Tag Archives: Montréal Design

Instagramming Perspectives on the City


Tour KPMG (Place de la Cathedrale) – Montreal

What can I say, I’m addicted to Instagram.

I’ll admit, when I discovered there was an Instagram-branded digital camera I bemoaned the death of Polaroid, but hey, who am I to tell the free-market what to do?

Personally, I like the filters and the way by which the filters are able to ameliorate otherwise low-quality digital photos, but I’m sure that will change too as the technology improves. Regardless, here are some of my favourite snap-shots of people and places in our fair city.


Saint Henri Bodega

The quintessential Montréal Dépanneur, commerce integrated directly into a residential plan, optimizing convenience while maintaining the link between vital small business and the neighbourhood that supports it. I read somewhere the estimate was that a single Montréal dépanneur typically serves a base of 1,000 regular customers, and as such, these small mom and pop operations tend to cater to specific local needs, not to mention offer some unique treats. One of the finest lunches to be had (on the cheap) in this city involves homemade soups and sandwiches sold by a lovely Polish lady in a dépanneur located at St-Marc and René-Lévesque.


Montreal World Trade Centre

A hidden gem, the Centre du Commerce Mondiale de Montréal (located next to Square-Victoria and a component of the Réso (Underground City), this massive atrium was built over the former Ruelle des Fortifications and as such unites several heritage properties into a single complex. It was conceived of as a horizontal skyscraper, with the Intercontinental Hotel anchoring the ‘base’. The fountain at one end of the reflecting pool was built in France in the early 18th century and, along with a piece of the Berlin Wall also located here, were, together with the complex, part of the city’s numerous 350th anniversary ‘presents’.


Windsor Station & 1250 Boul. René-Lévesque taken from the Place du Canada viaduct

An afterthought – both of these buildings have lost their anchor tenants. The tower was originally jointly owned by IBM and Marathon Realty, another 350th anniversary gift to the city from the private sector. It was built in competition with 1000 de la Gauchetiere West, and though both are icons of the city’s post-modern architecture, both lack anchor tenants. Odd considering how beautiful both are, how centrally located they are. Windsor Station was the corporate head office of Canadian Pacific Railways until 1997 when they consolidated their operations in Calgary. Today I believe CSIS maintains an office there. I wonder if new residential developments in the area will have any effect on their future significance in the urban tapestry.

McGill College Avenue at Dusk from the PVM Belvedere

One of the better achievements of 1980s city-planning, Vincent Ponté’s re-design of McGill College Avenue. Plans to create a showcase street date back to before the Second World War, but didn’t come to fruition until the 1980s. Prior, it was a far narrower street, with much of the space above Boul. de Maisonneuve nothing but parking lots. Redevelopment began when the Capitol Theatre was torn down in the 1970s and replaced with the squat, ugly brown building off to the left (out of frame). A more comprehensive plan came to fruition in the early 1980s that would ultimately lead to the development of several gleaming post-modern office towers and one of the city’s premier ‘show streets’. If I have one complaint, it’s that despite the large number of people who pass through here, work here etc, no one lives in this part of town. I can imagine it would be a rather fetching address. Sometimes I wonder why there isn’t a trend in this city to redevelop old office buildings (such as the aforementioned brown monstrosity) into condos. Seems like a natural evolution.

Hall Building, Concordia University, with Place Norman Bethune in the foreground, on a foggy October night


Avenue du Musée

I like the gradual development of the Quartier des Musées and the new pavilion of the MMFA – this is progressing in the right direction. The city has a plan for economic stimulus in this area, as they want to increase the number of stable local high-end boutiques and galleries. It could use a café and a bistro, and it would be wise for the city to help in the quartier’s branding if they were able to offer various incentives to help concentrate galleries in the area. Also, while I’m a big fan of the outdoor sculptures, they’re overwhelming given how close they’re grouped together. Would it be so bad if they were spaced out a bit? Maybe the presence of art installations could be used to delineate the boundaries of the Quartier?


We have beautiful balconies in this city…

A place where everyone can pass a long summer day thinking about tomorrow, pondering what could be. I think we’re lucky it’s considered an element of good design to include some type of balcony, front porch or rooftop terrace on urban residential construction here. In some places its quite the rarity, considered old-fashioned. Odd no?

