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Exploring the space in Montreal.

Capi Corrales Rodrigáñez

For Natalie Amaral, Marcie Babineau, Arlene Baldwin, Phillip Barker, Carolina Echeverría, Murray Gold, Richard Gold, Andrew Granville, Helen Kersley, Alejandra Kersley Gold, Hershy

and Elena Kisilevsky, Elizabeth Montesinos, Susan Nerberg, Alejandro Palavecino, Don Redekop, Araceli Reyes, Jim Ruxton, Francisco, Veronice and Patricia Thaine and Marie

Torres.

January 2009

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Step 1: In search of a good map of the city.

The fact that it was mathematics that brought me to Montréal last October, does

not change the fact that on its streets I was just a tourist. In my way there, I

stopped for a few days in Toronto, where Helen, who shares with her beloved Kant

a very practical sense of reality, provided me with a pair of good city boots, a warm

coat, lovely fur-lined slippers and a complete Fodor’s citypack (including a pocket

guide, a full size color map and a subway-net plan). My god-daughter Alejandra

completed her mother’s kit with a set of bath-tub balls. Thus equipped, I started

my explorations of the city.

I decided to set my base camp at Première Moison, the bakery-café on Sherbrooke

St. and Mackay St., in the heart of the city and half way between the mathematics

departments of Concordia and McGill, where Andrew took me for coffee in January

2008, during my first morning in Montréal ever. I chose a quiet table by the wall

and opened my map. In my experience, Canadian people are very civilized citizens

of the world, quite happy to abide reasonable rules of convention that make life

easier for everyone. Thus, I was not prepared for what I saw: Montrealers pretend

the North-West to be the North and the South-East to be the South; consequently,

the North-East becomes East and the South-West, West. After the initial suprise, I

studied the map carefully, and I concluded that Montrealers’ choice of directions

may not follow conventions, but it certainly follows reason.

The city developed around the place where Canal Lachine and the St. Lawrence

River meet today, and it occupies a horizontal strip of land along the water, with

Mount Royal —inland— and the Old Port of Montreal —by the shore— marking its

central vertical axis. Three main streets run parallel to the water. Sherbooke at the

feet of Mount Royal, Saint Catherine in the center, and René Lebesque closer to the

shore. Looked at it that way, nothing could be more comfortable, orientation-wise,

that pretending that the mountain marks the North and the water the South,

because, wherever you are in this strip, you can always see either the mountain or

the water, if not both. Thus, once one joins in this “let´s pretend the North-East is

North”, one never gets lost. A city that chooses reason and conmfort above

convention! Cool! I was ready to explore it! I took the city-guide in the Fodor´s

pack and opened it in the history section, Montreal then. I started reading.

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1535 French explorer Jacques Cartier became the first European to set foot in the native village of Hochelaga, the site of modern-day Montrèal. He named the hill above the village Mount-Royal —this was translated to Mont-Real by Italian writer G.B Gamuso in 1556—.

Following a guide that considers that the history of place started on the first day

that a European dropped by, did not seem very attractive to me. In my way out of

the hotel, I had taken from the desk at the lobby a brochure of The Historical

Center of Montréal, the official museum of the city sponsored by the local

government. I opened it and started reading.

Montréal en cinq temps. Exposition permanent. Revivez cinq périodes intenses de l’histoire de la ville, de 1535 à aujourd’hui. Vous y croiserez des Montréalais qui on fait et qui font encore l’histoire de Montréal. À votre tour, faites votre entrée dans l’histoire montréalaise.

The permanent exhibit in the Historical Center of Montréal also takes the arrival of

the first European as the starting point of its permanent exhibit! Besides all the

social and political information about the country codified in it, this new piece of

information was telling me that it would probably be difficult, it at all possible, to

find guides of the city with a different point of view. After a little thinking, I decided

to make my own. Being a mathematician, the tools I am more familiar with are

mathematics and its history, so I would use both. Which mathematical concept

could I use to follow the evolution of a city, that would only require paying attention

to data recollected after 1535, the only one seemingly available for a tourist? The

choice was obvious: space. On the one hand, space is both a common experience

to everybody (as the painter Barnett Newmann wrote in Ohio 1949, “Space is

common property”) and a fundamental concept in mathematics since the 17th-

century. On the other, it was precisely at the time that mathematicians started to

mention explicitly the word space, that mathematics —due to the Sientific

Revolution which followed the success of Newton and his contemporary

mathematicians in describing the laws of Nature— started playing its fundamental

role in the forging of our western cultural intuitions, spatial ones included.

Consequently, the way in which mathematicians have thought space along the last

four centuries, can be easily traced in most other disciplines of our cultures.

