Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie is a pioneer of prefabricated modular construction. As early as 1960, his final thesis at McGuill University in Montreal, Canada, entitled A Case for City Living, was about “a three-dimensional modular building system”. When his thesis supervisor, Sandy van Ginkel, invited him to participate in the Expo 67 world’s fair to be held in Montreal in 1967, he put his thesis into practice. Thus Habitat 67 was born, a residential building built according to the prefabricated modular method of mass production. Now, with the same principles applied by the same architect, Habitat Qinhuangdao, a large-scale residential development, is born.
Habitat Qinhuangdao is located on the northeast coast of China, almost 300 km east of Beijing, in the city-prefecture of Qinhuangdao, a major port and popular tourist and holiday destination for its long beaches in China. But Safdie Architects corroborates what we were saying about the relationship between Habitat 67 and the project we have chosen to tell you about: “Habitat Qinhuangdao retakes this vision”, we read in the presentation of the large development. This refers to the concept of a modular system of stacked housing, with gardens and outdoor communal spaces, which was unheard of in urban developments at the time Habitat 67 was built. However, the extension of this new project, of Habitat Qinhuangdao, is adapted to “the needs and scales of the 21st century”.
Indeed, if Habitat 67 was 10 storeys high – the 22 planned were cut to 10 for budgetary reasons, among others – and had 158 dwellings of different surface areas, Habitat Qinhuangdao “consists of individual 15-storey slab buildings that connect and stack vertically in two tiers for a total height of 30 storeys” and 1,800 residential units. And these individual buildings are linked by landscaped bridges, “also inhabited with special apartment unit designs”.
On the other hand, the north-south orientation of the towers and their stepped contour give the residential development a decidedly democratic character, as the distribution of space is intended to be somewhat equitable. Accordingly – and not so much as an a priori formal objective – the buildings rise in a pyramidal profile, so that all the dwellings enjoy access to services at the connecting bridges and landscaped roof levels, and a large percentage of them have direct access to sun terraces with sea views. In this regard, Safdie Architects specifies that Habitat Qinhuangdao responds to the local ordinance that requires each unit to receive abundant daily sunlight – measured at the lowest point of the winter solstice.
Sources: Safdie Architects, Safdie Architects Habitat 67, Wikiarquitectura.
Images: Safdie Architects.
