Posted Sep 22, 2019, 3:20 PM
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video et taceo
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Stockholm
Posts: 14,345
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Downtown Montreal, and not central Montreal as a whole but "downtown" specifically, is a bit underwhelming.
Luckily, it is surrounded by, in no particular order, a towering hillside Olmsted park, a prestigious and picturesque old university, a stunning 19th-century port district, and a few impeccable urban walkup neighbourhoods.
This is the reason for the mixed sentiment.
Downtown Montreal is frustrating for a few reasons. First, it was always a bit of a wandering star, so by the time you started to see landmark skyscrapers, it was already meandering to the northwest, first up Beaver Hall and then west to Dominion Square.
None of the individual points of focus -- Victoria Square, Philips Square/Rene-Levesque, or Dominion Square -- build to a crescendo, really. They all have their airy qualities. At Victoria and Dominion, urban energy leaks to the west and south respectively. At PVM, it leaks down R-L to the east. There is a lack of enclosure.
Boston is similar, but a greater number of imposing prewar buildings, a smaller number of non-imposing fillers, and a tangled street network contain downtown energy even as the centre of gravity pulls to the Back Bay.
San Francisco is similar in its lack of an apex, but again, it's a larger, richer city with larger, richer buildings.
Montreal is doing everything it needs to do in terms of densifying these areas, and I think the construction to the East and North of Griffintown, as well as westwards along R-L, will do wonders for the Dominion and Victoria Square focus points. The construction on Philips Square will help PVM, as do the condos on University and Union.
Unfortunately, Montreal needs the skyscraper. Cities don't, but Montreal does.
This is not Madrid or Paris. The pre-war fabric is not imposing enough, in and of itself, to create the metropolitan impression. Neither is the height limit meaningful enough; at 15 stories, it might have had a chance. At 50 or thereabouts, you receive all of the qualities of the skyscraper save its most magnificent.
The culture of Montreal, at present, is not focused on large-scale metropolitan aesthetics. In this sense it is like Copenhagen, another wonderfully livable city whose visual impact is less than nearby peers such as Stockholm. The city's greatest triumphs of engineering might have traditionally been infrastructural and not strictly architectural.
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