Folowing the evolution of the mathematical concept of “space” in the streets of

Montréal from 1535 to, say, 1967, when, in Expo 67, the city opened its doors to

the rest of the world, would be a way to explore the city as rigurous as any other

and, certainly, more fun than many others. I wrote down my first sketch

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16th-century: Precursors to Euclidean Space (Torriccelli) 17th-century: Euclidean Space (Newton) 18th-century: Mastery of the Euclidean Box (Bernouilli, Euler) 19th-century: Challenging the Euclidean Box. Precursors to space as nets of relations (Gauss, Riemann, Cantor, Poincaré). First half 20th-century: Space as nets of relations (Hausdorff) Second half 20th-century: Mastery of space as nets of relations (Grothendieck)

Part 2: The Fine Arts Museum of Montréal

A couple of blocks East from Première Moison, on Sherbrooke, stands The Montréal

Museum of Fine Arts. Painters, like mathematicians, work with ideas. The word idea

coming from the Greek ειδοω, that means to see, look or observe, and from ειδοζ,

that means figure, form, aspect or vision. The Permanent Collection of the Musée

des Beaux Arts offers, free of charge, an excellent selection of canvases painted

precisely during the period I wanted to explore, so I decided to complete my sketch

of the evolution of the mathematical idea of space, with a small selection of

paintings in the museum that would illustrate the evolution of the corresponding

pictorical idea. Putting images next to words usually helps me clarify ideas. I went

to the fourth level of the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, and entered the section of

the Museum’s Collection 19th-century European Art and Old Masters. In the 15th-

century, space was still thought of as a limitless vacuum, with things placed in it

one after the other. This space was represented as a golden continuum, in which

people and objetcs were painted in a row without relation to each other.

1410-15 The deposition of St. Peter, Pere Lembi 1490 The Holy Kinship, Jan Polack.

Nevertheless, in this century the cubical container already starts to emerge.

15th-century Annunciation, attributed to Master of Liesborn. 1475 Madonna Adoring the Christ Child, Francesco Botticini. 1480 The adoration, Antonio Llonye.

During the second part of the seventeenth century, Newton was working on his

Enumeratio linearum tertii ordinis, composed at least by 1676 (and first published

as an appendix to Optick in 1704). Like most of those among his contemporaries

who assumed the existence of infinite space, Newton thought the Universe as a

finite world surrounded by infinite space, that is, a continuous void containing

concrete objects. In this space with the shape of an enormous shoebox and the

properties of tridimensionality, immobility, indivisibility, lack of resistance,

penetrability, homogeneity, eternality and immutability, Newton placed all possible

geometrical figures.

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"In the Enumeratio, analytic geometry in the sense of Fermat may be said to have come into its own." ([Boyer, 1956], p. 138) "With Isaac Newton (1642-1727) the history of the spatial concepts that we have described thus far comes to full fruition. Prior to Newton, the doctrine of infinite void space played little role in science proper. As the chief architect of the Scientific Revolution, however, Newton would construct his new physics and cosmology within the frame of an infinite, absolute space. Such an achievement alone would entitle Newton to a major role in the history of spatial concepts. But even if his momentous contributions had been modest or even minimal, his reflections on the nature of space would nonetheless demand our attention because they illustrate most of the major conflicts, confusions and dilemmas that had developed since the sixteenth century." ([Grant, 1981], Chpt. 8, sec. 4l) "… everywhere all kind of figures, everywhere spheres, cubes, triangles, straight lines, everywhere circular, elliptical, parabolical and all other kind of figures, and those of all shapes and sizes, even though they are not disclosed to sight." (Newton in De gravitatione, quoted in [Grant, 1981], p. 242)

By the 17th-century, an idea of space similar to Newton´s had become standard

also in the representation of space in European painting, both in outdoors and

indoors scenes.

1595 The Meat and Fish Market (Winter), Lucas van Valckenborch. 1655 Roman senators and legates, Jean Lemaire. 1658 The adoration of the sheperds, Nicolas Maes.

The mastery of the Euclidean Box achieved along the 18th-century by

mathematicians like Johann Bernouilli and Leonard Euler, is beautifully illustrated in

the work of their contemporary artists.

1760 Interior of S. Marco, Venice, Canaletto.

Along the 17th and 18th centuries, in painting, like in mathematics and physics, we

have objects on the one hand and its container space on the other. The neat

distiction between them started to disappear with the Impressionists’ challenge to

the notion of a vacuum space along the 19th-century. From 1850 on, the idea of

things existing within a container which is both cubical and empty disappears from

their canvases.

“There is nothing more opposed to Realism than Impressionism. For this, there are no things, there is no res, there are no bodies, space is not an immense cubic receptacle. The world is a surface of luminous values. The things, starting here and ending there, are melted in a marvellous crucible, and start to flow into each other's pores. " (José Ortega y Gasset, Papers on Velázquez and Goya, 1950)

1850 Women pursued by satyrs, Honoré Daumier. 1860 Display of Enchantment, Henri Fantin-Latour.

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I descended the beautiful but uncomfortable stairs (with its Gulliverian steps,

adequate only for midgets or giants) to the first level, and resumed my stroll in the

galleries of The Museum’s Collections dedicated to The Modern Tradition from

Monet to Picasso.

1897 A cliff at Pourville in the Morning, Claude Monet. 1903 Dieppe: Duquesne Basin at Low Tide, Afternoon, Camille Pisarro. 1913 L’Estaque, Raoul Duffy. 1942 Clouds above the sea IV, Lyonel Feininger.

