David Hartt’s film in the forest revisits Habitat Puerto Rico, an unfinished project conceived by Moshe Safdie in 1968. Launched just one year after Safdie completed Habitat ‘67, Habitat Puerto Rico was one of several iterations of that visionary project that the architect developed for New York, Israel, and Singapore, among other cities. Nearly fifty years after Habitat Puerto Rico was launched, in the forest returns to its sites, as well as a number of remote locations around the island where modules have been abandoned or repurposed. Investigating the relationship between ideology, architecture, and the environment, Hartt’s meditative film captures the remains of Safdie’s project and offers a pensive study of this unrealized architectural experiment, recontextualized within the political and economic struggles of contemporary Puerto Rico.
