Save Griffintown!

Hello readers, journalists and j-school students alike.

This blog is NOT current or being updated in any way. The authors no longer live in or close to Griffintown, and are no longer involved with the official Committee for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown (CSRG).

For more updated news or for requests for comments and interviews, we suggest you contact CSRG’s spokesperson Jeff Dungen via their website, http://www.griffintown.org.

Thanks,
A.J. Kandy

Reader Roger sends a link to a LesAffaires.com article, in which it’s stated that a new, smaller Projet Griffintown, built solely below Wellington (abutting the train tracks) is set to go forward as early as this fall, presuming the plans are approved by the new administration. It’s said the plans may come under harder review because Projet Montreal’s Richard Bergeron is head of urbanism; so far, the report says that the project will be mostly residential and have only a few shops, not a full-blown shopping centre as previously planned. The controversial PPU which allowed for much higher building heights is still in effect, but the existing street grid will be preserved.

Read the full article here at Les Affaires.

When we last heard from the project in May 2009, the OCPM had issued some recommendations based on the public consultation process, including alterations to the design plan. Today, Canada Lands Corporation announced that the City of Montreal intends to vote to approve the revised project next week.

Instead of four open basins (one of which was intended to be a kind of open-air pool, if I recall correctly) only two will be incorporated; these are linked together to form a loop that runs around the easternmost buildings. with three 20-storey towers.

The westernmost basins will be ceded to the City of Montreal, to become two continuous green spaces that run north-south between Ottawa and the public park alongside the Lachine Canal, one of which will be an “aire de jeux” – most likely a soccer/football field – and one partly an artificial reed-bed wetland that processes rainwater (and possibly, sewage?), reducing the new neighborhood’s impact on the existing infrastructure. Overall, the project is aiming for LEED-ND status, with green roofs to manage rainwater and reduce heating/cooling costs.

The percentage of space given over to mixed residential-commercial space seems to have increased; there seems to be a strong tilt towards creating artist workshop spaces and galleries in the area (expanding on Judith Bauer’s idea of a “cultural corridor”). They ask to hold architectural design contests for the proposed buildings; I’m hoping we don’t end up with starchitectural nightmares or East Bloc prison chic, but something that harmonizes well with its red-brick, turn-of-the-century neighbours.

What’s left to do is some consulting with the South-West Borough to ensure that the higher towers don’t have too bad an impact on sunlight and wind at ground level. I have to say that I was initially skeptical, but overall, it looks like a very good project, and an example of how public consultation ought to be done in this city.

My friend Alanah Heffez posted at SpacingMontreal.ca about architecture firm Cardinal Hardy’s concept for the Seville Residences project, proposed for the north side of Sainte-Catherine Street near Atwater by the Bronfman-controlled Claridge Properties. It’s named after the former Seville Theatre, a purpose-built movie theatre from 1929 with additional street-front retail spaces; in the 1940s, it hosted live acts including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. Reverting to a repertory movie house, the building slowly decayed over the 70s and 80s until it was shuttered as unsafe. Part of an outside wall collapsed in 1994; its historic interiors were gutted for a never-realized redevelopment project. Now, with the heritage façade deemed unpreservable, it’s set to be demolished.

According to the Cardinal Hardy plan, the theatre would be recalled as a visual echo in the new building…as a symbolic corner of yellow brick.

The SpacingMontreal article raises the question of façadism —  the process of integrating heritage façades, typically the only portion of a building protected by a heritage designation, into new construction. She compares it to the retro-revival quest for authenticity among urban hipsters. I’m not sure I agree with that particular premise, because today’s architects seem to incorporate heritage elements only grudgingly, or when forced to by heritage preservation laws.

Occasionally, the results can be quite good, like the World Trade Centre in Old Montreal, which cleverly recycled an alleyway into a soaring atrium, used classical details inside, and largely matched new interiors to old exteriors. Sadly, the norm seems to be things like the mismatched 3-floor / 5-floor  chimera of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (with those infuriating, hobbling stairs); bluntly unfinished-looking black cinderblock boxes like the Hotel Opus, divorced from its Art Nouveau front on St-Laurent; and the unimaginative incorporation of Edwardian white-tile apartments to the tutti-frutti cubes of the Webster Library at Concordia. In all three cases, the architects paid no attention to the scale, rhythm, textures, or idioms of the preserved heritage elements.