After the work of the Impresionists and mathematicians like Cantor, Poincaré and

Hausdorff, whenever we have a given set of objects, as long as we can define a

relation between such objects we can consider them as forming a space. Different

relations will produce different spatial structures. This search of structures with

which to describe and study objects that in a first instance appear as

unmanageable, is one of the activities that characterizes the mathematics and

painting of the twentieth century. In both cases, the construction of these

structures takes place within the frame of what is called a process of abstraction: to

make a distinction between what is particular «this mountain», and what is general

«mountain».

1866 Bend in a road in Provence, Paul Cézanne.

Cézanne faces a mountain and he aims to represent that which makes us recognize

the mountain as such, whether is it covered by trees or bare. He makes abstraction

of the concrete mountain he is looking at, and he draws the external structure that

allows us to recognize the universal object «mountain». After looking at Cézanne’s

painting, I naturally looked for the Canadian Group of Seven. Contemporary to

Cézanne, these Canadian painters worked also on the construction of scaffolds and

structures, but coming from an American experience of space. The first time I saw

the mountains of Thomson or Harris at the Ontario Gallery of Art in Toronto, I

missed having one of Cezanne’s representations of Mt. Saint Victoire next by. I

would have loved to analyse how their different experience of physical space shows

in the work of these American and European masters of spatial structures at the

turn of the 20th-century. It seemed that the Museum of Fine Arts would give me

that chance. I walked along its galleries looking for the canvases of the Group of

Seven. There were none. I was puzzled. Why there were none of their paintings in

this section? They certainly worked within the modern tradition, and they certainly

lived between Monet and Picasso. I asked a lady from the Museum staff.

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She explained to me that, being Canadians, the canvases of the Group of Seven are

exhibited, together with the rest of Canadian artists, in the wing of the Museum

dedicated to Canadian art, on the opposite side of Sherbrooke St. I asked her –very

politely— if there was some one at the museum that could explain to me why, in

addition to which ever paintings were shown in the area dedicated to Canadian art,

there were no modern Canadian artists represented in the section dedicated to

modern art. She did not know, she said, as she looked at me as if I was a martian.

I was so shocked and infurated by her unfriendly glare, that I had to get out in the

street and breeze freash air. I felt that with its parroquial proposal (“here is Canada

and here is the rest of the world”) the Museum had stolen from me a moment of

intellectual pleasure, and I felt cheated.

I watched as a group of teenagers entered the Museum with their High School

teachers. How would it affect their perception of their own space in the world, this

presentation of Canadian art as unrelated to the rest of the world? These thoughts

were not making me very happy, so I crossed the street and went into the Michal

and Renata Holstein and Liliane and David M. Stewart Pavillions. To reach the

galleries of the Museum Collections dedicated to Canadian Art, located in the

second level of the building, one must walk through the new Decorative Arts Gallery

and walk up the stairs at the end of the room. I felt as if in one of those

department stores in which, no matter what you want to buy, you must first get

exposed to the shiny merchandise displayed on the stands. The canvases of the

Group Seven lifted the clouds in my mood.

1915 In the Northland, Tom Thomson 1926 Mount Temple, Lawren Stewart Harris. 1921-28 Morning, Lake Superior, Lawren S. Harris. 1920-24 Woods in Autumn, Franklin Carmichael. 1928 Cathedral Mountain, Arthur Lisner. 1929 North Shore, Lake Superior, F. Carmichael. Looking at these paintings from the distance (against the wall on the opposite side

of the room), the sight of the ample spaces of Harris and Carmichael on left and

right with the gridded space of trees by Thomson on a panel in the center, the work

of Agnes Martin (1912-2004, born in Saskatchewan) comes to mind. Her abstract

spaces seem to retain the essence of both types of Canadian spaces: amplitude and

order. A young caretaker walked by and I asked him where could I find Martin’s

canvases. “Agnes Martin? Sorry madam, but there is none of her work on display at

the Museum. Too bad, I love her pieces.” Comforted by his warm smile and

appreciation of Martin’s work, I returned to the Group of Canadian Seven.

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“A new conception of building, based on realities, has emerged; and with it has come a new conception of space.” (Walter Gropius, the new architecture and the bauhaus, MIT press 1965)

With these words described Gropius the effect of the work towards abstraction and

search for structures taking place in all disciplines at the beginning of the 20th-

century. As the early 20th-century pioneers of space explorations such as the

Group of Seven soon realized, if we want to construct spaces based on realities, we

must face a reality: our eyes are unable to focus simultaneously in the front and

back of a scene.

1912 Indian War Canoe (Albert Bay), Emily Carr

In her canvas, Carr makes a point of leaving out of focus every detail which is not

exactly in front of the eye. Her painting brings back to my mind a little one by

Matisse that I had just seen a while before in the same room as Cézanne’s painting.

I returned, hence, to the modern wing of the museum, this time through the tunnel

underneath the street.

