Montreal Field Trip

Immediately after the drawing competition, we packed our bags for an organized field trip to Montreal to visit our site at the Gesù Church. Our group of four rented a vehicle and drove down late at night to check in to a hostel and party it up a bit in the city. Next morning, we spent a full day surveying a portion of the building.

The purpose of this visit was to gain a sense of the site and generate some initial feelings of purpose to derive ideas for the rest of the project. A supplementary assignment to surveying the building is creating a 'photographic essay' of the building. A sort of narrative expressing our initial impression of the site or the building or anything at all we find significant to developing our project. We are meant to generate thought from this and weave in and out of it through the course of the semester.



OBSERVATIONS:: From what this church was intended to be, and what it became are two very different things. From the get-go, the design of the church was done up by an Irish architect in New York who had never visited the site, nor designed the building in drawings, but rather dimensions. The numbers were sent to Montreal to the Jesuits were to fill in the blanks. Additionally, higher authorities within the local parish wanted to keep another main church in downtown Montreal as the central church to the city and the Gesù church was not to exceed the other's height. We're told that historically, all kinds of dancing, performing arts, galleries etc were flourishing at the very doorstep of the Gesù but for some reason, the architecture never really followed suit. Instead, it has become an ugly duckling - incomplete towers, huge chunky proportions, careless repairs, set on a bed of cracked asphalt. In the winter, ice has been known to fall very dangerously - in one instance it broke right through the lower roof of the building! There's also no easy way of getting into the building. That's a long story in itself. It is also blessed to be next to the American Consulate. Some friends were escorted off of the neighbouring empty lot because we were photographing the church. Charming.

For the next few days, teams will compile their survey measurements and overlay them on Louis' final survey notes. The 'official' purpose of the survey is to see how close we are to the actual drawings which are already in CAD. I'm hoping that once we do this, we'll find strange things about the building to talk about, given it was constructed from numbers and not drawings. It's so strange to even consider architecture without drawing of any kind. Without any representation of the building, what gets lost? What would the list of dimensions even look like, and how would they be organized?

Here are some photos of the Gesù church and its nearby surroundings: