Habitat'67 is an experimental housing estate in Montreal: its "cells" - cubes are collected in three "pyramids". Each residential module is a full-fledged villa, and together they form a kind of city. It was the diploma and, at the same time, the most famous work of Safdie (and it remains so to this day). In the Golden Dream Bay complex in Qinhuangdao, a resort 300 km east of Beijing, the idea of Habitat `67 is taken as a basis, however, the Montreal building has been enlarged almost 15 times. 2,400 residential cells form four “megastructures” of stacked pyramids, prisms and volumes with more complex geometry, inside which openings appear 20 stories high.
The project emerged in preparation for last year's retrospective of Safdie's work at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The curator of the exhibition, Donald Albrecht, suggested that it end with an "examination" of the most famous of the projects - Habitat `67, and Safdie asked the architects from his Boston bureau to evaluate Habitat from the perspective of today: how to make the project more accessible," green "and better adapted to the present urban conditions, including increased building density? The team led by Lorenzo Mattia created five updated versions of the Habitat for the museum: among them, for example, the "Wavy Membrane Habitat" - a huge building that billows like a curtain, and "Urban Habitat with" windows ", in which" cells "frame large rectangular openings in the body of the building.
Around the same time, Safdie says, he was approached by one of China's largest developers, Kerry Properties, interested in new ideas for home design. The architect was invited to participate in a closed competition for a project in Qinhuangdao: "Usually we are suspicious of developer-sponsored competitions," Safdie notes, "but they were very passionate about experimenting, so we took a chance." As a basis, the architects took the most "real" of the Habitat `67 options of the future - with" windows ", and adapted it to the section of the coastline chosen by the developer. The result is a gigantic complex with a total area of more than 186 thousand m2, consisting of residential modules with an average of 95 m2 each.
Montreal's Habitat had 158 "cells" - the Chinese has 15 times that: the change in scale meant that architects had to sacrifice some of the original design's virtues. So, only 45% of apartments will have roof gardens or full balconies. Some modules do not have any open area of their own, but absolutely everyone will be able to enjoy views of the numerous gardens and swimming pools that "climb" on the flat roofs of the "cells" along the entire height of the building. In addition, the arrangement of the modules takes into account the strict Chinese solar regulations, which require each apartment to receive at least three hours of direct sunlight, even in winter.
Golden Dream Bay's mega-structures are somewhat reminiscent of the Marina Bay Sands hotel complex with a large rooftop park that Safdie built in Singapore. Certain analogies also arise with Stephen Hall's Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing and the Atlantis residential complex in Miami by the Architectonics Bureau, which in the 1980s impressed everyone with a five-story "window" in the center. But in Qinhuangdao, crowded with conventional apartment buildings, Golden Dream Bay certainly has no rival. Komlpeks are planned to be commissioned in 2014. As noted by Safdi, "the developer is already driving the piles while we are still finishing designing."
