The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big

Bruce Grainger is head of the Public Services Department, Macdonald
Library, McGill University.

This book was published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name
organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. It aims
to document a period of great change in the city’s physical
environment during which an unusual number of projects were completed.
During this time, many of Montreal’s skyscrapers, the Métro,
expressways, the Champlain Bridge, and the Expo ’67 site were built.
The price for some of these developments was the destruction of a large
number of existing buildings, often located in poor neighbourhoods (in
which case, “urban renewal” was usually a motivating factor).

While many of these kinds of projects were occurring in other large
cities, Montreal was perhaps unique in that “every single
standard-issue piece of mid-century modernist strategizing” happened
there. The result is a city whose skyline (with the addition of the
Olympic Stadium in 1976) and infrastructure date from the 1960s.
Virtually every page of this book includes at least one of the more than
230 illustrations consisting of drawings, maps, charts, models, and
photographs that relate to urban planning and architecture.

Contributor Marcel Fournier provides an overview of the Quiet
Revolution, which began in 1960 and transformed Montreal and Quebec
society. André Lortie describes the 1960s as a decade of unlimited
possibilities and a time during which long-talked-about projects in all
of Western society were realized. Planning by the federal, provincial,
and Montreal municipal governments resulted in the present
transportation network and important commercial and residential
developments.

Many projects did not become a reality (at least in their original
form), often for the better. The positive side of today’s Montreal has
even been attributed “not so much to careful planning as to
‘planning by not planning.’” Lortie engages Jean-Louis Cohen and
Michael Sorkin in a discussion of how Montreal was perceived in the
1960s by planners and architects. It seems the initial impression was
that of originality, but over time the glitter wore off.