1922 Femme assise, le dors tournée vers la fenètre ouverte, Henri Matisse.

A number of painters of the generation of Henri Matisse and Emily Carr, payed

attention in their canvases to the fact that when we look at a person’s eye and we

focus on, say, the left eye, the right eye goes out of the focus of our eyes. In order

to see it clearly, we must move our gaze, and then we will lose sight of the left one.

The only way to get a global view of a body is moving our gaze around it. On doing

so, we get several partial views, which we call local data. How to use the structures

developed by Cézanne and the Group of Seven, for example, in order to combine

in a coherent global description the different pieces of local information (the search

of a Hasse Principle, one could say), is the kind of work that many of the paintings

of Picasso illustrate.

1969 Head of a Musketeer (Cardinal Richelieu?) Pablo Picasso

In the one in front of us, the man’s right eye and beard are seen from the front, his

left eye and hair from the left, his nose and nostril from the right and his

moustache from left and right.

I decide to return to Premiére Moison and read about the Museum, my curiosity

aroused by the long and complicated names its buildings and galleries displayed.

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According to the brochure, since its coming into being in 1860 as the Art

Association of Montreal, and up to 1877, exhibits were possible thanks to the

generosity of its members —among the wealthiest families in Montreal—, that

would lend their private collections to be shown. In 1877, a rich merchant by the

name of Gibb gave the Association a plot of land, a sum of money to be used to

built a museum and a small selection of European paintings and sculptures to start

a permanent collection with. Donations kept arriving, and by 1909 the Association

decided to buy the actual site of the museum on Sherbrooke Street. The new

building was inaugurated in 1912, and a second wing, which inaugurated in 1991,

was later built across the street from the first one. In 1948, after being taken over

by young painters, the Association became the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In

the early sixties, the Museum started receiving a regular and substantial operating

subsidy from the Canadian Government, and long run planning started.

The fact that until the fifties the Association’s was essentially a collection of

collections, explains its peculiarities. The earlier collectors were the owners of most

of the factories and industries by the St. Lawrence River and of large shares of the

Canadian Transcontinental Railway. They lived mostly up North by the mountain,

next to the site were they built the museum, but the source of their wealth was

down South next to the old port. I decided to start my walks there.

Step 3. The buildings of Montréal, 1657-1945

After several explorations of the river area, sometimes by subway, bus or car, but

most times by foot under freezing weather, and often in the company of Veronice,

Elizabeth, Araceli, Susan or Alejandro, I was able to sketch a history of the city with

some of its buildings. Traces of the 17th-century pioneers can still be found in the

heart of the Vieux Montréal neighborhood. Life during that early period of discovery

and harvesting of the region’s resources, in the midst of such vast wilderness and

harsh climate, must have been very difficult, and the first European settlers tried

construct around themselves protective familiar spaces: boxes.

1657 Place Marché. The stone engraved in its wall reads:

The first public square of Montréal. 1657. La Place du Marché. Concede par les Seigneurs. 1676.

The building holding now the Museum of Archaeology, stands as a perfect physical

illustration of the Euclidean Box. Built around the time when Newton was

composing his Enumeratio, this little box stands at the center of the bigger box that

was the city then.

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1717-1744 Vestiges of the Fortifications, Champ-de-Mars, Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry

The architecture of this first period followed a French style of rural and provincial

origins, and is characterized by the use of masonry walls, firebreaks, large chimney

stacks and small-paned casement windows.

1770 Pierre du Calvet House, 401 rue Bonsecours (with Saint- Paul) 1810 Malard House, 174 rue Notre-Dame Est.

These two houses, similar to each other and at walking distance from each other

(according to my standards, very different from those of Andrew and Hershy, both

of whom consider the Atwater Market at walking distance from La Tour Belvedere),

illustrate the effect that, in the city of Montréal, had the 19th century techniques

and tools imported by the British. Both are built in the French style, but the big

stones of the first one’s walls had been substituted by cut limestone.

Despite the changes in the techniques for working the stone, the basic conception

of the space of the city remained Euclidean up to the middle of the 19th-century:

the vast wilderness was a huge container in which the city floated as a Christmas

ball unrelated to the rest of the world. As in painting and mathematics, this idea of

things —buildings, a stack of boxes— existing within a container that is both cubical

and empty —the outside wilderness— started to disappear around 1850.

By the 1840’s, the Neo-classical architecture —a European urban invention that

became the preferred style of the Scotch, the local elite for most of the 19th

century— had definitely supplanted in Montréal the French style. This shift in taste

reflected a period of major transition, during which a new conception of the city as

a center of trade for goods and information, started to substitute the old notion of

the city as a shelter.

1845 First Post Office, 218 rue Saint-Paul Ouest. 1845 Bank of Montréal, 119 rue Saint-Jacques, John Wells. 1845-52 Bonsecours Market, 300 rue Saint-Paul Ouest, William Footner.

Two constructions from the middle of the Neo-classical period marked the

beginning of this period of major transition in the space of Montréal: the second

Notre-Dame Church and the Canal Lachine. The second Notre-Dame Church (1824-

25) signaled the start of historicism in Canada. The Canal Lachine, one of the major

engineering feats of the century, opened in 1925, giving birth to Montréal’s

industrial revolution.

