Symposium Outcome

The symposium started at 9am on Friday with student crits running all day until 4:45 in the afternoon. The morning panel was lively and quite fiery in some of the critiques, mainly with our level of timidity in slicing up the existing church. There were a lot of projects that made their interventions around the church, but rarely dealing with the actual church. In general, it was concluded the church is so shitty, it's not worth fixing; instead, you can fix what's around it. Greg Andonian (one of the senior professors at our school, my prof in 4th year) was up in arms at the amount of time wasted in reading a lot of the biblical texts. 'Analysis is Paralysis ... just design!' He also grilled us for all claiming to have a solution to the problem of the site. This, he says, is not the way to bring life back to the site -- there are a thousand problems with the site that we can't see, so just do something broadly interesting and all the problems will start to disappear.

My crit was last of the day. The afternoon critics were a different crowd. The presentation went well, and I was thankful on the one hand for having all day to observe the other crits and fine tune my oral presentation; on the other, the critters were tired and seemed like they wanted to wrap things up. Here's a retrospective explanation of my panel:




The roots for this project go back to the initial site visit with Louis and my site observation that the area around Gesù and the church itself is in a state of decay. Through exploring the site and its context, I found a lot of rough edges to the place, informing me even more that there is some kind of atrophy happening here. Through the Photographic Narrative, I started to express this conviction. The five images show that areas around the site have been vandalized, occupied by the homeless, littered, and architecturally faceless (i.e. blocked up windows/openings). The area is unmistakably neglected and disconnected from its context.

In revisiting the site, I found myself falling into the same shoes as people using the site for themselves (e.g. employees of neighbouring American Consulate Building, UQAM etc). These people never use the site in a meaningful way, but rather cross it to get to St. Catherine Street or sit at its periphery to eat lunch or smoke. People can be found in dozens at lunch break sitting on cement parking slabs, rotted wood fence posts, or even on the ground in a minute strip of grass between sidewalk and parking lot. In finding myself wanting to inhabit the same area of the site, I realized how low the standards of public living has dropped. There just isn't a go-to place on the Gesù property; there is NO public space.

This observation helped nail down what I felt was the essence of the site: Leisure Space (the public realm). The buffer between leisure space and its surrounding context of mainly labour-oriented building uses just hasn't been established. The boundaries between public + private space, personal + communal, and labour + leisure space just hasn't been established, or if it has, it's been left in the same state of neglect that the public can naturally see. This spatial turmoil, where the intermingling of these spaces are happening is causing a low standard of public life. Eating food in a parking lot is a trip-up in honouring humanity, ourselves. It's like letting a highway come in to your living room.

To step back a minute, I want to illustrate a historical phenomenon that has occurred on the site since the early 20th century. This is the occurrence of two major shifts in Montreal. The first, the relocation of the commercial district of Old Montreal to St. Catherine Street. This progression of events de-centered the old district as the main shopping area of the city. In doing so, the main shopping artery of St Catherine Street appeared and therein, the birth of the department store. This was a major economic and developmental explosion for the city, coupled with the dismantling of city defensive walls which allowed suburban growth. The second phenomenon is the decline of religious piety in Quebec. Since the 1960's the church has gradually dropped in religious participation from 88% to 28% but yet while Quebecers deny this involvement with the church, they still claim affiliation as Catholics. So this is an interesting shift from being religious to spiritual. And in this, the spirituality is happening outside and around the church but not actually in it. The connection between these two major shifts in Montreal is equally interesting. The church, for centuries has taught the commodification of salvation. If you are Catholic and pay your dues respectively, you will go to heaven, etc. With the decline of the church, rise of the shopping life, the transfer of this energy and coinage of 'buying' salvation refocused on the shopping centre and personal commodity.

In all this, St Catherine Street became a bustling community of trade. But one block away, the Gesù church could not keep pace with this level of development. It was left in the dust with no connection to its neighbour.

To go back one step further, to the idea of leisure space, I initially interpreted it as a public garden space, but as Louis has pointed out, there is an etymological link between everything I'm saying: Otium & Negotium. Otium is the Latin meaning for the garden of leisure where Greek philosophers would share knowledge. Its antonym 'negotium' means trade. What a coincidence! This makes an relevant connection of co-dependency of the meaning of these words. Without a popular public space, you dwell in a state of poverty; without a thriving commerce, your public spaces will lack popularity and became unsafe.

Here, I'm proposing my intervention. This is where a mediation between these two spaces is needed, and I'm proposing a strategy to restore this link between St Cats and the Gesù church through the design of a public leisure space. The design will include the expansion of the Centre de Créativité, an arts-based organization hidden in the basement of the Gesù to spill into this public garden in the form of an outdoor theater, its existing art exhibitions, choir practice etc. In making visible the church by smashing out the ground level of the Belgo building (currently sited between the church and St Cats), and celebrating the existing dynamic program of the Church, I hope to improve its contextual fit.

[end presentation]

Summary of Responses (from memory):

Silence.

[Gesù Member]: idea makes logical sense. Why not expand Centre to outside? Public theater would be beneficial and interesting.

[me]: in the Belgo building at about the fourth floor there are dancers that can be seen/ heard. It creates one of the few uplifting feelings at the site. A ground level theater might benefit both parties.

[Kelly Crossman]: Clarification on the panel where St Catherine Street is. How do you want to open up the Belgo Building? There are some interesting examples to look at with contemporary gardens such as the Trinity Church garden in New York, Inigo Jones' park in London.

[Steve Fai]: I like the project. It would be fun to design. Gardens are the most difficult things to design. You have to think how people step on the ground. Materiality is the most important thing here, and I don't see any indication of making that step yet, but that's next. Look at the project in Ferrera -- the main cathedral. It is found through porous arcades.

[Louis]: this is what I'm interested in seeing next. Richard is reading [Walter] Benjamin [The Arcades project], and we are essentially encouraging him now to design an arcade through the Belgo building. I want to see how that is reconciled.

[Me]: The Belgo building is an amazing building because of its previous use as an experimental shopping centre. There used to be valet parking, gentlemen's cigar clubs, gambling etc...

[Gesù Member]: And a zoo!

[Me]: ...all these things. It was an experiment in living at the shopping centre. These are concepts tying in to Benjamin's writings. I want to propose a contemporary use of the shopping centre.

[Gesù Member]: It's true, most of the shopping places in Montreal and everywhere else are so uniform and sell the same thing. It would be nice to see something new here. Making a connection to St. Catherine Street but creating something new is a good thought experiment.

[end]