Hillside Sample Project Cinematic Unreal Engine

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.

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.