NowMontréal

Architecture

Architecture in Montréal

Montréal spent the 1960s building a second city underground and a world exposition on two islands, and both are still in use. Winter explains more of the plan here than style does.

• Grande Bibliothèque

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  Completed 2005

  Patkau Architects

  The provincial library in the Quartier Latin, holding a general collection, a children's library and the Québec heritage collection. Patkau Architects, with Croft Pelletier and Menkes Shooner Dagenais, put the two main collections inside large wooden rooms on the upper floors and wound a promenade around them that climbs through a sequence of reading rooms. The building is entered on the corner and connects straight down to the metro. Its subject is the walk past the books rather than the room they are kept in.

• Palais des congrès

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  Completed 2002

  Saia Barbarese Topouzanov · Hal Ingberg

  The convention centre's expansion, which doubled its floor area and gave the block a wall of coloured glass. Three practices shared the work, and Hal Ingberg designed the facade as three hundred and thirty-two coloured panels set among fifty-eight clear ones, backed inside by reflective surfaces. The concourse behind it is deliberately plain, and the glass floods it with colour that moves through the day. A convention centre is a windowless box by definition, so this one spends everything on the surface facing the city.

• Westmount Square

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  Completed 1967

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

  An office and apartment complex at the edge of Westmount, the largest of the three commissions Mies took in the city. He set the towers in black anodised aluminium and glass on a plaza of white travertine, and buried the shops and the metro connection so the ground stays empty. Seventy houses were demolished for the site. It applies the Miesian formula whole, plaza included, to a city with four months of winter.

• Habitat 67

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  Completed 1967

  Moshe Safdie

  A housing block on the Expo 67 site, built from prefabricated concrete boxes stacked out of alignment. Safdie developed it as a student thesis and built it at twenty-nine: the offset stacking gives every unit a roof terrace on the box below and daylight on more than one side, which the apartment slab cannot do. Fifteen unit types come out of one module. It was meant as a prototype for mass housing and was never repeated at cost.

• Biosphère

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  Completed 1967

  Buckminster Fuller · Shoji Sadao

  The United States pavilion at Expo 67, on Île Sainte-Hélène in the river. Fuller and Sadao built a geodesic sphere of steel struts three-quarters of the way round, glazed in acrylic and fitted with motorised shades that tracked the sun. A fire during renovation in 1976 burned the acrylic off in half an hour and left the frame standing. It has been open to the weather since, which turned a demonstration of enclosure into a drawing of one.