Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City, exhibition at CCA
24/10/2017.
[Montreal, Quebec] Canada
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
The research undertaken and presented in this exhibition permitted constructing a social history of urban change.
Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City is among numerous projects Phyllis Lambert has devoted to heritage in a context of research and museology. In the mid-seventies, the initial study of Greystone buildings was carried out by the Montreal Greystone Building Research Group formed and led by Lambert – before archival research programs on architecture of the city were implemented. Subsequently the Groupe de recherche sur Montréal established at the CCA. It was at the origin of an important data bank on property and buildings in Montreal at the beginning of the colony, a work in collaboration with Alan Stewart that led to the CCA exhibition and publication entitled Opening the Gates of Eighteenth Century Montreal (1992-1993) which Lambert curated. The exhibition and publication Montreal Metropolis, 1880-1930 (1998), concerning the period during which Montréal was transformed from a 19th century merchant city to the metropolis of Canada.
GREYSTONE Exhibition
The greystone buildings standing in Montreal today are evidence of patterns of settlement from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. A deep study of their history demonstrates the influence of geology, topography, politics, culture, and ethnicity in shaping the city over time.
Among the possible ways of analyzing city fabric, the focus on a single material of construction provides insight into a wide range of topics. This approach would be less productive in cities like Paris or Jerusalem, for example, where all buildings are faced with local stone. However, in Montreal, the North American city with the greatest amount and concentration of stone construction, such focus is revelatory. At first the result of pragmatic concerns, Montreal grey limestone buildings, distinct from those built with other materials, came to hold special symbolic value. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thick stone walls provided protection against attack, against fire, against the cold. Eventually they became prestigious markers of status.
During the winters of 1973 and 1974, I undertook a photographic mission with Richard Pare, working with a view camera to study city growth. Greystone buildings form a unity across the island and this campaign would become a catalyst for increased concerns about the conservation of the city’s heritage. Early in the day we trudged through the snow, photographing the neighbourhoods presented in this exhibition: Old Montreal and the original faubourgs directly north of it, as well as other faubourgs and suburban towns on the island of Montreal, as mapped in 1890.
Photographs are the protagonists of this exhibition. They are expanded on and complemented by maps and interpretative texts, the results of extensive research into building dates, proprietors, owners, and occupants at the time of construction. Insurance atlases, historical city maps, cadastral plans, municipal tax assessment rolls, city directories, notarial records, private papers, are the essential primary sources that help to construct a social history of urban change, confirming the patterns and hypotheses that emerge from a close study of visual documentation.
Phyllis Lambert (born January 24, 1927 in Montreal) is an architect, author, scholar, and activist, and is the Founding Director Emeritus and formerly Director and Chair of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) which she established in Montreal in 1979.
Lambert first made architectural history as the Director of Planning of the Seagram Building (1954-58) in New York City. Actively engaged in advancing contemporary architecture, as well as the social issues of urban conservation, Lambert founded Héritage Montréal in 1975, and in 1979 was instrumental in establishing the Société d'Amélioration de Milton-Parc, the largest non-profit cooperative housing renovation project in Canada. In 1996, she formed the Fonds d’Investissement de Montréal (FIM), the only private investment fund in Canada participating in the revitalization of housing in low- and medium-income neighbourhoods. For 23 years, Lambert served on the Board of the Vieux Port de Montréal, where she established public consultation as an instrument of planning. Spearheading the revival of Montréal’s downtown west quarter through the roundtable she initiated in 2005, Lambert’s involvement in shaping the city continues also through the Institute of Policy Alternatives of Montréal (IPAM) which she presides. For her tenacious engagement in advancing the role of architecture in the public realm, from Seagram to the CCA, Lambert received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2016, the Wolf Foundation in Israel bestowed upon Lambert its Wolf Prize in Arts for her six decades of championing innovation in building design and preservation of properties of patrimonial significance, and for invigorating the profession and research into architecture, which she infuses with intellectual doubt and political critique. Last year, she also received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize 2016 Architecture Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.