Watch a beautifully animated tour of the Hillside Sample Project, a virtual recreation of Moshe Safdie’s original vision for Montreal’s Habitat 67, created with Unreal Engine 5 and RealityCapture.
By diving into one of the most important buildings of the 60s, Neoscape helps viewers explore some of the key architectural principles that make Hillside so compelling, from Safdie’s use of prefabrication to modular design. It also demonstrates how the design changes in relation to different weather, seasonal, and time-of-day shifts, reminding viewers how much of an impact an environment plays on a building/structure.
Explore the Sample Project in Unreal Engine today: https://unrealengine.com/hillside
About Habitat 67:
Habitat 67 is a model community and housing complex in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, designed by Israeli-Canadian architect, Moshe Safdie. It is one of the most recognizable projects in modular urbanization and construction, partially because its vision for affordable future living was considered very ahead of its time. It is still a key landmark in Canadian architecture and is well-known throughout North America.
Habitat 67 was originally conceived as Safdie’s master’s thesis at the School of Architecture at McGill University and then built as a pavilion for Expo 67, a World’s Fair, which was held from April to October 1967.
As one of the major symbols of Expo 67, Habitat 67 gained worldwide acclaim as a “fantastic experiment” and “architectural wonder” and was seen by millions of visitors (over 50 million attended the exhibit).
Habitat 67 was designed to integrate the benefits of suburban homes—namely gardens, fresh air, privacy, and multi-level environments—with the access, community, density, and economics of a modern urban apartment building. It illustrated a new potential for urban living at a time when many households were leaving the city and sprawling, low-density development was on the rise.
Sadly, scope and funding never aligned, making the realization of the full project vision an unfinished dream. The existing structure was originally meant to only be the first phase of a much larger complex, but the total estimated cost of $42 million prevented that possibility. Instead of a community of 1,200 families rising 30 stories, the Habitat 67 that stands today was scaled back to 158 residences and less than half of the original height.
However, thanks to Unreal Engine, Safdie’s original vision can be explored in all its (virtual) glory, providing the next generation of architects, engineers, and urban planners an interactive reference point for creating a better tomorrow.
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