The Sun Life Building (1931), PVM 5 (1968) and PVM 1 (1962)

We’ve really got to figure out what to do with this place. How much longer do we let it slowly decompose?

Heat Waves and Watering Bans and Environmental Degradation (oh my!)


The Beaver – not just a euphemism any more!

Yes, it’s sweltering out. I know. We know. We all know. It happens. It will dominate the local s’news until it’s replaced by exciting Smartphone coverage of the raucous thunderstorms apparently on route to light up the night sky.

The thing here is that I often find the perennial complaining about the heat to be an insincere form of back-handed self-flattery. See? It’s not really that cold up here, it can be downright tropical in fact… And it misses the point. We do have a say in what kind of weather we have, and we could be doing much, much more to help stabilize local climatic and environmental conditions. The way the news tells it, whether NBC, the CBC or the local yokels trying to fill the air before the half hour they dedicate to sports coverage, you’d think we only just became aware weather exists in the first place, and that we had never had a heat wave before, never had major forest fires or droughts. This is subtle refusal to acknowledge human beings are having a direct and often detrimental effect on weather patterns and the environment. Climate change is real – but it also runs both ways.

I refuse to complain about the weather out of principle – do you not remember five months ago when we were freezing? When we collectively put on anywhere from five to twenty pounds of insulation au-naturel so that we don’t otherwise parade around in snow suits and balaclavas? I can remember and I hate the cold, but especially Winter’s such as the last one. Too little snow, far too many bone-chilling days and high winds, not to mention that awful tease we got in mid-March when for a week it was as though we had skipped Spring altogether. Of course I made the best of it when I had a chance – we all did. But I can’t escape the fact that for all this talk and apparent knowledge about the weather and climate and the peculiarities of our regional meteorology, geography and ecology, we seem to forget, constantly, what has happened recently.

Does it not strike us all as odd that every summer now has record breaking heat waves?
That every summer carries the risk of and most cases increasingly destructive forest fires?
Or that the water quality is poor and seemingly, always at record-low levels?
Or how about that the French seem to think us Québecois talk about the weather incessantly?

I know general interest news stories tend to repeat themselves, but it seems to me that something’s not quite right with our weather patterns, in that it seems we’re not getting the clockwork weather systems we once got used to. Winter used to start earlier, Spring used to be longer, and all seasons seemed to have been much wetter not so long ago. And even if we are currently facing a rare meteorological phenomenon, you’d think we be smart enough to employ various measures to protect ourselves. Water levels, wet-lands and heat waves all have something in common – they’re all implicated in ground-water retention, and we have the means, at the very least, to develop new and expand on existing wetlands within the Greater Montréal region.

As I sit here waiting for the inevitable and highly exciting lightning strikes I can’t help but notice my burnt suburban lawn, nowhere near as green and healthy as it’s supposed to be. Ferns and other plants have shrunk, our vegetable patch isn’t producing and as far as I can tell, the phenomenon seems to be adversely affecting my whole neighbourhood, if not a good chunk of the region. The water levels are at ten year lows, watering bans are in full effect as a consequence (though I’m surprised to see who seems to be ‘above the law’) and the news coming in from les régions (indeed, all of rural Canada and the US) is that this year’s harvest won’t nearly be as bountiful as had been hoped. Locally, this not only means higher food prices, but an additional complication to regional economic stability. Never underestimate the primacy of agriculture in our economy, it’s remarkably multi-faceted and forms a core component of the region’s economy.

So then what’s to be done? Something’s amiss when the confluence of two rivers and multiple tributaries in a land overwhelmed by freshwater lakes can’t provide enough water for a city of our size spread out as we are across a very large geographic area. Though I’m by no means an environmental scientist, I would argue that there nonetheless seems to be a correlation between environmental degradation (particularly of wetlands) and the constantly recurring adverse weather and climatic conditions. As I write this a brief downpour has wound down and a temporary humidity has set in. Tweets have indicated the heat wave isn’t expected to break for several more days. We seem to alternate increasingly between dry heat spells and sudden torrential storms, as opposed to a more regular cycle of cooler daytime temperatures and far more precipitation across all seasons.

