The southwest exit of Montreal’s Jean-Talon metro station — a small but interesting specimen of contemporary architecture — is situated along Jean-Talon Street, at the end of a huge parking lot and between some commercial strips in need of renovation. In that situation, we can hardly tell the difference between the street itself and the parking lot; the sidewalks are invisible.
And yet this is the main exit one uses to reach Jean-Talon Market, one of the most famous landmarks in midtown Montreal. And the area’s density means that Jean-Talon is also a street often densely packed with commuters.
As part of a design exercise, we’ve been thinking about how we could transform this area without investing a significant amount of important resources, and in what way this could be done in the short term.
The simple solution we provide here is an outdoor café and terrace, where people could simply stop by for a drink or have something on their way to the office. The design of the public space suggested, using trees, plants and some furniture, helps structure the street itself. It is, as you can see, a basic concept that we prepared quickly to use as an example.
In light of this solution, do you think Montreal — or other cities — ought to invest resources in some similarly simple transformations ? Could our quality of life be significantly upgraded by little more than such simple urban design?
Earlier this month I found myself in Macau for an afternoon, waiting for my girlfriend to pick up her Macau identity card from a local government office. I wandered up to the small streets just below the Fortaleza do Monte, an old military fort, and happened across a trio of terraces lined by mid-twentieth-century buildings. Each row of buildings was identical, but the presence of their inhabitants was seen in the façade of every individual apartment.
Call it déjà vu: five years after Norman Foster’s plan for the West Kowloon Cultural District was scrapped in the face of massive public controversy, another Foster plan for the district has been chosen.
On Friday, the authority in charge of developing the cultural district announced that Foster’s bid was selected over rival plans by Rem Koolhaas and local architect Rocco Yim. It’s not a surprising decision, but it’s a disappointing one, because Foster’s plan is by far the least interesting and most unambitious of the lot.
Foster’s original plan, unveiled in 2001, called for a giant canopy to be built over most of the 40-hectare site, but the government’s decision to let a single property developer take control over the entire district angered the public, forcing it to send the entire cultural district concept back to the drawing board.
Last August, three new master plans were unveiled to the public. Each of the plans had to conform to a set of basic criteria, including the same amount of performance space, exhibition space (including a new contemporary art museum, M+), park space, commercial space and residential space. (The commission was to develop a master plan only; the design of its specific components will be determined later.)
Foster, Yim and Koolhaas took this mix of ingredients and produced plans that were strikingly different. Foster’s plan called for a giant city park with most of the residential, commercial and institutional uses clustered in a single waterfront strip. Yim imagined the site as a vast, multi-leveled, green-roofed complex linked by various levels of passages. Koolhaas’ plan was by far the boldest, with a strong conceptual element that saw the cultural district broken into three urban clusters, inspired in spirit by ancient Chinese villages and in form by Hong Kong’s traditional urban fabric, street markets and all. Each cluster would be separated by green space, some of which would be used for farming.
Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a collection of farming towns and fishing villages home to not much more than 300,000 people. It is now a sprawling metropolis of several million, with around 3.5 million in the city centre and another five or six million in the suburbs and industrial towns that stretch for miles beyond.
The story of Shenzhen’s growth has been told many times, in many places, but it is still hard to understand exactly how quickly the city has grown until you see it from above. 1,200 feet above ground, in the observation deck of Shun Hing Square, the city’s tallest building, the ad hoc nature of Shenzhen’s development becomes obvious.
It might only be thirty years old, but Shenzhen has been built and rebuilt so many times, it has the urban layers of a city four times its age. Country fields developed into worker-unit housing blocks in the 1980s were redeveloped into low-rise private housing in the 1990s and then into high-rises in the 2000s. None of these generations fully subsume the other — there are always traces left of the past — and the city is littered with discarded planning initiatives, like attempts to build tree-line boulevards that were abandoned after just a few blocks.
Then-and-now impresario Lee Chi-man uploaded this compilation the other day. It depicts Shin Wong Street as seen from Hollywood Road, in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district, in 1969 and 2011. Lee accompanied the image with a short, poignant inscription, in Chinese, which Laine Tam took the liberty of translating:
When I was taking this picture, people passing by kept giving me weird looks. They peeked at me and then looked at where I was pointing my lens.
