Recycling the Récollets

>> Discreet Logic's plans for a campus might revive a dead neighbourhood and rewrite Montreal history

by PHILIP PREVILLE

In his office, Discreet Logic founder and CEO Richard Szalwinski has a table-top model of the Récollets, the area of Old Montreal just west of the port where Discreet's new headquarters are located. The model includes miniatures of the Lachine Canal and the ramp to the Bonaventure expressway--the actual structures are visible from his office window--and detailed balsawood replicas of the buildings. Szalwinski picks the buildings up and puts them down gently, much like the Friendly Giant used to do with the rocking chair and the big armchair.

Last week, Save Montreal, the coalition of community groups that monitors urban planning and architecture in the city, presented Discreet with one of their annual Orange Awards for the recycling of the J&R Weir foundry, the exquisitely renovated building we are in. Szalwinski is pleased about the award and is describing his future plans.

"This is where we are now," he says, holding the building in his palm. "Next week we'll move people into this building next door." Szalwinski has just renovated the Buchanan Building, a one-time women's prison built in 1844. He also has options to purchase adjacent buildings on Duke Street, and has his eye on others farther from the waterfront.

If things go according to plan, the abandoned warehouses and hauntingly quiet industrial streets of the historic Récollets will soon become a Discreet Logic campus, something similar in concept to Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington. If successful, Discreet will single-handedly revive an area that has been dead for over 20 years. Discreet will also rewrite a piece of Montreal history. The Récollets, once a hub of the Canadian rail and shipping industries, will become an epicentre of the information age.

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Locating a software giant like Discreet Logic in the J&R Weir foundry creates a bizarre paradox. Refurbished, it is beautiful, spotless and quiet--but it was never meant to be that way. You can still read the fading paint sign on the brick wall: J&R Weir Limited Marine Engineers & Boilermakers Smokestacks Tanks & Welding. It sat empty for years. Quebecor apparently considered housing a printing press there, but no one ever thought of filling it with desks and computers, let alone hanging art on the walls.

Just after World War I, when Montreal was still a major port city, J&R Weir was a going concern in ship repairs and maintenance. They employed dozens of men known as engine fitters, skilled tradesmen who, with nothing more than a hammer, a chisel, a set of files and an assortment of measuring tools, fashioned precise steam engine parts from whole blocks of metal.

The engine-fitting trade did not survive the development of Ford-style assembly lines, but J&R Weir did. Cranes, welding and machining equipment were brought in; the premises were expanded. On a busy day, the interior would be filled with smoke and the loud clang of iron falling on concrete, with welders over in one corner, engine parts everywhere, and natural sunlight streaming through the windows and the haze. And every day was a busy day: employees often worked around the clock to complete repairs in time for the ships to sail.

J&R Weir did eventually close up shop, the combined result of the port's decline due to the St. Lawrence Seaway, shipping's decline relative to air and road transport, and the country's decline as a world shipping power--Canada never developed a reputation for metal shipbuilding like it did for the old wooden hulls. From the mid '70s on, the building stood abandoned and lifeless.

This is a terrible thing to happen to a building, even an industrial shop. According to the lore of Freemasonry, the stone-cutter's craft is a form of divine knowledge; buildings, properly crafted, mirror the structure of the human soul. But a building's true soul comes from the people and activity that inhabit it; remove the people and it becomes a neatly ordered, gravity-defying, hollow pile of rubble.

Worse still, the foundry symbolized the fate of the entire Récollets area. J&R Weir was surrounded by relics of an earlier industrial age. The Lachine Canal was put out of commission. The railway running through the middle of de la Commune, which once served all the industries along the canal, atrophied for lack of clients. Surrounding businesses faltered, and many fell like dominoes. Parking lots proliferated where buildings once stood.

In the mid '70s, Save Montreal tagged the area "an urban desert of dusty, old buildings" and demanded a Récollets redevelopment plan. But real estate developers avoided the area like the plague, and would have still if not for Szalwinski's aesthetic sensibility--combined, of course, with his surfeit of money.

Szalwinski says his brokers spent six months showing him sterile corporate low-rises and high-rises. By December 1995, he was getting impatient. "I told them, 'Let's get in the car and drive around. I'll show you what I want.'" He already knew: an industrial warehouse with lots of light, near the waterfront.

"The minute I saw this place, I said, 'This is it! This is the bloody building!'" His brokers, skeptical, counseled against it, but he was insistent, motivated by vision or hubris or a desire to indulge his personal tastes. Eighteen months and about $10 million later, Discreet moved in.

"It was a courageous move by Discreet," says Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal, who presided over Save Montreal's jury for the 1997 Orange and Lemon Awards. The decrepit state of both neighbouring Griffintown and the entire canal corridor meant that the Récollets, part of an increasingly vast expanse of abandoned real estate with a freeway cutting through its middle, was hardly ripe for gentrification.