There’s been talk coming from the local chapter of the Suzuki Foundation recently of expanding or otherwise developing a local green belt specifically to counter-act this problem. And that’s where our furry national symbol comes into play. A simple re-introduction of beavers as part of a larger preservation/conservation and rehabilitation plan would help retain significant quantities of groundwater. In fact, a few beaver colonies strategically located may be able to replenish natural aquifers, meaning lack of rain won’t matter as much given that Spring meltwater could be held over a longer period of time. More trapped groundwater, such as in marshlands, swamps, natural beaches etc, mean more water for irrigation, be it for agriculture or simply keeping the grass green. But it’s all the other goodies that come with building new wetlands – more biodiversity, cooler temperatures, less erosion, cleaner air and cleaner water, to name but a few benefits.

We need to get on this right away. A comprehensive plan for the entire archipelago and metropolitan region needs to be put into action so that we don’t completely destroy the naturally lush and historically bountiful eco-system we’re encroaching on. Low-density residential housing development, both on and off-island needs to come to a halt, and remaining green-spaces need to be treated properly and for what they are – the circulatory and respiratory systems of an interconnected mass of humanity.

Now if only we can convince the powers at be that investing in environmental rehabilitation is worthwhile, for the greater good, over a long term.

I fear it is precisely for those reasons, and the fact that we can’t make a buck off of it, that nothing will come of this.

And we’ll continue to be ignorant as the problem is perennially presented to us as something out of the ordinary. We seem to suffer from collective short-term memory loss, especially when it comes to ecological issues. What do y’all think?

A Sensible Approach to Redeveloping Griffintown

Let me make myself perfectly clear; being in favour of enhanced local government involvement in residential and commercial planning is not, in any way shape or form, anti-business. Nor is it necessarily going to lead to nepotism or otherwise create a conflict of interest. I need to stress this as a necessity, because we may otherwise spoil a golden opportunity to breathe new life into a dormant sector of the city by being fearful of the appearance of collusion. The city, by necessity, must be intimately involved in all manner of urban zoning planning – leaving it up to developers uniquely is simply irresponsible. The role of the city is to plan the necessary constraints placed on development and provide the requisite infrastructure to secure long-term growth and socio-economic stability within its boundaries. It is the private sector’s responsibility to adhere to these constraints and deliver a bankable product, on time and under budget, to their investors. A key issue to consider is this however; who are the investors? With regards to residential development projects, especially those of the size and calibre to potentially stimulate the rebirth of an entire residential zone, it is not merely the banks and the development company; all citizens who pay taxes to the municipal government are also paying for the city’s involvement in urban redevelopment, such as by rehabilitating old sewer systems, re-paving roads, building parks etc. Thus, in an indirect though significant fashion, the citizens are also investors, and their interests ought to considered as though the citizens are the financial backers of the city, in the same fashion that the banks and investment firms back the contractors, speculators and developers.

The plans to redevelop Griffintown caused a considerable uproar a few years back amongst citizens inclined towards a certain preferred urbanism. Indeed, the Devimco plan was seen as an uninspired condo-tropolis reminiscent of recent construction in Toronto or Vancouver and, though the project was officially put on hiatus as a result of the global economic meltdown, one can’t deny it was also very poorly received. Smaller projects have been implemented instead, and large-scale planning for the area doesn’t seem to have much if any involvement from the City. Perhaps it’s just hard to gauge, but the Montréal2025 plan, the Devimco plan, the scaled-back Devimco plan and the Canada Lands Corporation plan (along with a proposed Cité-du-Havre redevelopment scheme) all seem to be little more than ideas, proposals. Perhaps they are in accordance with a master plan somewhere in the city’s planning department, but publicly, it doesn’t seem that the Tremblay administration is making much headway. I can only wonder why Griffintown’s redevelopment isn’t the focal point of a major campaign on the part of the City to win the confidence of the tax-payers and potential investors, though I think it may have something to do with the number of strategic partners involved and the fluidity of Griffintown’s potential borders.

