Island of Exteriors

According to Robin Ward, Montreal’s buildings are “a fusion of tradition and modernity.” He notes this distinctive blend early in Exploring Montréal before turning to Expo 67. “And there are the spectacular relics of the World’s Fair.”

Even those of us who grew up far from Quebec didn’t escape the pull of Expo 67. It convinced some impressionable young people (like me) to become designers, as it made architecture appear to be a boundlessly creative profession. I’m still enthralled by what remains of the months-long exposition. There’s the American pavilion’s immense geodesic dome, designed by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, repurposed in 1995 as the Biosphère environment museum. And there’s Moshe Safdie’s still futuristic-looking housing experiment, Habitat 67. Montreal itself was a revelation six decades ago. The city exemplified what urbanity could be, with remarkable public and private projects unfolding in parallel with the fair, which helped recast the island in the St. Lawrence as a global metropolis. When Ward writes that “the architectural heritage of Montréal is second to none in North America,” it’s difficult not to agree.

Ward, a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, is an architectural critic, writer, graphic artist, and photographer. After moving to Vancouver in 1988, he wrote a weekly architectural column for the Vancouver Sun for more than a decade. He’s also no stranger to the guidebook format: among his many titles is Exploring Vancouver (co-written with Harold Kalman), now in its fifth edition, along with books on the buildings of Glasgow and Edinburgh. In Exploring Montréal, he is an informed observer, not a civic booster, and the result is both expert and accessible.

Initially, I wondered about the title’s arithmetic: Why 150 plus one? The one is likely the Van Horne Mansion, demolished in 1973 and the only included building that no longer exists. “The demolition of the Van Horne Mansion provoked public outrage and mobilized support for heritage preservation,” Ward notes. Soon after, Héritage Montréal was formed by concerned citizens. In that sense, many of the buildings celebrated in Exploring Montréal owe something to the mansion’s sacrifice, and it’s earned its place in the guide, even if posthumously.

Ward explains that the catalogued buildings were “chosen not only for their architectural interest and environmental sustainability but also for their compelling narratives.” I was relieved that so many were built before 1980 — or whenever sustainability became part of the architectural lexicon. It would have been a shame to ignore historical structures because they don’t meet today’s environmental standards. Similarly, it’s good that Ward’s criteria didn’t exclude edifices named for famous people now out of favour or beautiful churches because of Catholicism’s connection to residential schools and unchaste priests.

Many historic buildings are gathered here, including the august offices that symbolize Montreal’s financial pre-eminence during the first century of Confederation. The competition for most impressive bank headquarters began even earlier, in the 1840s. Canada’s oldest bank, the Bank of Montreal (established in 1817), built its headquarters “with a pedimented portico of six Corinthian columns.” This was a temple of commerce crowned by “a dome inspired by the Pantheon in Rome.” In 1928, the Royal Bank Tower, designed by the New York firm York and Sawyer, was “the tallest building in the British Empire,” with a “massive, Tuscan-columned podium bigger than the adjacent Molson’s Bank.” If size is a measure of success, the Sun Life Building triumphs. Designed by the Toronto architects Darling and Pearson, it was the largest building in the British Empire when its third and final phase was finished in 1933. “Thousands of workers could be accommodated inside the steel-framed, granite-clad 26-storey structure,” Ward writes. “When Britain was threatened with invasion by Nazi Germany, ‘Operation Fish’ saw the Bank of England’s gold reserves secretly shipped across the Atlantic in crates stamped ‘Fish.’ They were stored in Sun Life’s vault, guarded by a Mountie.”

Montreal’s skyline changed dramatically after the war with the addition of three major landmarks. Completed in 1962, Place Ville Marie became the country’s tallest building: “Its cruciform plan was chosen to bring natural light to the office floors that project from the concrete service and elevator core.” Three years later, the forty-seven-storey Stock Exchange Tower (Tour de la Bourse) took the title, as well as that of “the tallest reinforced concrete skyscraper in the world.” Many locals celebrated: “The oldest exchange in Canada becomes the most modern in the world.” In 1967, a brutalist behemoth appeared, Place Bonaventure. While not the tallest, “the multi-layered labyrinth was the world’s largest concrete building.” It takes up an entire city block to accommodate shops, offices, a hotel, and trade and convention facilities.

