Habitat 67, Montreal

Moshe Safdie, 1967. Built for Expo 67 on a pier in the St. Lawrence River, Habitat stacks 354 precast concrete boxes into a hill of homes, offset so that almost every apartment gets a garden on the roof of the one below. Safdie developed it from his university thesis and was in his twenties when it was built. This 2019 ground-level view shows how the cantilevered boxes and open gaps let light and trees through the mass. The dream of cheap factory-made housing never took off, but the complex is now a sought-after address and a fixture of every brutalism tour.