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As was happening in Europe, the wider circulation of books and photography

(stimulating the architecture of the past and explaining the archeological

discoveries of the day), the emergence of a merchant class that wanted to emulate

the earlier models of the aristocracy and fear of the technological innovations

brought by the industrial revolution, made historicism the dominant form of

architecture in Montréal practically until World War II. The two styles that

dominated this historicism’ foray where the Gothic Revival (employing pointed

arches for all types of openings) and the Renaissance Revival (considered by

merchants as a symbol of prosperity and an adequate way of expressing their

sympathy for the humanistic ideas of the Renaissance). My favorite buildings

illustrating these revivals, Gothic the first one, Renaissance the second one, were

both constructed in the same year.

1868 Wilson Chambers, 502 rue McGill, Richard C. Windeyer. 1868 Recollet House, 457 rue Sainte-Hélène, Cyrus P. Thomas. The Canal Lachine, one of the major engineering feats of the century, opened in

1925, giving birth to Montréal’s industrial revolution. Around 1850 the first

buildings specifically designed to meet the needs of the industry were constructed.

Silos, factories, warehouses, refineries, train tracks … . From 1850 to 1950, tones

of bricks, concrete, iron and steel were used on both sides of the Canal Lachine,

and a lovely urban landscape was created.

1859 New City Gas Company, 956 rue Ottawa, John Ostell. 1875 Macdonald Tobacco Factory

Wherever one finds factories, one also finds two other types of very different

constructions: commercial buildings (including warehouses and banks) and workers

living quarters.

1855 Urquhart Building, 434 rue Saint-Pierre, 1860 Commercial Building, 168 Saint-Paul Ouest. 1861 Warehouses and shops, 85 rue Saint-Paul Ouest, Victor Bourgeau. 1888 New York Life Building, 511 place d’Armes, Babb, Cook and Willard.

The charm of the first one, the elegance of the second one and the sobriety of the

third one, make these three ancestors of the modern movement in architecture

some of my favorite buildings in the Old Montréal, while the fourth one, an eclectic

beauty in red sandstone, was the city’s first skyscraper.

Unfortunately, I was not able to visit what its left of Montreal’s working class

neighborhoods during the 19th-century.

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When researching with Elizabeth the possibilities of such an exploration, I found out

about the existence of L’Autre Montreal, an association of architects, historians,

urban planners and social scientists that organize guided tours of the city. After

reading the description of their tours, I knew that it was through some them that I

wanted to first be exposed to the other Montréal (http://www.autremontreal.com).

Unfortunately their excursions are not offered during the cold season, so I had to

postpone my exploration for a future visit, and content my self with Elizabeth’s

beautiful stories.

She told me of how the seed for the Workers’ Unions in Montréal had been planted

by the women workers at a cotton factory. Men, women and children were forced to

work as slaves and, in order to prevent them from falling asleep, children would be

beaten and tied up to their working places. The situation grew so bad that the

women went on strike. The managers were unable to make the women go back to

work, so the police forces were called. Only when they saw them resisting despite

the attack of the mounted police, did the men finally dare join the women in their

strike. Thus were born the Workers’ Unions in Montréal.

She also told me about Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, an area where in the same street

one finds some of the richest homes in the city right acroos the street from some of

the poorest. In the first ones lived factory owners, on the second one their workers.

The owners of the factories (and of the worker’s living houses) charged the workers

with extra taxes for each window in their house, so the workers would cover them

up with bricks in order to save money, so poor they were. Apparently, this can still

be seen in the façades. The idea of factory management charging taxes to the

workers for enjoying the sun and moon rays or watching the starts from their

home, haunted me for a long time 1.

After the rapid industrialization that took place around the end of the 19th-century,

the appearance of new construction techniques allowed for even more rapid

architectural changes. It finally became acceptable in the constructions of the time,

designed in what is known as rationalistic style, to take the new structures out from

behind conventional screens (historicist camouflage, for example) and expose the

1 A few weeks later, back in Toronto, I was describing these covered windows to a group of artists and scientists friends of Jim in a bar, when one of them, Georg Muehleck, who was sitting next to me said he had seen them in the old farms of Scotland, where he had been living for a long time. At first, Georg had assumed that the windows were covered by bricks in order to avoid the cold, but then an old farmer told him how, during centuries, the landlords had been charging taxes to the peasants for the use of natural light. With time, poor Scottish peasants started covering up their windows in order to save money.

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structures of reinforced concrete or steel. The most spectacular constructions of

this period are the Silos in the Old Port, now abandoned, that form one of the most

beautiful pieces urban landscape I have ever visited.

1885 Silos A, B 1902 Silo 1 (built by the Port Authorities) 1903-58 Silo 5 1912 Silo no. 2 1913 Windsor Station Concourse, Corner of the rue de la Gauchetière and rue Peel. 1917 American Can Company Factory, 2030 boulevard Pie-IX 1922 Cold Storage Warehouse, Bassin de Marché. 1924 Silo No. 3 1967 Silo No. 4

Silos A and B, the first ones to be built in Montrèal, are two fabulous pieces

constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway which were in use until 1911. Silo No.