The region bounded by Highways 720, 20 and 10 looks like a backwards comma and is referred to as the Sud-Ouest. It includes the communities of Griffintown, Little Burgundy, St-Henri, Lower Westmount, Village des Tanneries, Pointe-St-Charles and the former Goose Village. Given the City’s plan to demolish the Bonaventure viaduct, this region will soon include the Cité-du-Havre, the Faubourg-des-Récollets and the proposed Quartier Bonaventure as well. The Sud-Ouest borough also counts the neighbourhoods of Cote-St-Paul and Ville-Emard further West and has a total population of about 70,000 people. This region is served by about a dozen Métro stations either within the boundary or on its periphery and has been going through a partial gentrification for about fifteen years. It is extremely convenient to live in this sector, apartments are generally quite affordable and you are in the immediately vicinity of the Central Business District. New construction is taking place and the borough has already established itself as an up-and-coming alternative to the Plateau. It’s hip and chic to live here. So why aren’t we planning for the area as a whole?

I can imagine it’s in all of our best interests to attempt increasing the residential population in this area – perhaps by significant margin given the availability of open, largely under-used land. But if this is to be the case, we must further ensure an appropriate mix of incomes and living arrangements. For one, there are a great deal of heritage properties which must be protected. An excellent way to go about this is to have the City acquire said properties and keep them rent-controlled. Other initiatives should include mandatory construction of rent-subsidized apartments and middle-income condo/apartments in all new large-scale residential development projects. Further, the city will have to construct new schools and rehabilitate old civic properties to support the new population increase (as an example, the area in question has old community centres, churches, fire stations, schools etc, many of which could be renovated and re-used), while further investing in a massive, sector-wide city beautification project. For too long it seems as though the City has focused uniquely on beautifying areas within the sector that have received significant private investment – this has given the area a very uneven look. Finally, new small-business initiatives would have to created (and backed by the City) to foster a stable local economic foundation. We can accomplish all of this, but it will require greater City involvement and a bird’s eye perspective. If the population could be doubled in this sector and a new Plateau result, it’s worth the investment. The City should use the opportunity to create a massive new residential zone built according to the interests of the citizens and our urban planning experts.

So apparently we’re getting a very expensive bridge…

The Champlain Bridge, Montréal - not the work of the author.

…and as always, efficiency takes a back seat when it comes to stimulus spending and infrastructure development in the Montréal region.

The CBC announced a plan by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper (in case you were unaware) to build a $5 billion replacement for the Champlain Bridge over the course of a decade. The new bridge will feature ten traffic lanes and is designed to fully replace the existing Champlain Bridge, which is estimated by some to no longer be worth retrofitting or renovating after 2022 when it will turn sixty years old. Maintenance costs to keep the bridge operational until then will come up to about $25 million over the next ten years. Previous cost estimates for bridge replacement came to $1.3 billion for a replacement by a similar span, and $1.9 billion for a double-decker tunnel capable of handling a similar amount of traffic (roughly 156,000 cars and trucks use the bridge each day) on one level with buses and trains on a lower level. The projected construction time was five years for each project, which is in line with the amount of time it took to build just about every other bridge and tunnel connecting the Island to the Mainland. Moreover, adjusted for inflation alone, the cost of building the Champlain Bridge would only cost about a quarter billion of today’s dollars. Now while many argue the cost of construction has gone up, I’d still like to know just what it is about this replacement bridge that justifies a $5 billion expenditure? For additional details, see the Wikipedia entry.

Perhaps the cost was estimated based not on actual costs for materials, labour, design and construction, but instead based instead on trying to ensure everyone gets a slice of the stimuli pie. Given that Québec lost out on the Great Canadian Shipbuilding Sweepstakes, perhaps this expensive bridge project is some kind of a consolation prize. Do we not recognize that it is sounder to seek smaller amounts of tax revenue for stimulus spending than larger amounts? Is it not our responsibility to seek efficient infrastructure solutions?

Here’s the deal – in my opinion, replacing the Champlain Bridge with an enlarged replacement toll-bridge isn’t exactly helping reduce traffic congestion in Montréal, and its not entirely fair to use tax dollars to build it and then a toll to pay for it. Moreover, it may not even be necessary, and that is to say that there are many considerably wiser, more efficient ways to spend such a large sum (such as on public transit) which in turn may allow the Champlain Bridge a longer life-expectancy and a considerably smaller associated long-term maintenance costs, thus making bridge replacement a moot point.