Szalwinski actually loves the view of the expressway, and takes great pleasure in the contrast between the purpose the foundry once served and what goes on in there now: a heavy industry shop turned into a post-industrial warehouse filled with software coders and other information workers. It's a big, human hard drive. But not quite: the foundry's original steel I-beams, spotted with rust, remain exposed to view. A large ceiling crane, once used to move heavy equipment across the shop floor, is still in place.

Outside, the government turned the canal into a park, and the railroad tracks still run through de la Commune. Once an essential part of the infrastructure, they now serve only as eccentric additions to the view. "When the mayor visited here, he noticed the train tracks in the street," Szalwinski says, "and he said, 'Oh, I'll have those torn out.' I said, 'Don't you dare!' I want them to stay. The juxtaposition attracted me here in the first place."

But when cranes, canals and railways are reduced to quaint scenery, is history being made banal? The train tracks aren't even nostalgic anymore. If they were, they would bring about a painful remembrance of times past, of the toil that built the nation.

Such is the risk of urban renewal. In the attempt to preserve history, you end up writing over top of it. The other option is no better: if Montreal were Cleveland, the J&R Weir building would have likely fallen victim to one of those controlled dynamite explosions and replaced with the kind of prefab locales one finds in industrial parks. It's a tribute to Szalwinski that he kept the train tracks there. At least the traces of history remain.

Besides, being a software coder can be as poetic as being an engine fitter: coders build software infrastructure and, as any computer engineer can tell you, the truly talented people in the field write remarkably elegant code. A hundred years from now, when everyone earns their living by hard-wiring their brain directly into a network, people will wax poetic about those gruelling pioneers who spent eight-hour days toiling in an office with some primitive desktop computer.

The jewels and junkyards of the urban landscape Save Montreal's 1997 Orange and Lemon Awards

THE GOOD

Orange for Urban Living: Rehabilitation of waterfront properties by the City of Montreal The city has made a priority of reminding people they live on an island, re-establishing access to the shoreline with parkland.

Orange for Urban Renewal: The new Cirque du Soleil headquarters in St-Michel The Cirque's presence is bringing new life to the old Miron Quarry and its surrounding neighbourhood.

Orange for Recycling: Discreet Logic's revival of the J&R Weir foundry See story.

Orange for New Architecture: The Centre Sportif de la Petite-Bourgogne The entrance hallway is encased in glass, the gym to the left, the pool to the right--a hub of activity. Little Burgundy is alive and kicking.

Honourable Mention for Urban Living: The revival of Montreal's points of entry The return of international flights to Dorval will ultimately help the city. Jean-Talon Station, thought to be useless, was revived when the MUCTC temporarily revived a suburban rail link while the Marius-Defresne bridge was closed. The bridge is now open again, but people are still taking that train--they prefer it.

Honourable Mention for Renovation: 1419-1441 Pierce In a city centre littered with concrete high-rise apartments, this project, near the Faubourg, gave new hope to downtown residential living.

Orange Tree Flower for Urban Design: The plan to extend Sir-Georges-Étienne-Cartier Square to the Lachine Canal A great idea, but success depends on revitalizing the waterfront buildings.

THE BAD

Lemon for Urban Living: The city's mishandling of the mega-store issue: Maxi at the Angus Yards, Loblaw's at the Jean-Talon Train station The City is forging ahead with the mega-stores, even though they will suburbanize city life. And the plans for Jean-Talon Station will wreak havoc for suburban commuters who are just rediscovering it.

Lemon for Urban Policy: The city's contempt for residents: Benny Farm in NDG, Loblaw's in Park Extension A process issue. Why will no one let residents have their say?

Dishonourable mention for Urban Living: The commercialization of public space at the Molson Centre No less than 23 massive new billboards. Visual pollution.

Dishonourable Mention for Urban Living: The Casino's monopolization of Ile Notre-Dame More parking and more cars on what was once a sublime green space--all in the name of deficit reduction.

Dishonourable Mention for Renovation: Complexe Desjardins Desjardins forged ahead with renovations that hyper-commercialized the interior space and even removed some exterior public art: the statue of Alphonse Desjardins.

THE IN-BETWEEN

The Orange-Lemon Citrus Drink Award for Historical Imitation: New condos on Mont-Royal Ave. It's nice to see new Plateau housing that emulates the area's distinctive three-storey walkups. But don't do a low-level pastiche of cheap materials and poor proportions.

The Small Lemonade Prize for Missed Opportunities: Place de la Dauversière (behind city hall) and Parc Jeanne-Mance The former renewed a space--but no one's using it. The latter could have done much more.