This fall, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is presenting the third exhibition in the series The American Century, organized by Phyllis Lambert, Director of the CCA. "The series seeks to cast a fresh eye on critical aspects of modern America's architectural culture--its promises and disappointments, its roots and offshoots, its unparalleled worldwide impact" (ref.: CCA Press Release). This exhibition [1] offers a new perspective on the century-old utopian sites of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted shaped much of the public landscape of North America in the latter half of the 19th century, designing several national and urban parks, suburban communities, university campuses, and cemeteries. His vision of the development of green spaces would have a profound influence on public spaces in North America for generations. "These massive public projects also amount," in Phyllis Lambert's words, "to a triumph of civic will, a determination to civilize the city that seems sadly inconceivable in current times. I hope the exhibition will remind people of the scale of action needed to reinvigorate our cities in the future" (Ref.: CCA Press Release).
As part of this event and in keeping with a tradition established on the occasion of the exhibition Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm, in the autumn of 1994, the CCA, in conjunction with architecture and urban design faculties and institutes at the Université de Montréal, McGill University, Université du Québec à Montréal, Université Laval, Carlton University, University of Toronto, and Guelph University, is inviting students to take part in an interdisciplinary and interuniversity charrette on the theme "Land into Landscape". This charrette calls on participants to reflect on the postindustrial condition of the North American urban landscape.
The aim of this design contest is to propose new plans for the development of public and private urban spaces in Montreal and to highlight new possibilities for the transformation of the city's obsolete industrial zones. The focus will be on the western region of the Port of Montreal, in the grain silo sector. This urban site was chosen for the charrette on the basis of its many problematic aspects and the questions they raise, including the complexity, disorder, and spatial illegibility of the urban fabric, the stratification of the highway, railway, and river transportation structures at the entrance to downtown, the zoning (the product of an urbanistic functionalism), the future of the Port of Montreal's grain silos (although abandoned, they nonetheless constitute an undeniable part of Montreal's industrial heritage), and the Ville de Montréal's plans for the area (housing and marina projects). A phenomenon facing all major Western cities, the issue of obsolete industrial zones and their conversion has taken on a new urgency with the dawn of a new millennium. What potential do these zones harbour for urban landscapes, new centralities, and environmental solutions? Does their scale set a pattern for current and future urban problems? Can it be said that their very disorder is an indispensable aspect of the urban order? What type of landscape project is needed to help define the city of tomorrow in a context of profound economic recession? These are the major issues upon which students are invited to reflect.
At another level, this charrette calls for a critical reflection on the notion and process of the urban project. Considering its complex morphology and conditions of use and the fact that it is the scene of a dialectical tension between individual and collective interests, has the urban project come to reflect an impossible convergence (ref.: the project for the Old Port of Montreal and current municipal projects such as the development of the Forum, the Villa Maria woodland)? What are the conditions of inflection of this type of project and of its conceptual process? This aspect of the method of intervention in the multidisciplinary context proposed by this charrette offers an opportunity to reflect critically on the logic of the urban project. This point intersects with the concern expressed by the urban architect Joan Busquets in relation to her conception of the role of the "vacant lot" in the urban environment (19th Congress of the International Union of Architects - Barcelona 96): "The logic of the "urban project" gives rise to a confrontation that brings into play extremely complex situations. (...) The revision of "vacant" landscapes, of landscapes devoid of definition, leads us to revise the heterogeneity and discontinuity of urban reconstruction and allows us to consider other processes that are not necessarily conventional."
The charrette focuses on the western region of the Port of Montreal (see attached map), which includes a portion of the Bonaventure highway sector bordered by the Récollets neighbourhood and the Dow Planetarium. This northern portion of the site includes part of the Griffintown neighbourhood and the aerial megastructures of the Bonaventure highway and the railway lines leading to the Bonaventure train station, extending to the entrance to the Victoria bridge in the south. To the west, the area includes the old part of the Lachine Canal that used to link the Port of Montreal with the former riverside industrial lots. To the east, it includes the locks, Mill Street, Windmill-Point basin, Bickerdike dock and basin, Mackay Pier, and the grain silo complex, as well as the eastern end of de la Commune Street.
The main problems raised by the site can be defined through the following statements:
Georges Adamczyk and Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec - August 1996