It’s true, this road is empty, a charmless building on the side. There are no worthy reasons to press the shutter at this spot, yet I’m here crouching. Passers-by are probably thinking, “What is this man photographing?”
What I really want to show them is the scenery from 1969, to let them know that the scene really was worth capturing then, not only for photography, but for sketching, or as a background of a movie, an art film…
But today, there is nothing here. I’m crouching on the sidewalk, framing my shot. I knew everyone thought I was a low taste long yau. I… understand.
What happened here ? This used to be the north end of Griffintown, right next to the business center of Montreal.
À Montréal, au cours des années 1950 et 1960, notamment suite au rapport Dozois, on identifie des dizaines de quartiers qualifiés d’insalubres, vus comme irrécupérables, et où les taudis menacent la santé publique. Puis ont les rase, un par un, pour faire place à des projets d’ensemble, comme les Habitations Jeanne-Mance ou encore la tour de Radio-Canada, dans l’Est.
Hong Kong’s gloomy winter chill has set in, and with no indoor heating, the best thing to do on a cold day is to set off for a brisk walk. That’s what I did two weeks ago when I took the train up to Fanling, the last major suburb before the border with Shenzhen, where I wandered over to the market town of Luen Wo Hui.
Though it seems old in comparison to what surrounds it, Luen Wo was actually a modern development master-minded by a group of wealthy Fanling property owners in the 1940s. A market was built in 1951 to serve the surrounding farms and villages. Over the course of the 1950s, the surrounding area was developed with shophouses into a regional commercial centre meant to compete with the nearby market town of Shek Wu Hui, about 20 minutes away by foot.
(The story behind Luen Wo’s development is actually quite fascinating, with inter-family rivalries, accusations of price-gouging, rural politics and the influx of Chinese refugees after 1949, many of whom were farmers from around Guangzhou and who resumed their agricultural practices in Hong Kong. It’s all covered in sociologist Chan Kwok-shing’s essay on Luen Wo Hui.)
Luen Wo quickly became economic and political centre for the surrounding area. There were rice shops, dry goods stores, travel agents, barbershops and a cinema, as well as bars that served British troops stationed in nearby military bases. In the 1980s, Fanling was designated as a New Town — a focal point for new population growth — and intense development followed.
Boulevard Exelmans at Rue Chanez, XVIe Arrondisement, 1905-2008
Contemporary photos by Laurent David Ruamps
Chat up a critic of historic preservation and the conversation may turn, sooner or later, toward Paris. What the French capital’s historic center has retained in fin-de-siècle flourish, s/he might claim, it lacks in the dynamism that fuels the growth of other great cities. London, New York, and Tokyo boast continually adaptable, evolving cores. But in attempting to cling to its glory days as “capital of the 19th century”, Paris consigns its modern needs to forgettable, peripheral suburbs. Its heart risks becoming little more than a quaint period museum.
You don’t have to be a Paris detractor to buy into such a narrative. Luc Sante, the author of a recent look at two new Paris histories in the New York Review of Books, has noticed the city’s chroniclers shifting their gaze, increasingly focusing on the large-scale changes now taking place outside Paris’ core. Today they find it impossible to even conceive of the city as a living, breathing organism without casting their glance toward its roiling, occasionally riotous, undeniably more au courant satellite settlements. As Eric Hazan writes in his new book, The Invention of Paris:
[A]nother “new Paris” is taking shape…it is leaving the west of the city to advertising executives and oil tycoons…crossing the terrible barrier of the Boulevard Périphérique…and stretching towards what is already de facto the twenty-first arrondissement, towards Pantin, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Bagnolet, Montreuil…
There’s no question that much of Paris’s cultural and economic dynamism alike is now weighted toward its outskirts. But to what extent is its center’s supposedly stultifying over-preservation to blame? Images taken by Laurent David Ruamps, an architecture enthusiast who has rephotographed a number of old postcard views of early 20th century Paris, suggest that the idea itself that Paris has been frozen in architectural time might not be so fully borne out.
Ruamps’ then-and-after views of Le Corbusier’s modernist Villa Bresnus, swallowed by denser, more street-sensitive construction, demonstrated the resilience of traditional urban development in a Paris suburb. That makes it less surprising to consider that, much more than many casual observers would suppose, the central Paris we know today was a relatively recent invention.
