‘Architectural interest, environmental sustainability, compelling narrative’

Exploring Montréal: 151 Best Buildings
by Robin Ward

Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2026
$29.95  /  9781771624619

Reviewed by Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe

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In 2006, Monréal/Montréal was declared the first UNESCO City of Design – not unfairly given its rich and lengthy architectural patrimony. Robin Ward, a graduate of the celebrated Glasgow School of Art and respected architectural critic and author, does justice to that inheritance. He has added to the comprehensive yet accessible guidebooks he has written singly or collaboratively, including on Victoria and Vancouver, in this province. The photography is excellent and selection of buildings and civic statuary or artwork both astute and appropriate to exploring the built environment of Canada’s one-time leading metropolis. Its historical trace from Indigenous to French then British imperial regime, and, more recently, the post-colonial era, is effectively recorded both pictorially and through informative as well as insightful text. These latter alike manage to interweave biographical, technical, and aesthetic commentary. The visually appealing bibliographical composition is enhanced by a series of maps marking districts and individual sites that together, will beckon design professionals, urban history enthusiasts, and attentive visitors to explore the “City of Saints” gathered around Mount Royal on Montreal Island.

Interestingly, Ward has followed recent linguistic terminology in using Francophone nomenclature. The recent legislation undercutting former Federal bi-lingual practice – one instituted by Montréal’s most famous politician, Pierre Elliot Trudeau – is the latest episode in modern civic narrative. Through the several conflicts between British and French control of New France/Lower Canada the built environment reflected their pattern of changing Dominion [of Canada] (the Biblical descriptor once applied to the Confederation). The French religio-seigneurial system was largely supplanted by the Anglo-Scots pursuit of resource development and financial expansion. The societal authority of the Roman Catholic church actually enabled the rise of such technocratic and industrial enterprise as evinced by the establishment of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Knowledge [McGill University].  The once massive Angus Workshops manufactured rolling stock for the Canadian Pacific Railway, while the city headquartered the quiver of major Canadian banks: the Bank of Montreal, the Merchants Bank, the Royal Bank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Especially from the Napoleonic era the port of Montréal – positioned well up the St. Lawrence River and deep into the North American continent (later bolstered by construction of the St Lawrence seaway) – enjoyed tremendous prosperity. That period of economic growth was celebrated by the erection of a column honouring Admiral Nelson whose victory off Cape Trafalgar initiated the many decades of Pax Britannica; a taller monument once stood in Dublin, designed by William Wilkins also responsible for the Nelson Column at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk.

Ward includes other artefacts of Montréal’s erstwhile dominant Anglo-Scottish heritage. Not just the original edifice of McGill University or the Redpath and McCord museums plus the now defunct Royal Victoria Hospital, but also the statue erected to King Edward VII and the Boer War monument in which the Royal Canadian Regiment performed with considerable gallantry. Add to those the Armoury of the Black Watch of Canada and its regimental church of St Andrew and St Paul on Sherbrooke Street. Ward reminds us of the magnificent stepped structure of the SunLife Building housed the gold bullion shipped from the Bank of England during the Second World War. The very railway station and hotel architecture of the CPR, and Grand Trunk Pacific, were chiefly inspired by the Scots Baronial revival: an architectural idiom adapted from French Renaissance Chateaux, used by Charles Barry for the Star and Garter Hotel in Richmond, and favoured for railway architecture as well as by several of those Scottish nobles who promoted the Highland  Clearances which, paradoxically or ironically, propelled the almost hegemonic mould of 19^th and early 20^th-century Canada.

