1945-2008
Seulement 2 résidences de cet ensemble de 4 maisons en rangées construites en 1893 au coin des rues Sherbrooke et Bishop subsistent encore aujourd’hui. Les 2 maisons de gauche furent remplacées par un immeuble à bureaux en 1960.
Montage du jour : Maisons sur la rue Sherbrooke au coin de Bishop
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4 comments
What a shame, those greystones are so much more appealing than that office tower. Thankfully, Montreal has managed to retain many of them.
On the same topic, does anyone know what is going on with that office tower at the corner of Bishop/Sherbrooke? It appears to be abandoned, for a few years now – all the windows on the upper floors are covered with garbage bags, and there is no retail activity at the ground floor level. Always struck me as strange, being at such a prominent location.
I agree, the loss of these townhouses is a shame. They were stunningly elegant. That office building, though mid-century modern, is just a bad (cheap) knockoff of Mies et al. It’s buildings like this one that gave modernism the bad name.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it could find a vocation, but for as long as I have been alive, that building is lost. Nothing has ever worked in the retail space and nothing seems to be working on the office floors either.
Restored and renovated properly though, it could serve as a very chic corporate HQ or by opening up the inside, it could be a much bigger, multi-level retail space. It just needs someone with some vision. That bus shelter blocking the front doesn’t help much.
Well, bus shelters are a necessity in our climate – there should be more of them. Perhaps the design could be better, and better-suited to its surroundings.
Yep, that building sure ain’t Westmount Square, a lovely 1960s building. Why was so much crap built then, when that style could be sleek and chic, and work well with older buildings?
A lot of lower-end (so-to-speak) developers simply knocked off the architectural style or aesthetic because it was in style. Basically, to make a quick buck. Of course, these second-rate buildings have not aged well in a lot of cases and all over the world. Manhattan is chock-full of them. Developers do they same thing today. Some things never change.
While I agree with the necessity for bus shelters in Montreal, this is really a secondary bus stop and could go without – talk about harming the aesthetic of Sherbrooke street.
There is a fabulous example of a building on Fifth Avenue in NYC of the same scale as this that Louis Vuitton (I believe) took over and refit completely in a clean-lined very airy modern design. It’s pretty any time of day but especially at night. Such a re-do could work beautifully here against the older pre-war structures. I imagine that the bones of this building are in really good shape. It needs a new concept and curtain wall.