Earlier this week, the urban issues magazine Next American City tweeted a link to an illustrated cross-section of the Kowloon Walled City, the world’s greatest informal settlement. It gives you a good idea of just how intense the level of human activity within the city was: one room a factory, the next a bedroom, the next a restaurant, all of it linked by an unplanned panoply of staircases, bridges and alleyways.
It has been nearly 18 years since the last piece of the Walled City was torn down by the Hong Kong government. Interest in the city has only magnified since then; there are books, documentaries, websites and discussion forum threads about its architecture, how it came to be and what it was like living inside. (This forum thread in particular is worth looking at — with 330 posts since 2004, it’s as complete a repository of information as you’ll find online.)
By the time it met its demise, the Walled City was an interconnected group of buildings, some up to 16 stories in height, that was home to 33,000 people. It covered an area of just 6.5 acres, making it the most densely-populated place on earth. Long notorious for its brothels and drug dens, it was also home to unlicenced dental clinics, small factories, restaurants and hundreds of ordinary working-class families, most of them recent migrants from mainland China. The entire city was built by hand, without a master plan: a shantytown in highrise form.
In 1922, Le Corbusier was hired by a man named George Besnus to build a new house in the Paris suburb of Vaucresson. It was the architect’s first chance to put the Purist ideals he had been toying with to practice: an architecture stripped of its excesses, made as clean, clear and efficient as possible. The house was meant as a statement, from the gracefully rounded edges of its balcony to the bathroom, which was placed in the centre of the building, allowing for an uninterrupted flow of interior space.
As you can see in the photo compilation above, though, Le Corbusier’s original design has been altered beyond recognition. Gone are the carefully-considered proportions, the clean contrast with scrubby surroundings. A four-sided roof replaced the original flat one and shops were built in the house’s front garden. It now looks like a slightly more modern version of the petit bourgeois houses that surround it, which is ironic, considering that Le Corbusier’s Modernist villa predates them by at least several years. In a way, knowing that those fuddy-duddy traditional houses were built during the emergence of Modernism makes you all the more sympathetic to Le Corbusier’s ideals. You can see very clearly what he was working against.
“Sauvons l’église Saint-Sauveur!” I wrote three years ago on Spacing Montreal. And for three years, it seemed vaguely possible that the 145-year-old church on lower Saint-Denis Street wouldn’t be demolished. The huge hospital for which it was supposed to make way, the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montreal (CHUM), has been stalled for years, and for awhile it would have been reasonable to guess that it would eventually crawl into the back room where tired, abandoned Montreal megaprojects go to die.
Alas, that wasn’t the case. Kristian Gravenor broke the news in yesterday’s Gazette that Montreal’s city council has issued a demolition permit for the church, which has sat empty and abandoned for years. It isn’t in the best shape — its prized stained glass windows, designed by the renowned Guido Nincheri, were stolen in 2006 — but its bones are strong. More importantly, it remains a testament to the city’s history.
Saint-Sauveur was built thirteen years after a fire swept through the Faubourg Saint-Laurent in 1852, its greystone façade, neo-Gothic architecture and tin steeple a testament to the fashion of the era. In the beginning, it was actually an Anglican church named Holy Trinity. It didn’t become Catholic until the 1920s, when Holy Trinity moved west to NDG and the church was sold to a Syrian congregation.
Nothing but a wall remains from an old house that once stood on Bonham Strand West in Sheung Wan. It’s a bit like the ghost buildings you often find when a structure has been torn down and some evidence of its existence — the outlines of a roof, windows, staircases — lingers on the wall of the adjacent building. (The Spanish photographer Anna Malagrida captured the effect in a 2003 photo installation called Barrio Chino, which you can see here.) In this case, however, the entire wall has been left intact, which seems to be fairly common practice in Hong Kong. You’ll often see old walls poking out between two newer buildings.
worst anti-bike lane arguments ever: pretending cyclists don't pay taxes, cost of "wide stripes of paint", rain erosion http://t.co/i723dTGKabout 6 hours agofrom web
fans of jason hawkes' gorgeous night aerials of london: here's more of his work, in large format, from across the UK http://t.co/Z0RGSCQSabout 11 hours agofrom web
after the whole shipping container architecture trend, shipping pallet street furniture was probably inevitable http://t.co/fHlgChBoabout 14 hours agofrom web
