The demolition committee, which is looking into the desire of a real estate developer to reduce Charles Daudelin’s house-workshop to nothing, postpones its decision. “At the end of last night’s meeting [soit le 20 octobre], the Demolition Committee decided to take the case under advisement. The decision will therefore come at a later date. The municipality did not communicate to the To have to the date on which the demolition committee must finally render its decision.
This Kirkland planning committee, made up of seven residents and two elected municipal officials, must seal the fate of this building of national interest designed by several architects and occupied during his professional life by the artist Charles Daudelin.
“In its decision, the Committee will take into account the elements submitted by the applicant as well as the objections that were presented following a public notice and by those present at the meeting,” the municipality indicated to the To have towhile indicating that she would not comment further.
A text from To have to recalling the importance of this building and its occupant caused a lot of emotion. The bad luck that hangs over this house, despite its architectural, cultural and historical importance, has raised the ire of several specialists who have multiplied public interventions.
At the Kirkland Demolition Committee meeting on the evening of October 20, two officials from the Ministry of Culture and Communications (MCC) were present as observers. Members of Docomomo Québec, an organization dedicated to the enhancement and preservation of modern heritage, were also on site.
The former curator of contemporary art at the Regional Museum of Rimouski, Ève De Garie-Lamanque, now artistic director of the International Festival of Reford Gardens, as well as a dozen other specialists, including Ève Katinoglou, head management of the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, intend to protect the house by asking Quebec to classify it as quickly as possible under the law.
Docomomo Quebec also, for its part, intends to ask the new Minister of Culture, Mathieu Lacombe, to hasten to protect this house and see to classify it to enhance it. When she was appointed in 2018, her predecessor Nathalie Roy found herself faced with a similar case, that of Château Beauce, a building also threatened with demolition. The minister had issued, on the very day of her swearing in, a notice of intent to classify the building to save it. Docomomo Quebec wants to ask Minister Lacombe to do the same in the case of the Charles-Daudelin house.
In 1951, the architectural firm Rother, Bland, Trudeau had been hired by Charles Daudelin to design his residence. This house was envisaged as a developing extension of his own work.
The design of the house had been entrusted to Charles Elliott Trudeau, brother of Pierre Elliott and uncle of the current Prime Minister of Canada.
The house, enlarged a few times over the years, also benefited from the work of architect Jean-Louis Lalonde, associated in Paris with one of the biggest post-war projects, namely the construction of the Palais de UNESCO. The architect Gordon Edwards, to whom we owe the Mirabel air terminal, also worked on the development of the Daudelin house, who had also done a lot on this extraordinary residence. The gardens are partly the work of Quebec’s first landscape architect, who was also the artist’s brother.