Phase 2 of Habitat Qinhuangdao in China
Safdie Architects Completes Its Largest Habitat
Safdie Architects and Kerry Properties have announced the completion of the second phase of Habitat Qinhuangdao, a complex on the coast of the Bohai Sea, 200 miles (320 km) east of Beijing, China, that consists of 1,800 residences spread across 40 acres (16 hectares).
Moshe Safdie's trajectory has been atypical compared to most architects. Instead of starting with interiors, houses, and other small projects and eventually moving to large-scale projects, Safdie's first building — based as it was on his thesis as a 22-year-old undergrad at McGill University — was Habitat 67, a complex of more than 150 apartments contained within mountainous stacks of 354 prefabricated concrete modules. His first scheme, with 1,200 units, was even more ambitious, and the popularity of Habitat 67 allowed Safdie to explore equally large variations of his Habitat system for Israel, Puerto Rico, and even Manhattan. These schemes remained unbuilt, but Safdie revisited the Habitat principles this century and subsequently applied them to projects in China, Singapore, and other parts of East Asia undergoing building booms and receptive to the ideas at the core of Habitat: human scale, scalability of construction, abundant natural light and ventilation, and the provision of outdoor spaces for each resident (the last is often summed up in Safdie's much-repeated statement, also the title of his 1974 book, “For Everyone a Garden”).
The first phase of Habitat Qinhuangdao opened in 2016, but just before that milestone made news, World-Architects got a peek at what Safdie Architects and Kerry Properties had envisioned for the whole development. A model of the scheme in the traveling exhibition Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie showed roughly twenty-story rectilinear and triangular blocks stacked three-high, their terraces and atria oriented south and east, toward the beach. Photos on the wall revealed the refinements of the design and the fact it was more than just visionary: China was helping Safdie make good on his Habitat ambitions from a half-century earlier. Now, with the completion of the second phase of Habitat Qinhuangdao, the development has more than doubled its 2016 size. Although the now 16-story blocks are stacked just two high, the scale is still huge and the terraced forms stand out among the typical residential slabs and towers that surround the development.
“The demand for quality multi-family housing in China’s growing cities has allowed us to apply the principles that informed Habitat ’67 at a greater density. By breaking down the mega- scale, Habitat Qinhuangdao is a model for high- density housing where the amenities surpass that of the typical high-rise complex without sacrificing the structure’s efficiency or humanity.”
Linking the residential blocks are an element that is used in many of Safdie Architects' new Habitats, and has found more success in East Asian than European and North American contexts: skybridges, found at the 18th and 33rd floors. The lower skybridges are visible as trusses that allow the upper residential blocks to straddle the lower blocks, in turn forming large “urban windows” that mean the overall development is porous toward the beach, rather than a massive boundary between land and water. Within and atop the skybridges are pools, gardens, and other community spaces, while parks for the residents sit between the blocks at ground level. Thanks to the cascading form of the blocks, the parks — like every residential unit within the blocks — receive plenty of sunlight.
