries, was basically the most Canadian thing ever.
I often say that Canada is british democracy with french efficiency that only persists for lack of many natural predators this far north. Habitat 67 is kind of a monument to that absurdity.
Quebec has in some ways paid the price for lethargy, I think due to the resulting institutional inefficiency, it's clearly poor for a more advanced province.
That said - it's hard to fathom how Ontario is that much richer without the indirect stimulus offered by large scale immigration. When newcomers arrive and eventually take out mortgages at inflated prices, we basically print money for those and flush it into the economy.
At the end of the day I'm not sure there's that much difference between Quebec and Ontario.
The transfer payments equation basically dictates how much it should spend. If the province got richer it would end up in a situation where it pays more than receive from the federal government. Just imagine the constant electoral adds "instead of hiring X teachers we were forced by the feds to write a check to Newfoundland or some other money pit".
That's exactly how it has failed. One purpose was to illustrate that you could build affordable and liveable urban apartment buildings in high number and high quality.
You reporting 50 years later that you wish you could live there (I would also love to), illustrates that this didn't happen.
The area is just expensive as hell, final. Some of these cubes are horribly dated, but just the fact it's in the Old Port makes the price shoot way up.
I mean, you can say that, but, it's all mixed-use highrises around there. There are new thirty-story buildings going up all the time. I don't think there's much more that could be done policy-wise, it's just a desirable area -- and there's condos half the price ten minutes away by metro.
It's a quote (hence the ''). If you read the article you'll see it comes from https://thewalrus.ca/for-everyone-a-garden/, which (as others have said) says it 'failed' to be housing for everyone.
Not a bad thing, Montreal is literally an island and there are plenty of places with ugly moldy and unsafe *plexes wish were demolished and rebuilt like this https://goo.gl/maps/unYizR5WCsLT3QhK7 for example, if you remember how it looked before.
I wish I could remember the name of the book by Safdie that I read about 15 years ago which tells the story of the design and construction of Habitat, it's quite good from what I recall. There are several possibilities on WorldCat but I'm drawing a blank.
I found it underwhelming for the admission price. The habitats are not very large and the entire complex isn't very large either. There's just not that much to see compared to similarly priced famous exhibitions (say San Diego Zoo, NY Botanical Garden, etc.). I understand it's a little different from a traditional zoo, but I wouldn't make a stop if I were just a tourist. There are better things to see in Montreal if you have a limited amount of time.* It's just not that biologically diverse and very expensive per square meter of viewing space.
*For perspective, I go to Montreal multiple times a year for decades now, and I only went to the biodome once as an adult. If I lived there, I would probably take my kids.
It's not really a zoo per-se. It's closer to a permanent exhibition recreating major ecosystems, w/ live animals.
Gotta disagree with the pricing thing though. A quick Google search tells me San Diego zoo is about USD$60/day. NY Botanical Garden is USD$22 (~CAD$28) for the day. The Biodome is CAD$21 (~USD$16.50).
You're right about the prices. My bad. I was at these other things quite a few years ago and either remembered wrong or the prices have gone up. It is significantly cheaper today. I stand by that if you're a tourist with a limited amount of time in Montreal it's not a top 10 destination.
Oh, indeed. It's nothing incredible. Kids love it, but it's definitely small. It's still a converted velodrome, after all. Its proximity with the Botanical Garden and Planetarium are nice though, and those two I really like.
