Moulin à Images by Robert Lepage, Sept 1st, 2008. Sorry for the poor image quality – I was standing on a fire hydrant…
I was in Quebec City last weekend and got a taste of the 400th anniversary frenzy. Its impressive what a city can create (or what kind of creativity the city will let flourish) when it goes into official celebration mode.
Robert Lepage’s Moulin à Images is remarkable for its shear grandeur: The entire old port of Quebec is transformed into a movie theatre every evening, featuring a 40-minute filmed blitz through Quebec’s history, all projected on a 30 x 600 meter silo complex (the technical challenge projecting a high-quality image onto a “screen” consisting of 81 silos is fairly mind-boggling). Public transit also got a face-lift for the festivities and free, electric buses shuttle tourists around the historical parts of town.
Meanwhile, Montreal City Opposition Leader, Benoit Labonté, announced this week that he wants to get Montreal’s groove back by the year 2020 with another Expo-67 style World Fair.
Labonté says that Expo-67 and the 350th anniversary celebrations in 1992 were golden occasions in which Montrealers were able to participate in the development of their city, and that these events imparted citizens with a great sense of collective pride. Since this last celebration, he claims, Montreal has slipped into ordinariness, and our pride eroded by quarrels and divisiveness.
According to Labonté, a massive influx of tourists 12 years down the line is exactly Montreal needs to focus our creative energy on reanimating our parks, public spaces, public art, design and architecture, transportation system and sustainability objectives. But is the international spotlight really what it takes to rekindle local pride? For that matter, is Montrealer’s pride truly as down-in-the-dumps as Labonté presumes? How sustainable are bursts of development with short-term objectives in mind?
I was relieved by City Hall’s level-headed response: “We already have projects that are far more beneficial, we have projects that are in the process of being realized today, not in 12 years’ time,” Alan DeSouza, executive committee member responsible for economic development,told the Gazette.
Still, I wonder whether Labonté’s plan has some merit after all. Perhaps Expo-driven development is what city hall needs to keep public infrastructure, public space, and public art afloat against a rising tide of private development in Montreal.
3 comments
Un autre projet que montréal va crisser au vidange.
Montreal devient de plus en plus la banlieue de Toronto au lieu d’etre sa propre métropole.
A few items:
As lovely as the idea is, the concept of the world’s fair is really a dinosaur.
I don’t think we should try to re-create what we had: it may turn out to be a disappointment.
We can think just as big and be just as visionary without the need for such a mega-project. If it is international attention we are after (and let’s face it, even though I think we are charting a comeback, we could use a little boost) in 2008 the way to garner international attention BIG TIME is by hiring the best architects of the day to design everything from condo towers to office buildings to concert halls. A Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, or Rem Koolhaus project here and there would do the trick. A great opportunity is already upon us: the MSO concert hall. What could be more appropriate that giving our world class symphony a truly world-class building. Enough with the local “chez nous” mentality ALL the time. (BTW, why on earth is the MSO hall slated for some back corner in the quartier de spectacles?? I mean, the QDS is a great urban project and much needed but let’s get real, the MSO is a high brow institution that deserves a more prominent and elegant spot while the QDS is effectively a Times Square like civic project; it is, for all intents and purposes a low-brow ( no derogatory connotation), entertainment district. How about on R-L in the swath of land btw the QDS and the QI. IT can be a link between the two neighborhood and Old Montreal. It is a squandered opportunity not to situate it in the right place to spur either development or re-ignite a blighted part of downtown).
I think Labonte is right that we have been thinking far too “provincial” in everything from urban planning to real estate development. I mean, Montreal in its earliest days modeled itself off of London and to a lesser extent, Paris. The new intersection of Park and Pine is just too perfect of an example of lack of vision.
I really liked the Expo 2017 idea (www.expo17.ca). Does anybody know if Labonté is working with these folks?