The Great Montreal Architecture Disaster
Phyllis Lambert’s first foray into architecture was upon seeing the plans for the Seagram building her father was about to build in New York and wrote a long-winded letter to him which started emphatically with:
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no”
Lambert, the patron of Montreal architecture, is largely credited with ushering the likes of Mies van der Rohe to Montreal to bring the international style to the city and hatch the iconic Westmount Square. Its choice of materials and functional architecture have a minimal framework and free-flowing spaces, allowing massive buildings to seem light and airy from ground level. Although it could be seen as an architecture replicated in many cities throughout the world, notably New York and Chicago, it elevated Montreal to a city of that rank and could have set it on a noble trajectory.
Modernity was also on show in a more utilitarian aspect, in housing projects such as Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 where his reinvention of the modern apartment building, based on a system of prefabricated concrete homes, granted inhabitants the benefits of suburban homes — namely gardens, fresh air, privacy, and multilevelled environments — with the economics and density of a modern urban apartment building.
Lambert’s opening gambit to her father echoes the feeling we get when faced with new developments in Montreal, where there is a mushrooming of mediocre buildings that happen to look all exactly the same.
The city’s heritage is forgotten, and to some extent demolished; the greystone buildings of old Montreal or the modernist architecture of the 1960s, likewise. Montreal finds itself slowly declining into resembling a Midwestern town of no particular merit; a St. Louis, Minneapolis, Cincinnati.
Hopefully this forecast is pessimistic. Montreal is celebrating its 375th year. It should use this landmark to evaluate what those 375 years brought to the city and how it should better approach the next 375.
Of course these buildings are a result of cost-cutting on the part of developers. We cannot expect them to recreate what Lambert or the World Fair did in the 1960s — or even to hire more dignified offices like Chipperfield or Herzog & De Meuron. What we can ask, however, is that developers and planners maintain a certain regard for this city and attempt to build something that further defines Montreal in North America.
Has it reached a level where politicians need to impose a moratorium on new buildings, and force developers to a higher standard through strict building codes which tend to stifle innovation? How is it possible that Westmount residents are unable to modernise their windows due to heritage preservation — while at the same time such bland monstrosities are allowed to take shape?
Finally a study on who is actually purchasing this real estate should be conducted — are they being used as financial placements by foreign absentee investors? In this case Montrealers seem to have been taken hostage by an artificially propped-up real-estate market which may, as we have seen with the sub-prime crash in 2009, end by leaving the city with much more than an eye sore.
