Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City

When cities were built with local natural materials, stone and granites, at certain hours of the day, depending on the light, if you’d look at the cityscape, it would blend with the sky, with the same halo as the mountains around. A man made nature, geometrically shaped by the hands of civilization.

That is something that I think of so often in New York City, at dusk, on a sunny day; the old towers and brick buildings suddenly become like mountains of ochre, red and yellows, and like in a Canaletto painting, with its light and color enveloping the architecture, some magic seems to happen every time that is indivisible from its context and locality. It’s the geologic history of a place and its palette.

With new and prefabricated façade materials this magic gets somehow lost, and cities tend to loose their distinctive colors, to a more generic type of architecture of glass and composite materials, shipped from around the world with completely manufactured processes. So big cities tend to look more similar every day, another trademark of globalization -- design and materials are seldom local anymore. These older parts of cities become like manuscripts from another time that help us understand and read those cities and its history, and the history of its people.

The city of Montreal has its color as well: it’s grey. When I went to interview few months ago architect, author, scholar, activist, and CCA’s founder Phyllis Lambert (DAMn63), -- who has fight to preserve Montréal’s architectural heritage for decades -- that’s something that stroke me on my first afternoon there, the beautiful grey stone large façade in the old harbor avenue. The sun was coming down, and the sky, the stone and the reflections on the river were one, and suddenly I felt I had arrived to Montréal, past and present uninterrupted.

From 12 October 2017 – Until 4 March 2018, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City, an exhibition curated by Phyllis Lambert that reveals her deep attachment to these Greystone buildings. This interest gave rise to a vast research project initiated more than forty years ago. It is an in-depth study of the history of these buildings from the 17th to the beginning of the 20th centuries, through the Greystone photographic series. It reveals the influence of geology, topography, politics, culture, and ethnicity in shaping the city over time.

Conceived as a photographic mission conducted by Phyllis Lambert and photographer Richard Pare through the Montreal neighborhoods from 1973 to 1974, the Greystone photographic series reveals the relationship between city growth, architectural expression, and individuals. Phyllis Lambert explains that this mission, a research approach focused on the visual, became “a catalyst for increased concerns about the conservation of the city’s heritage. Greystone buildings create a unifying sense across the island of Montreal.” Greystone evokes the scope and demanding aspects of the project: “Early in the morning we trudged through the snow, photographing the neighborhoods presented in this exhibition: Old Montreal and the original faubourgs directly north of it, as well as other faubourgs and suburban towns on the island of Montreal, as mapped in 1890.“

Among the possible ways of analyzing city fabric, the focus on a single material of construction provides insight into a wide range of topics. Originally functional, Montreal grey limestone buildings, distinct from those built with other materials, came to hold special symbolic value. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thick stone walls provided protection against attack, fire, and the cold. During the 19th century, Greystone buildings developed from a pragmatic to a symbolic role through successive, layered material transformations, reflecting the changes in politics, trade, cultural identity, society, and human ambition. “This approach would be less productive in cities like Paris or Jerusalem, for example, where all buildings are faced with local stone. However, in Montreal, the North American city with the greatest amount and concentration of stone construction, such focus is revelatory.” underlines Phyllis Lambert.

“Photographs are the protagonists of this exhibition”. Black and white, they are expanded on and complemented by maps that are key to understanding the city, its topography, building dates, architects, owners, and occupants at the time of construction. They explore Old Montreal and the three central neighborhoods — the former faubourgs of Saint-Laurent, Saint-Louis and Saint-Jacques, which have been the heart of Francophone Montreal for two centuries. Among the sources of research underlying this study are primary documents that include insurance atlases, historical city maps, cadastral plans, municipal tax assessment rolls, city directories, notarial records and private papers.

The research undertaken and presented in this exhibition permitted constructing a social history of urban change.