Two omissions in the commercial category surprised me. One is 1250 René-Lévesque (formerly the IBM-Marathon Tower), designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and completed in 1992. At forty-seven storeys, it’s a classic skyscraper, the kind King Kong would have wanted to climb with Fay Wray. The other is Westmount Square, a residential and office complex by Mies van der Rohe. Sitting between Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest and Boulevard De Maisonneuve, it shares with the Toronto-Dominion Centre the architect’s International Style sensibility. It opened in 1967, about the same time as the first tower in Toronto.

Montreal has numerous architecturally significant churches — hardly surprising. La Visitation, the oldest church on the island of Montreal, Ward explains, “dates from the missionary and fur-trade era of New France.” Many of these buildings have stunning, well-preserved interiors, even more remarkable at a time when plenty of churches are neglected or sold off for condo developments.

But when it comes to the interiors, houses of prayer have stiff competition. Crew Collective & Café, the barrel-vaulted banking hall of what was once the head office of the Royal Bank (from the 1920s), is awe-inspiring. Opening in 1980, the Lucien-L’Allier metro station, with arches like Roman aqueducts, ennobles the subway experience. However, my vote goes to Le 9e: “This magical space was first opened in 1931 as the Ninth Floor Restaurant of Eaton’s department store.” Here Lady Flora Eaton tapped the French architect Jacques Carlu, who was famed for his use of the art moderne style and also responsible for Eaton’s Seventh Floor in Toronto, which opened a year earlier. After Eaton’s in Montreal closed in 1999, the rooms sat abandoned for years. They were restored in 2024 and are sublime.

This book has quirky buildings too, including two inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. Ward notes how Château Champlain’s windows “resemble those at Marin County Civic Center.” It’s no wonder the hotel is colloquially called the “cheese grater.” The Letourneux fire station echoes Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, and is about the most eccentric fire hall you can imagine. Another inclusion is inspired: the Pure Milk Bottle on Rue Lucien-L’Allier. The ten-metre-tall pint weighs six tonnes and is perched atop what was once the company’s factory. There had been an outbreak of typhoid fever in 1927, caused by unpasteurized milk, and “the bottle was a publicity stunt, part of Pure Milk’s effort to reassure consumers that its milk was safe to drink.”

Overall, these are memorable condominiums, offices, public buildings, art installations, and monuments. The brilliant contemporary examples should empower all of us to demand better from our cities, as Montrealers have done. Their amazing structures and public art don’t merely populate the urban space; they are essential to its sophisticated, idiosyncratic culture.

Exploring Montréal is an exemplary guide, but the genre has intrinsic limitations when it comes to explaining architecture. Organizing entries by neighbourhood, for instance, chops a city into small pieces, not well understood at the micro level. Arranging buildings by how you encounter them on the street rather than in a timeline can’t offer a coherent historical narrative to give their existence context. One moment you’re in the eighteenth century; turn the corner and you’re face to face with a structure completed yesterday. That can be amusing, but without some local knowledge already in mind, the experience feels jumbled, and the historical tidbits can become repetitive because properties are treated in isolation.

You also easily overlook the overarching stories, ones that are often more interesting than any single edifice. Expo 67, for example, was transformational for Montreal: the subway and other civic projects that it engendered are key to understanding other projects of the period. The before-and-after saga of the fair — or the Olympic Stadium debacle several years later — adds a dimension that takes architecture beyond the sound bite. There’s a related issue with references to styles and designers. If you don’t already know, for instance, what art deco is, or who Darling and Pearson were and why it mattered that they were hired for a major Montreal commission, Ward’s brief mentions of them don’t help you much.

What’s the alternative? Keep Ward’s neighbourhood codes intact for flâneurs but present the buildings in a chronology for general readers, perhaps with a handful of sidebars that sketch transformative moments and explain key styles and practitioners along the way. Yes, that might mean a bit of page flipping on the sidewalk. But for those who want to understand Montreal’s architecture and aren’t simply exploring the métropole with a checklist, it would enrich the experience of reading such a guide.