ARTH 374 Architecture and Urbanism in Montreal

• Thursdays 8:45-11:30 am
• Instructor: Véronique Proteau

The relationship of architecture to issues of urbanism, analyzed through examples from Montreal’s past and/or present. (3 credits, no prerequisite.) As Bryan Demchinsky and Elaine Kalman Naves observed in their book Storied Streets (2000), Montreal belongs among the great cities that were twice built, “once of wood, brick, and stone and once as an act of imagination.” For several centuries now, the imagined Montreal is being edified through countless fiction novels, short stories and plays written by diverse authors who have scoured its grounds and experienced its singularities. This vast body of literature creatively materializes the city in all its glory and decay, richness and complexity, vibrancy and dullness, through the point of view of a wide array of fictional citizens which encompass diverse generations, genders, origins, cultures, religions, occupations, and socio-economic classes. These narrative texts, which benefit from an artistic licence and typically rely on various stereotypes, cannot be taken at face value in historical inquiries. However, they can be relevant in that they often reveal truths that are outside the reach of traditional methods such as archival research and on-site analysis, regarding, for example, how the city has been experienced and embodied in the past, particularly by marginalized groups and individuals. This course proposes to uncover and confront these three different types of readings about Montreal—the archival, the material and the fictional—as a means to reveal some of the city’s polyphonic micro-histories and build a fuller understanding of the history of its built environment. Through a combination of lectures, readings, field trips and archival research, students will learn how to document and interpret Montreal’s infrastructure as well as challenge the popular imagination about its history.