by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Montreal might be 362 years old, but much of our surroundings were born in a single decade 40 years ago. The metro, skyscrapers, suburbs, highway system and underground city were all fuelled by what today seems an almost unrecognizable urban vision. It was an era of ambition, optimism and arbitrary rule, good times and bad. A decade when islands could be thrown into the river to create enchanted islands or when entire neighbourhoods would be razed unopposed on the whim of the mayor.

Italian architect and professor Mirko Zardini is in town to help with the Canadian Centre for Architecture's exhibit The Sixties: Montreal Thinks Big, on display for 11 months starting October 20. He considers Montreal in those times as "the perfect case study, a prototype of a certain mode of thinking of the city in this period.

"They had a larger vision with a larger strategic view of the future of the city," he continues. "They were able to think farther than the year they were in - perhaps today we have lost that."

The era started with interventionist city planners reengineering the town like a doll's house. With neither peep nor petition, the city demolished neighbourhoods like Goose Village and those where the Décarie Expressway and CBC building now sit. "It was like a technocratic dream," says Zardini. "It was - in the beginning at least - completely detached from a kind of larger political and social process." But by the end of the decade, residential quiescence had been replaced by protest, most notable in the La Cité affair, where long-haired hippies blocked much of the planned demolition of the McGill Ghetto. It was the genesis of what Mirko calls "a new consciousness of the existing city."

Much of what was accomplished in Montreal in the '60s could never be done today, contends Zardini, and that's both good and bad. "There were big mistakes. I feel the process of razing part of the city and having a highway system go through neighbourhoods - from the contemporary point of view and in terms of the relationship between the new and the existing - that was really a very radical thing," he says, although he adds that decisions were based on the panicked notion that we'd be hosting six million residents by 2000, a number we've never come close to reaching.

The massive creation of roads and tunnels transported an entire urban mythology with it, with our metro system bringing an elfin fantasy of underground living. "There was an image of Montreal as a city living underground with ice covering it, which of course isn't true. But this exaggeration was very strong and it makes the point that the infrastructure brought a whole new kind of development," says Zardini.

The CCA promises to display a variety of historical materials, ranging from newspaper clippings to models in an effort to convey the foreign world that was urban planning in 1960s Montreal. "The mood is completely different today," says Zardini. "There's a clear difference between that incredibly optimistic period, in which there was a faith in the modern and progress, versus the situation we are in today."