But none of that seems to matter – once again, infrastructure redevelopment is narrowly focused, places an emphasis on the needs of the few as opposed to the many, and is more about securing large investments for an already corrupt construction industry instead of seeking to trim costs and ensure fiscal responsibility. Is it any wonder the rest of Canada thinks we get an unfair advantage?

Consider the 2009 Métro extension plan, which aimed to increase the network by a dozen stations on twenty kilometres of new track and tunnel, extending into Eastern Montreal and the South Shore in addition to closing the Orange Line loop, benefitting the residents of St-Laurent, Pierrefonds, Cartierville and Laval. That project is estimated to cost $4 billion and could potentially add several hundred thousand more individual uses per day in addition to further extending the operational reach of both the STM and AMT. Aside from the issue that the provincial plan benefits people throughout the metropolitan region, it further would lessen the strain on our bridges, meaning the Champlain’s life-expectancy (with additional preventative maintenance) could be extended beyond sixty years. All of the other bridges are considerably older than the Champlain and are still working fine, and it should be noted that other bridges and tunnels were often designed as part of larger transit schemes. This replacement bridge will carry no tram lines, no provision for commuter trains, and only a limited number of reserved bus lanes. It’s too little, too late, and designed for a bygone era. How typically Québecois.

Unfortunately, it now seems as though the STM is unable to secure funding to execute the entire plan, and so the Mayors of Montréal, Laval and Longueuil now have to petition the people and the provincial government for their own individual extensions. This is an awful situation to be in, yet here we are, bitching and banging heads against each other for a thin slice of the better idea. If the fed can justify spending $5 billion on a bridge replacement, why not spend $4 billion to help more people get around and then spend the billion left-over dollars to fully renovate and upgrade the existing bridge? How is that a sounder investment?

Consider other plans, such as the use of ferries, light-rail lines across the ice-bridges, new Métro and commuter train lines or running surface trams on reserved lanes on the existing bridges and tunnels. There are many ways to cut down on the number of people bringing their cars into the city and increase the number of people utilizing public transit as their primary means to get around. But if the City can’t reign in government and guarantee an efficient use of stimulus funding, then we’re bound to develop along someone else’s politics, someone else’s vision. And as long as we congratulate ourselves for taking unfairly large portions of the communal tax revenue (as some kind of sick justification for our opportunistic federalism, no doubt), then we get what we pay for, and have no reason to pout when things fall apart. We’ve been responsible for our own infrastructure problems for years because we develop said infrastructure as though it were a consumer item, and thus the bridges, tunnels and buildings we procure are designed to artificially stimulate the construction industry by requiring near constant maintenance. And so we are literally stuck in a rut. Why is it that every Summer major construction work is required throughout the City? Are we foolish designers or are we trying to keep a bloated industry well-financed with futile self-perpetuating renovation work? We must begin designing more durably and begin employing innovative technological solutions to finally solve our frequent problems with rapid infrastructure degeneration.

It’s becoming clear to me that we are not designing with problem-solving in mind, and this will be our undoing. Technological solutions for most of the infrastructure problems we encounter on a day to day basis could be saving us incredible amounts of money, but they mean some people in the construction industry won’t make as much money as they used to. The new Champlain Bridge project smells so bad of graft and nepotism you’d think the price tag was of the scratch-and-sniff variety.

MUHC Superhospital Plan Lacking Access (yet provides ample parking)

El Superhospital!

Who’d have thought the much maligned MUHC Super Hospital would come up short?

The experts who said ‘super hospitals’ were already obsolete? (relevant)

Or the pundits who want to know why our two-language health-care system is still, hopelessly, divided on the linguistic front (last time I checked, medicine’s language is scientific, not rhetorical – and aren’t all local doctors and nurses more-or-less bilingual anyways? – also relevant).

Or the architects who have been arguing against this ridiculous project for years on a wide-spectrum of issues, from lack of access, to infrastructure and cross contamination (speaking with one of these experts who came in to address my Montreal history course lead me to write this highly relevant article)?

And so, yet again, we find that the MUHC Superhospital project is coming up short once more, now with regards to pedestrian and public-transit access. It seems as though area residents are demanding better access to the new facility, and the typical cold-shoulder-wrapped-in-warm-n-fuzzy-pr-bs-response from hospital officials is that it is already accessible.

