Built to last

Witold Rybczynski remembers
a life in architecture

by JULIET WATERS

In 1889, a journalist from Harper’s magazine wrote: “Montreal is a striking exception to the text that a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Last week, before his talk at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, I read this to Witold Rybczynski, the prolific architecture critic for Slate. He chuckled. Back in 1993, when he was making the decision to leave Montreal, he might not have agreed. The city was heading into its second referendum, linguistic tensions were high, the mood was dreary and the city’s future felt uncertain.

Rybczynski grew up in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, went to Loyola High and studied architecture at McGill in the early ’60s. He worked for a time in Moshe Safdie’s office (the architect behind Habitat 67), and converted Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome into a bird sanctuary.

“Montreal at the time of Expo 67 was really an amazing place, really an exciting place to work. It was crawling with architects, mostly American, and also European. But that all really changed. That cosmopolitanism disappeared. The Olympics really killed all that.”

Before he started his career, however, he underwent training in architecture that had little to do with Montreal. In one of the most interesting essays in his latest book, My Two Polish Grandfathers and Other Essays on the Imaginative Life, Rybczynski writes, “We were being taught to make a new kind of architecture—Modern Architecture—but it was one that most of us had never actually seen…Instead of experiencing architecture, we studied it by looking at pictures.”

Over coffee, he elaborates. “The strange thing about Montreal when I was studying was that there wasn’t any modern architecture in Montreal, you had some early skyscrapers going up, but there was very little modern architecture and I would say no important modern architecture at all.”

This isn’t to say that there was nothing to study in Montreal. “The shame of it was that Montreal had this terrific Art Deco architecture, unique in North America. What Americans call Art Deco is mostly like Miami, which is this really cheap sort of plaster version. Rockefeller Center is one of the only places where you see it, but the Great Depression stopped construction. It seemed to have less effect here. During the early ’30s, there was still building here, so you got this really interesting work. What you see, for instance, in the Université de Montréal...We were blind to that.”

What they also seemed to have been blind to is Montreal’s abundant, inexpensive, functional working class housing. As he writes, “It is hard to overstate the position that housing occupied in the field in the mid 1960s; it was not a branch of architecture. It was architecture. Housing didn’t mean private houses. In all my time at McGill, I never designed a house—an individual residence was deemed too trivial, not worthy of an architect’s time—but I designed several housing projects.”

After winning a CMHC Travelling Scholarship, Rybczynski set out across North America to learn about all the great housing projects going on, and all the plans for urban renewal. He kept journals on his visits to projects like this one in Philadelphia designed by Louis Kahn: “There were two high-rise towers with large balconies. The balconies had no handrails; instead, they were screened from top to bottom with what appeared to be chain-link fencing. Children were playing inside, as though in cages.”

Another stop in the tour was a visit to the projects created by the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency. Projects so disastrous they became the centrepiece for five seasons of The Wire.

“When we saw these projects, in 1963, just before the urban riots all over the U.S., we didn’t like them, but the repercussions weren’t clear yet. And then it all came apart over the next two or three summers.” The same summers, ironically, that Montreal was getting ready for Expo.

MY TWO POLISH GRANDFATHERS BY
WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, SCRIBNER, HC,
228 PP. $32.99