That relative balance of power between the “Two Founding Nations” – Indigenous peoples apart, the Canadian ethnic demographic was always more diverse – reversed from about the time Hugh MacLennan published his novel Two Solitudes in 1945. Thereafter, with the quite swift decline in British power and allegiance, the French-Canadian culture and political independence consolidated. Ward includes a fine photograph of “Ardvarna,” the eclectically-styled house built to designs by the École des Beaux-Arts-trained Maxwell brothers. It was designed for stock-broker Sir Henry Meredith and his wife, daughter of the owner of the Allan Steamship Line, on the lower end of the ‘Golden Square Mile.’  This precinct of superior social privilege and monetary status, representing suppression and exclusion of Franco-Canadian legitimacy, likely prompted the running of the multi-lane Avenue des Pins [Pine Avenue] through its formerly tranquil landscaped gardens. The built environment is ever the seemingly permanent, yet more usually volatile, site of shifting proprietorship. The obverse is the evisceration of conventional French Canadian religious observance marked, for their architectural historical rather than liturgical functioning, by the many handsome, chiefly monumental Academic Classical churches included by Ward. To some degree, these relics of the secularizing ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960s parallel the impact of strident nationalism and the FLQ crisis that witnessed the overnight exodus of financial corporations to Toronto. Nevertheless, Montréal has been, and remains, a locus of Canadian national purpose, typified by Expo’67 and the 1976 Olympics, one legacy of which is the Metro system with a number of notably designed and ornamented stations.

Previously as putative nexus of Confederation, Montréal exerted considerable economic, political, and cultural sway right out to Vancouver Island. McGill College of the West morphed into the University of British Columbia, its establishment in part funded by the Macdonald tobacco family. The McGill School of Architecture nurtured, among a bevy of Canadian architects, Arthur Erickson’s notable design talent, and his mentor, John Bland, together with Harold Spence-Sales, wrote the brief for the creation of the Vancouver Planning Department. The reverse flow of architectural acumen was heralded by Expo’67 and continued, as Ward illustrates with the Patkau’s imaginatively functional Quebec Public Library (in collaboration with Pelletier Architects). The larger promotion of architectural enterprise and recognition of its importance in constructing the social fabric has been the mission and achievement of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; one major exhibition being devoted to the emergence of Modernism centred on Vancouver. Its founder, Dr. Phyllis Lambert, has advocated with signal success for the aesthetic and technical puissance of architecture/planning. One component of that vision has been to conserve civic architectural legacy especially in her home city.

Instead of picking out highlights from this admirable guide, it seems more fitting to commend again Ward’s selection. True that some may question the absence of more buildings from the campii of the Université de Montréal or McGill; or of Hazen Sise’s Beaver Lake Pavilion (with Guy Desbarats; restored by Paul and Saia); or the houses of Percy Nobbs, doyen of the McGill architectural programme, and of Ernest Cormier who was chosen to sit on design committee for the United Nations headquarters at New York. Yet he has fulfilled his sated criteria: architectural interest, environmental sustainability, and compelling narrative. Actually, that cluster of values offers a robust template for relating the history and contemporaneity of architecture: recognizing that daily living is marshalled by often scantly comprehended internal and external design form and structural composition. Such, in conjunction with natural topography, is the physical and psychological scenery of our experience. Robin Ward, building on the building of Montréal, affords means to heighten appreciation of what Le Corbusier defined as “the learned game.”

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Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe headed the Department of Fine Arts (now Art History Visual Art and Theory) at UBC and the Individual Interdisciplinary Programme before serving as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at UBC. He wrote the section on architecture in Canada and the United States for the latest edition (2019) of the Banister Fletcher “Global History of Architecture” (with Michelangelo Sabatino). A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Margot Fulton Award, his many publications on architectural history include Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age (UBC Press, 1983, with Anthony Barrett); The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver, 1938-1963 (Douglas & McIntyre, 1996); Architecture and the Canadian Fabric (UBC Press, 2011); and Canada: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books, 2016, with Michelangelo Sabatino), reviewed here by Martin Segger. As Rhodri Jones he has written a memoir, Edges of Empire: A Documentary (Rarebit Press, 2017). [Editor’s note: Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe has reviewed books by Harold Kalman and Robin Ward, Adele Weder, and Matthew Soules & Michael Perlmutter for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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