I was living in Canada having emigrated there with my parents from Israel in 1953 when I decided to study architecture. I went to McGill University and in 1961 I graduated with a degree, a bachelor degree. And in my fifth year of six there was a scholarship offered to one student from every school of architecture in Canada to study housing across the continent. And I won it and joined five other students. We travelled through the continent and out of it came the proposal for my thesis which was a housing system, urban housing system, which I submitted in 1961. I worked briefly for Sandy Van Ginkel who had been my thesis advisor. My thesis was very well received, published in the Dutch magazine Forum. Aldo van Eyck embraced it. And from Van Ginkel I went in '62 to Philadelphia to work for Louis Kahn. I worked on the Mikveh Israel Synagogue and I worked on the Indian Institute of Management. And in 1963 Van Ginkel came to Philadelphia and recruited me to return to Montreal to work on the master plan for the World's Fair Expo 67. One of my conditions, if I was cheeky enough to put it forward, was that I would have the, I would have permission to develop my thesis further and propose it as one of the theme exhibits for the World's Fair. When I returned I worked for the first few months intensely on the master plan and as that was taking shape I used a grant that the World's Fair had from the cement companies to do the engineering work and preliminary work on the idea of Habitat. To cut a long story short, well summarised I think in my book Beyond Habitat, we developed the idea, we priced it, we engineered it and eventually the Cabinet of Canada approved it as a principal exhibit of the World's Fair. And that's how I began my practice.

The concept was that you do houses rather than apartments and you stack them so that they form, each forms a garden for the unit above it. And you serve them by a network of open streets rather than corridors, that the units are open in three directions, that they're prefabricated as three-dimensional modules and pre-finished in the factory on the ground so you have very little work in the air. And therefore it would be more efficient to build and extremely more liveable in terms of the amenities it offered. It's more private, it's more soundproof, it's open, it has more views, it's got a garden outdoor open to the sky. You can grow trees and vegetables and so on and so forth.