2 is said to have been one of the largest and most beautiful silos in the world. It

was demolished by an implosion in 1978. There are some lovely vestiges of its

Marine Tower and pier behind the Marche Bonsecours. The increasing development

of the Old Port kept requiring more grain storage facilities. Silo No. 3 was built a

little further East in 1924 and Silo No. 4, still further East, in 1967. The most

beautiful of the remaining buildings is Silo 5, built between 1903 and 1958 in

several stages. It is about a third of a kilometer long, over twenty storey high and

it can hold enough wheat to make two hundred and thirty million loaves of bread.

The oldest part of the complex was built by John Metcalf for the Grand Trunk

Railway, and it has in it a wonderful Grain Elevator, the only one left of the five that

the Old Port used to have.

This whole area is now rapidly being gentrified and renovated for high-tech

commercial, luxury residential, and tourism/leisure industry uses. There are several

projects to turn the silos complex into a cultural landmark for the city. The two

more attractive ones are The Xilophone Project and Silo No 5: Museum of Modern

Art. The Xilophone Project wants to take advantage of the formidable acoustic

properties of Silo No. 5, transforming it into a huge musical chamber and cultural

center focused in sound and net art. Silo No 5: Museum of Modern Art wants to

restore the Grain Elevator and use the entire complex to hold a permanent display

of the collection from the Modern Art Museum of Montreal.

During the first half of the 20th-century, many people still found the rationalistic

buildings too extreme, and so the style flourished mainly in industrial constructions,

while other modern movements coming from Europe, like Art Deco, started to exert

a great influence in the city.

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1926-32 University of Montreal, 2900 boulevard Édouard-Montpetit. 1929 Aldred Building, 501 place dÁrmes, Barott and Blackader. 1930 Eaton’s Restaurant, 677 rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest (9th floor), Jacques & Anne Carlu 1932 Atwater Market, 110 avenue Atwater, Ludger and Paul Lemieux. 1932-37 Main Pavilion, Botanical Gardens, 4477 boulevard Pie-IX, Lucien Kéroak 1938-43 Central Station, rue Belmont, J. Campbell Merrett

Step 4. Montréal opens to the world, 1657-1945

As it is often said, alter World War II and its unfortunate ending with the atomic

bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, all that was solid dissolved in the air.

Thus was born what we can call the «contemporary period», that reaches up to

today. The atomic bombs left our world in pieces, and it was necessary to

reconstruct it again. The crisis that followed made it necessary to develop new

ways of living, new ways of relating and new ways of thinking. In search of a frame

for a sketch of this period of the history of Montréal’s space, I went to visit the

Musée D’Art Contemporain De Montréal. The museum, located since 1992 at 185

rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, developed from the Contemporary Arts Society,

founded in 1939.

The day of my visit there were three exhibits showing in the museum: Sympathy

for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 in the first floor, a presentation of

three video installations by Lynne Marsh in the basement and a display dedicated to

Paul-Émile Borduas and Refus Global in the little room of the ground level named

Omer DeSerres Gallery. Only the last one offered possible references to the

reconstruction of the space after WWII as seen from Montréal, so that is where I

went. Borduas’ wonderful inks and oils have been among my favorite abstract

expressionist pieces for years now.

1954 Vibrations Grises, Paul-Emile Borduas 1956 Radiating expansion, Paul-Emile Borduas 1957 Etoile Noir, Paul-Emile Borduas

The first two pieces, for example, describe the shattered textures that the bombs

left behind with clarity and beauty comparable to that we find in the canvases Eyes

in the Heat or Shimmering Substance from series Sounds in the Grass that Jackon

Pollock on the Bikini bombing of 1946, while the third one brings to mind the

wonderful collages and constructions of Robert Motherwell or Esteban Vicente. At

the entrance of the gallery, a quote on the wall called my attention.

“Our treasure is poetic resource: the emotional wealth on which the centuries to come will draw” (Paul-Émile Borduas, Refus Global, 1948).

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Le Refus Global (Total Refusal) was a manifesto released on 1948 in Montreal by a

group of sixteen artists and intellectuals. I found the following radio clip in the

archives of CBC-Radio Canada.

The 'dark age' of Québec. Broadcast Date: Oct. 21, 1998 The 30s, 40s and 50s are considered the dark ages in Quebec. The chilling climate of the Cold War, McCarthyism paranoia and the repressive influence of the church lead to frequent bans and censorship. The Padlock Law, extolled in this clip by Premier Maurice Duplessis, allows seizure of property belonging to "suspected" communists. The law exemplifies the chill on Quebec society at the time. It is against this backdrop that young artists begin to gather at painter and mentor Paul-Emile Borduas's home. At these informal meetings, they passionately discuss art, philosophy and above all the need for intellectual and religious freedom in Quebec.

