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Innovation in Learning

A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

Apartments
Lesson code: LM9E-A5S9-Z8NX ADVANCED

1 Key vocabulary
Match the words to their correct definitions.

1. a high-rise building a. a building that is culturally important

2. a suburb b. a building where there are mainly shops
3. a heritage building c. a level of a building
4. a retail building d. a path for people to walk on, usually by the sea
5. a promenade e. a regulation made by a local authority
6. congestion f. a very tall building
7. a storey g. an area outside the city centre, where there are typically middle
class people living in houses
8. housing h. buildings for people to live in
9. a bylaw i. the state of being full or blocked, especially with traffic

2 Before you watch

You are going to watch a talk about housing. Before you watch, discuss the questions below.

1. What kind of people typically live in high-rise buildings?

2. What kind of people typically live in the suburbs in your hometown or country?
3. What are the benefits and drawbacks of living in the suburbs compared with living in an apartment
block?
4. Do you think it's possible to build apartment buildings to be more `suburban'? How?

Now watch Moshe Safdie, an architect, talk about how his projects are designed to bring the benefits
of suburban life to the apartment building. Compare your ideas to his projects.

You can review this worksheet online at www.linguahouse.com/ex 1/3

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Review your flashcards at least 3-5 times a week for 20 minutes to keep the material fresh in your memory.
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 lingua house
TM
Apartments
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

3 Checking understanding
What do you remember? Choose the best answer for each question.

1. Where did the idea of Moshe's original Habitat project come from?
a. His trip to China.
b. His observations of major American cities.
c. His visit to a heritage building.

2. What happened to his original Habitat project?

a. It failed to become popular.
b. It became very popular.
c. It became very affordable.

3. How has China changed since his first visit?

a. There are more people.
b. There is more pollution.
c. There are more high-rise buildings.

4. How would he change Manhattan?

a. He would separate office buildings from residential areas.
b. He would have apartments rising above the offices.
c. He would have more parks.

5. What is the most important quality of his Manhattan project concept?

a. its openness b. its community c. its swimming pool

6. What is the main feature of his Singapore project?

a. its public gardens and open space
b. its height
c. its community and lifestyle

4 Collocations
Match the words on the left with the words on the right to form phrases from the talk.

1. community a. density
2. high b. housing
3. middle-income c. park
4. a sky d. space
5. intense e. urban life

Make some sentences about Moshe's projects using these phrases.

You can review this worksheet online at www.linguahouse.com/ex 2/3

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Review your flashcards at least 3-5 times a week for 20 minutes to keep the material fresh in your memory.
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 lingua house
TM
Apartments
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

5 Talking point
Discuss any of the questions below.

1. What do you think of Moshe's concepts?

2. Would you like to live in his Habitat building?
3. Why do you think his original project didn't take off?

You can review this worksheet online at www.linguahouse.com/ex 3/3

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Review your flashcards at least 3-5 times a week for 20 minutes to keep the material fresh in your memory.
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 lingua house
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Apartments - Transcripts
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

2- Before you watch

When, in 1960, still a student, I got a traveling fellowship to study housing in North America. We
traveled the country. We saw public housing high-rise buildings in all major cities: New York,
Philadelphia. Those who have no choice lived there. And then we traveled from suburb to suburb,
and I came back thinking, we've got to reinvent the apartment building. There has to be another
way of doing this. We can't sustain suburbs, so let's design a building which gives the qualities of
a house to each unit.

00:51 Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors. We
prefabricated it so we would achieve economy, and there it is almost 50 years later. It's a very
desirable place to live in. It's now a heritage building, but it did not proliferate.

01:18 In 1973, I made my first trip to China. It was the Cultural Revolution. We traveled the country, met
with architects and planners. This is Beijing then, not a single high rise building in Beijing or
Shanghai. Shenzhen didn't even exist as a city. There were hardly any cars. Thirty years later, this
is Beijing today. This is Hong Kong. If you're wealthy, you live there, if you're poor, you live there,
but high density it is, and it's not just Asia. So Paulo, you can travel in a helicopter 45 minutes
seeing those high-rise buildings consume the 19th-century low-rise environment. And with it,
comes congestion, and we lose mobility, and so on and so forth.

02:17 So a few years ago, we decided to go back and rethink Habitat. Could we make it more affordable?
Could we actually achieve this quality of life in the densities that are prevailing today? And we
realized, it's basically about light, it's about sun, it's about nature, it's about fractalization. Can we
open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior?

02:46 We came up with a number of models: economy models, cheaper to build and more compact;
membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens.
And then we decided to take New York as a test case, and we looked at Lower Manhattan. And we
mapped all the building area in Manhattan. On the left is Manhattan today: blue for housing, red for
office buildings, retail. On the right, we reconfigured it: the office buildings form the base, and then
rising 75 stories above, are apartments. There's a street in the air on the 25th level, a community
street. It's permeable. There are gardens and open spaces for the community, almost every unit
with its own private garden, and community space all around. And most important, permeable,
open. It does not form a wall or an obstruction in the city, and light permeates everywhere.

03:51 And in the last two or three years, we've actually been, for the first time, realizing the quality of life
of Habitat in real-life projects across Asia. This in Qinhuangdao in China: middle-income housing,
where there is a bylaw that every apartment must receive three hours of sunlight. That's measured
in the winter solstice. And under construction in Singapore, again middle-income housing,
gardens, community streets and parks and so on and so forth. And Colombo.

04:30 And I want to touch on one more issue, which is the design of the public realm. A hundred years
after we've begun building with tall buildings, we are yet to understand how the tall high-rise
building becomes a building block in making a city, in creating the public realm. In Singapore, we
had an opportunity: 10 million square feet, extremely high density. Taking the concept of outdoor
and indoor, promenades and parks integrated with intense urban life. So they are outdoor spaces
and indoor spaces, and you move from one to the other, and there is contact with nature, and most
relevantly, at every level of the structure, public gardens and open space: on the roof of the podium,
climbing up the towers, and finally on the roof, the sky park, two and a half acres, jogging paths,
restaurants, and the world's longest swimming pool. And that's all I can tell you in five minutes.

You can review this worksheet online at www.linguahouse.com/ex i

photocopiablebw.pdf
Review your flashcards at least 3-5 times a week for 20 minutes to keep the material fresh in your memory.
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Linguahouse.com
 lingua house
TM
Apartments - Key
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

1- Key vocabulary

Students can work individually and check in pairs.

1. f 2. g 3. a 4. b 5. d 6. i 7. c 8. h 9. e

2- Before you watch

In a class, students discuss the questions in pairs or groups. Alternatively, elicit ideas from the class, especially
for question 4. You could write up their propositions on the board and, after watching the video, see whose ideas
were most similar to the speaker's. For more background information, go to Wikipedia and look up `Habitat 67'.

3- Checking understanding

1. b 2. a 3. c 4. b 5. a 6. a

4- Collocations

1. d 2. a 3. b 4. c 5. e

Possible sentences:
There is lots of community space around the housing units.
The architect attempted to create a natural housing environment in a high density area.
Habitat is a middle-income housing project.
The Singapore project includes a sky park.
He created an environment for intense urban life.

You can review this worksheet online at www.linguahouse.com/ex i

photocopiablebw.pdf
Review your flashcards at least 3-5 times a week for 20 minutes to keep the material fresh in your memory.
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Linguahouse.com