No-one can really argue that the rejuvenation of this strip of Sainte Catherine Street isn’t vital to boosting downtown, nor that the creation of more rental apartments will help ease pressure on a market that has seen too many properties converted to condos. What I’m more skeptical about is what they’re planning to build on that block — if it’s anything like the mockup shown in the SpacingMontreal post, it’s yet another bland, postmodern set of cereal boxes with ‘interesting’ window lines. This, to be sited next to the clownish spectacle of the AMC Forum, does not bode well.

Does a corner of yellow brick do the memory of a minor architectural gem any service? The Seville, which my parents used to attend frequently during its years as a repertory cinema, was a place which inspired attention and imagination. I’m worried that what’s planned will induce a state of torpor instead. If the city really wants to honor the memories of M. Cajetan Dufort (architect) and Emmanuel Briffa (interiors), why couldn’t they insist that whatever gets built must be both future-focused, yet respectful of the neighborhood’s pre-war (as they say in NYC) architectural heritage? In short, why not build a 1929-esque building that’s up to LEED standards?

There is absolutely nothing on a technological level preventing today’s architects and builders from doing just that. I worry, however, that they’ve lost touch with basic architectural vocabulary. For instance,the new condo building that went up on the site of the old Unitarian church on Sherbrooke Street mimics the forms of its neighbors, but its proportions are all slightly off. The entrance portico seems like a Canadian Tire version of neoclassical; like nearly all new buildings, the windowsills (and hence, the implied thickness of the walls) are a bit too shallow; it appears to be clad in white styrofoam and tack-on MDF crown molding, as opposed to limestone and brick. Overall it’s a lot better than we might have expected — thank the gods it’s not another Port Royal — and it’s a bit of a novelty to see old forms pop up downtown again, but I can’t help wishing they had paid a little more attention to detail; that it had more of the sense of permanence as the Acadia or the Linton.

Whatever gets built on Sainte-Catherine Street, our main artery, ought to really feel of Montreal — new, yet familiar — and drawing on its neighbors for inspiration would be a welcome change.

According to the Metro newspaper, the City of Montreal is lifting its expropriation orders on properties in Griffintown not already directly owned by developer Devimco, who say they will be proceeding with a new, downscaled residential project below Wellington.

As far as I’ve been given to understand, the re-zoning to mixed use is still valid, so individual property owners should be free to sell or redevelop their own lands as they see fit.

http://www.journalmetro.com/montreal/article/183365

(Thanks to SG reader Elizabeth for the news tip.)

Rima Elkouri writes in La Presse about demographic trends producing some paradoxical changes in the makeup of Montreal, namely, a multilingual, immigrant society with a common public language, French (well, wasn’t that the point of all the language laws, after all?)

One line strikes me as rather willfully ignorant, however:

Les tendances dominantes sont le déficit de naissance chez les francophones, l’étalement urbain et l’arrivée d’une proportion importante d’immigrants non francophones. Or, il est très difficile de faire bouger ces tendances. […] Contrer l’étalement urbain? Pas évident d’aller à l’encontre du choix personnel d’un nombre croissant de familles qui vont s’établir en banlieue.

Is suburban sprawl really a personal choice? I would say that it is in reality a lack of choice — it is what has been made available on the market by speculators and developers, to the exclusion of all else. It is also the result of provincial policy decisions that favour automobile use over investment in public transit (highway 30), municipal policy decisions that delay or sideline walkable, transit-centric, denser urban neighborhoods with good portions of affordable housing. It is also the result of banks, private and public investment groups putting all their eggs into the production-homebuilding industry.

Maybe people have been sold on the idea of suburbia as the dream where you have all the lebensraum you need, but when you think about it, suburbia is a lifestyle choice that has been politically wedged into our society, that drains the main economic engine (Montreal) of money in order to sustain itself. If it continues, Montreal’s critical infrastructure will continue to degrade, but ultimately, if Montreal goes, so go the suburbs that depend upon it vampirically.