From June 17 to December 7, 2008, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts hela n

exhibit entitled Refus global 60 years Later. In the Museum’s brochure for the

exhibit , art historian Iris Amizlev, curator of the exhibition, describes in this way

Refus Global.

Presented at Librairie Henri Tranquille in Montreal on August 9, 1948, the Refus global was a collective project by the Automatistes, a multidisciplinary group of sixteen artists1 who would soon become renowned in the fields of painting, dance, poetry and theatre. As leader of the Automatiste movement and a teacher at the École du Meuble, Paul-Émile Borduas played a pivotal role within the group. His proclamations were radical and scandalous at the time, as he denounced the two ideologies that reigned supreme in Quebec during the 1940s, namely the religious regime of Catholicism and the conservatism of Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale party. It was a cry for liberation from these oppressive authorities and an appeal for an opening-up to the world. Considered to be vital to Quebec’s modernity, the Refus global triggered change. As people became aware of their isolation and were drawn to the new possibilities offered by Borduas’s suggestions, they caught up with current social and cultural international trends.

Although only half of the one thousand copies printed were sold at the time (for a

dollar a piece), the manifesto would become one of the most important and

controversial artistic and social documents in modern Quebec society. Besides

blasting the clergy and the corrupt government of Maurice Duplessis for keeping

Quebecers in the dark, the text portrayed French Canadians as devout tuque-

wearing habitants held back by their own fear of the outside world. The Refus

Global paved the way for contemporary art to flourish in Quebec, and it also stands

as one of the triggers of the social change that would ultimately lead to Quebec’s

Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

One of the best illustrations of the shift that took place in the province during this

quiet revolution, is the world’s fair Man and his World, held in Montréal in 1967.

Also called Expo 67, the fair marked the emergence of the metropolis to the world.

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Large attendance was expected (that year, Montréal received 50 million visitors

between April and October), so the city decided to expand its subway network and,

in order to accommodate the fair, the earth extracted for the construction of the

subway would be used to create a new 300-acre island (Île Notre-Dame) in the

middle of the Saint Lawrence River, and to expand an existing one (Île Sainte-

Hélène) to more than twice its original size. The fact that the subway network

played such a role in the organization of Expo ’67 is very illustrative of the change

in the space of the city that hade been taking place during the previous decades.

The dictionary gives us the following definition of space.

Space and time. Terms used in philosophy to describe the structure of nature. They are sometimes described as containers in which all natural events and processes occur, and sometimes, as relations which connect such events.

(Collier's Encyclopedia.)

The two words, containers and relations describe, respectively, the idea of space

held during the seventeenth century, when the notion of space was explicitly

mentioned for the first time in mathematics (by Newton in 1687), and the idea held

in contemporary mathematics (first described with precision by Hausdorff in 1914,

later developed by Grothendieck precisely in the 1960s). Montreal started as a

container, and by the 1960s had become an important and cosmopolitan nod in an

international network. Like mathematicians, by the sixties Montréalers had jumped

from the box to the net. The tool that allowed Hausdorff and later Grottendieck to

take the jump was topology. A subway map is an excellent example of topology in

action. Although none of the existing plans of the subway network of Montréal

corresponds with the physical aspect of the rails, all of them will give us the

information we need in order to travel in it, since they are all are faithful to the

order in which the stops are placed and the connections between the different lines.

Besides the expansion of its subway network, Expo ’67 gave the city an opportunity

to open its architectural space to some of the most interesting modern ideas, many

of the directly connected to mathematics, like the geodesic domes of Buckminster

Fuller (United States Pavillion, now The Biosphére), the minimal surfaces of Fried

Otto (German Pavillion) or the modular interlocking concrete forms of Moshe

Safdie’s Habitat 67 (Thematic Pavillion and residence of the world dignataries

visiting the Fair).

1964-66 Bonaventure Metro-Station, corner of Peel and De La Gauchetière, Victor Prus. 1966 The Bisophere, Ìle Sainte-Hélène, Richard Buckminster Fuller. 1967 Habitat, 2600 Pierre Dupuy Avenue, Marc-Drouin Quay, Saint Lawrence River, Moshe Safdie. 1967 German Pavillion, demolished, Fried Otto

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It is very easy to get information on and visit, the wonderful geodesic structure of

The Biosphere, holding acually the Environmental Museum. Unfortunately, unless

one knows someone living in it, nowadays Habitat 67 can only be studied in the

distance or in books (luckily Montreal has a wonderful Architecture Museum with a

superb library in it). The project (which was believed to illustrate the new lifestyle

people would live in increasingly crowded cities around the world) was designed to

create affordable housing with close but private quarters, each equipped with a

garden but, ironically, the building's units are now quite expensive due to its

architectural cachet. It is owned by its tenants, who formed a limited partnership

that purchased the building from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in

1985.

Even if it is difficult to access Habitat 67, at least one can enjoy a gorgeous view of

the building when taking a walk in the port. With Fried otto’s Pavillion, we only have

photos. Having grown up in a family with many architects, Otto’s minimal surfaces

have been part of my fantasys since childhood. As a kid I could not understand

very well the explanations of the adults, so all I knew is that his constructions were

related to mathematics, soap bubbles and circus tents, but that was more than

enough to trigger my imagination.

