Oren Safdie

My father’s prefabricated housing project, Habitat ’67, broke ground in April of 1965. The building, which grew out of his bachelor’s thesis, came to be regarded as one of the touchstone buildings of Montreal’s Expo ’67. There are many twists and turns in the story of how the building came to be, but, simply stated, it was born at the fortuitous juncture of social and political change, Canada’s coming-of-age as a progressive country, and a young architect’s naive determination to realize his vision.