If there were an award for cities with the most bent utility poles, Montreal would surely be a finalist.
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Originally a community settled by Irish immigrants in the 19th century to service industry along the Lachine Canal, Griffintown got its first heavy dose of ‘renewal’ in the mid-20th century by way of warehouses, parking lots and thruway elevated transportation infrastructure. This renewal was so successful that the neighbourhood became an exemplary no man’s land [...] Palais de Justice, MontrĂ©al It is one thing to look at architecture from bygone eras and wonder “What were they thinking?”. Hindsight is 20/20, and even brutalism must have been avant-garde in the beginning. It is another, slightly more discouraging thing, however, to look at projects now under construction and wonder “What are they thinking?”. This sentiment, unfortunately, is [...] Like an endangered species making a comeback from the brink of extinction, the construction crane has once again made a habitat of Montreal. While the sky literally falls on the city’s crumbling transportation infrastructure, its building stock is being renewed by all manners of new condos, office complexes, hotels and even a new mega-hospital or [...] The Sud-Ouest borough in MontrĂ©al is a typical neighbourhood in transition, with condominium living steadily infiltrating a working class landscape built on the back of industry. Of course, this being Montreal and this being 2011, the presence of industry is relegated to rust and relics- the Lachine Canal, the birthplace of Canadian industry, is now [...]
A few months ago, I purchased a Turkish language learning programme to, not surprisingly, learn some Turkish. Living with a wonderful Turkish woman who is soon to be my wife, it was high time to get a better grasp of what exactly she was saying about me to her [...] Somewhere under Istanbul, I’m told there are hills. I can believe that, although they are hard to discern from the heaving, pulsating city that has been constructed on top of them. The city’s rolling neighbourhoods seems to owe less to geology and more to heaps of apartment buildings that look at first glance [...] In the annals of regrettable architecture, Hydro-Quebec’s Montreal headquarters must certainly be reserved a place of honour. Completed in 1962 to house Quebec’s government-owned electric utility, its wide-bodied ode to statism dominates the eastern edge of downtown and looms over the city’s small but lively Chinatown. The building’s bland appearance, however, belies the reality that [...] Coming of age in 1990s Montreal, the concept of dynamic urban change was not exactly ingrained in my experience of the city. Despite a mini-boom of office tower construction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the urban fabric of the city was, for the most part, one of decline. Despite its historical [...] |
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