Megacity Montreal

Megastructure: Place Bonaventure, Montreal

This reading week, Emma and I travelled to Montreal. We saw lots of amazing museums/other cultural institutions (my favourites being the Point-à-Callière Museum of Archaeology and History, which is actually two buildings attached by underground ruins, and the Redpath Museum on the McGill University campus, which is an interdisciplinary natural history/anthropology institution), ate lots of great bagels and cheap brie, and just generally hung around one of Canada’s great cities.

Megastructure: urban futures of the recent past

Just before I left though, I had been reading this book, Megastructure: urban futures of the recent past by Reyner Banham, for my thesis. Basically it tracks the history of the megastructure movement that tried to rectify the Modernist interests in rationalization and controlled, simple and cohesive aesthetics with the popular interest in being able to have choice in the decor of one’s surroundings and combine things willy-nilly – from Rococo to Space Age to High Modernism itself. They would do this by building giant structures (hence megastructures) that were Modernist in nature – without ornament, rational, and in this case futuristic – but the structure would contain individual cells that could be completely personalized by their tenants.

The book has an entire chapter called “Megacity Montreal” that discusses the massive amount of megastructure or megastructure-like architecture in this city, and I think that really coloured my perception. To me, the whole place seemed to have this sci-fi aesthetic (think somewhere between Fahrenheit 451‘s depressing Brutalism and Logan’s Run‘s scale and interconnectedness), despite some of the beautiful old buildings. I think part of the reason for this is that a good portion of the downtown is tied together by the Underground City and the Metro, both of which started construction in the 1960s and have a heavy Brutalist influence.

I specifically took a trip to Place Bonaventure (which you can see in the banner of this post as well as above), which is featured in Banham’s book, and it gave me a really good idea of the aesthetic of megastructures. The building looks like it has been built out of cement building blocks stacked slightly askew, with some units coming further toward the road, and others set further back (comparable to Habitat 67, another better known megastructure also in Montreal). As a result, Place Bonaventure looks like it is made of modular units held together by some kind of superstructure, but it’s all visual. Inside, the building is less remarkable other than its sheer size and the continuation of the Brutalist aesthetic. This is the catch with the whole megastructure movement – very few of the architects’ plans were ever executed, and nearly all of the built examples of the movement, even those considered to best represent the movement like the Cumbernauld Town Centre, only appear to follow the movement’s tenets.

Photos below!

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