This is why I’ve stopped bothering to go to these public consultations – they (the Man, in whichever form) are not listening to you, they’ve spent so much god-damn time rehearsing their methodically precise answers they don’t have time to address these legitimate concerns. I doubt anything will come of this, given just how retartedly stubborn the government and MUHC has been what with this project.

Such a large facility is going to require multiple access points designed for high traffic. The more pedestrian or public-transit access points there are, the better it will be for the surrounding community, least to mention the more car spaces it will liberate and the chance for major traffic jams (pedestrian or vehicular) decreases proportionally. The MUHC has been touting that they’ll have an abundance of parking spaces, which will be useful given that the site happens to be next to two highways and the intersection of several major urban arteries. But not everyone should be using vehicles to get here, given the likelihood of traffic jams. This means that, among other things, ambulances will require their own access points, perhaps multiple access points. The MUHC wants you to believe that the Glen Road access point can be shared by both speeding ambulances and pedestrians, cyclists etc. Do you want to share a road with speeding ambulances? I didn’t think so…

Construction cranes at the Glen Yard Campus of the new MUHC Superhospital

Worse still is that the MUHC doesn’t yet seem to have a plan in place to handle additional traffic from Vendome Métro Station. Tunnels have been planned, but little more seems to have been accomplished. Further, while they are insistent that they will build two tunnels to serve the Northern side of the campus, plans so far only provide for one – pedestrians looking to access the site from Boul. de Maisonneuve are likely going to have to cross an open-air pedestrian bridge that will go over the tracks. Not exactly ideal now is it. And as for Southern access, well you can pretty much forget it.

Then there’s the issue of the traffic-jam waiting to happen when the hospital comes on-line three years from now and all public transit access to the hospital runs through Vendome station. Suffice it to say I’m looking forward to saying ‘I told you so’.

It seems as though the only real solution here is to bite-the-bullet (and who cares really – the project’s over-budget anyways, may as well go for the gold and at least ensure this project doesn’t become a total White Elephant due to lack of access – consider how lack of access has played a significant role in our other major White Elephant mega-projects) and spend a considerable amount of money on ensuring the site has excellent accessibility.

First, I’d highly recommend transferring AMT operations from the “Vendome Platform” to a bonafide train-station, such as you will find located at the far Eastern edge of the Glen Yards Campus at the old Westmount Train Station. While the inter-modal set-up at Vendome has been useful, it will likely soon become overcrowded. Running a tunnel from the Westmount station through to the hospital (and then back to Vendome) will allow for better traffic diffusion, not to mention commercial retail space which in turn could provide a steady revenue for our perennially cash-strapped hospitals. Situating another tunnel to connect the hospital under the tracks with the Métro station is a no-brainer, but it should be part of a much larger system that provides access to both ‘tactical and strategic’ access. Ergo, its not just the tunnels to the Metro and train station, tunnels must further allow access to the community surrounding this new site, especially the Southwest District. While a Glen Road access lane for ambulances is an excellent idea, pedestrians shouldn’t be asked to share this space. Instead, a tunnel under the Ville-Marie Expressway to the corner of Glen Road and St-Jacques could help ensure that this hospital can actually reach the community its supposed to serve. Another potential access point would be Ave de Carillon or Rue St-Rémi, coming up from the South. And of course, putting a new bus terminus on the southern side would allow for a better connection to communities like St-Henri, Ville-Emard, Verdun and Pointe-St-Charles. Point is, the architects of the MUHC project could easily transform this site into a major traffic hub, which may save the hospital’s reputation. If it can be used to guarantee a safe and secure method of getting between the ‘city above and below the hill’, then perhaps this project has a prayer.

But it will cost us in the short-term. That said, as far as I’m concerned, it’s completely worth it.

New photos – Quartier des Spectacles & Fur District

A Quaint Country Cathedral, right in the middle of the city...

Check the photographs tab for Photos III, documenting my new neighbourhood, kinda known by a multitude of names, sparsely populated and barely a neighbourhood in any tangible sense, yet home sweet home nonetheless.

Click here for instant photo action!