Once I was old enough to search his buildings, the beauty and intelligence I found

in them exceeded, by far, all my expectations. here is a description of the German

pavillion he designed, together with the engineer Rolf Gutbrod, for Expo ’67.

“Frei Otto and Rolf Gutbrod attempted, with this competition-winning project, to create a man-made landscape. The cavernous interior contained modular steel platforms arranged at different levels. The entire area was covered by a single membrane of irregular plan and varying heights. Its contours were determined by the high points of the masts and the low points where the membrane was drawn, funnel- like, down to the ground. Eye loops filled with clear plastic material accentuated these points and the saddle surfaces they created. The prestressed membrane consisted of a translucent skin hung from a steel wire net, which, by eye, ridge, and edge ropes, was connected with the mast heads and anchor blocks" (Ludwig Glaeser, The Work of Frei Otto, p. 109).

These three pavilions are par of what is known as modern architecture, the

architecture that flourished in the second half of the last century. In modern

architecture, 20th-century materials (aluminum, concrete, glass-plate) were used

in such a way that they would show off their inherent textures and colors, and the

structural elements of the building were left exposed. The new techniques of mass

production provided the architect with prefabricated elements that, used over and

over again, gave the modern façades its regularly patterned rhythms.

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The breaking point for this modern architecture was Mies van der Rohe’s

construction in 1948, of Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, the first buildings

fitted with curtain walls. Based in these apartments, and also combining glass and

black metal, Mies designed the two most beautiful buildings of Montréal:

Westmount Square and the Esso Gas Sation in L’Île-des-Soeurs.

1964 Apartment Buildings, 100-200 rue du Gaspé, L’Ìle-des-Soeurs, Mies van der Rohe 1964 Esso Gas Station, Íle des Soeurs, Mies van der Rohe. 1964-66 Westmount Square, boulevard Sainte-Catherine and Wood, Mies van der Rohe

Located on boulevard Sainte-Catherine, next to the Atwater Commercial Center,

Westmount Square is very easy to find. Its black towers stand out against its

neighbors, making them all look more ugly than they really are. The three buildings

themselves (two skyscrapers and a pavilion) look very much like the six towers and

pavilion in the Toronto Dominion Center in Toronto, although the complex itself is

not so beautiful as the TD Center (one of the finest architectural pieces in North

America).

Unfortunately, the Esso Gas Station is not only hard to reach, but it may in fact

soon disappear. It was the first cold day of the winter and one of my last Saturdays

in Montréal when, with Susan and Alejandro, I went in search of van der Rohe’s

buildings in L’Île-des-Soeurs. The island is easily reached from the city by Freeway

15, it extends from North to South (Montréalers’ North and South) along the St.

Lawrence bank and is crossed from one side to the other by the boulevard de L’Île-

des-Soeurs. Rue Gaspé is the last street perpendicular to this boulevard in its South

extreme. On its West side, rue Gaspé ends up in a little private square, where a

very pleasant man, who was racking the leaves in front of his house, explained to

us that Mies’s apartments were the two towers standing by the water in the East

side of the street. He also told us that there are plans to close the Esso gas station

(located blocks North of rue Gaspé on boulevard de L’Île-des-Soeurs, in the North-

East corner of the cross with rue Corot), and demolish Mies’ building. On learning

where we came from, he seemed desolated: “You are lucky that you asked me. Few

people here know about that gas station. Here you are, coming all the to way from

Sweden, Chile and Spain to see van der Rohe’s gas station, and we are considering

demolishing it!”

The three grey apartment towers (we found another one a little further North along

the coast, not far from the gas station) are quite beautiful, not as striking as the

black ones in Westmount Square or the TD Center, but very beautiful nevertheless.

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The Esso gas station, on the other hand, is superb. None of us had ever seen any

gas station —or building, for that matter— quite like that one before. The elegance

of its shape and proportions is striking. And at the same time, it is such a simple

structure! It reminded us of a table: two cubical legs with a huge black board over

them.

In the way back to the city we kept thinking of possible ways to save the buildings.

After considering many different possibilities, we decided that the simplest thing

would be to relocate it, placing it in the park Jean Drapeau of Île Sainte-Hélène.

The empty area of the park next to the Biosphere is large enough to locate there

station without its presence disturbing the harmony of the place. Mies’ building

would be a fantastic addition to Sainte-Hélène rich collection of fabulous

constructions (Fuller’s geodesic dome, Calder’s sculpture Man, the Fort that holds

the Stewart Museum or the constructions in the amusement park La Ronde), and it

could be used as architecture library, children’s playground, auditorium or cafeteria

(there is none in the Park, not even in the Biosphere).

A few days later, Elisabeth spoke about the Esso’s gas station sad destiny to some

local groups of citizens who fight to preserve the environment of L’Île-des-Soeurs

from the greed of speculators. Let us hope these, or some other Montrealers, are

able to prevent Mies’s beauty from disappearing. This is my with for the New Year.

Happy 2009!