Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Current art spaceissue 136 (winter 2024).
In his novel May our joy remain (Héliotrope, 2022), Kevin Lambert describes the environment of “starchitects” associated with globalized capital, the one which, in the name of prestige, imposes fabulous architectural projects which rarely reflect social reality. The main character, famous Montreal architect Céline Wachowski, founder of Ateliers C/W, is on the eve of inaugurating the Webuy complex for her hometown, while social groups express their disapproval of all-out gentrification in a context housing crisis.
The most comical element of this fiction by Lambert, who has accumulated several prizes, including the Médicis 2023, is that the Ateliers C/W are located at 305, rue de Bellechasse. An address which, in real life, corresponds to a former factory transformed into artists’ studios and which, in 2020, in the name of real estate speculation, was converted into renovated spaces, sold or rented at high cost.
The story is not new: in Montreal, as in several Western cities, artists often settle in abandoned locations until a new owner is found for them. Their presence in these buildings nevertheless constitutes a stimulating factor for the cultural and economic development of a neighborhood, a notorious phenomenon of real estate developers who take over places and accelerate the process of gentrification.
In his documentary 305 Bellechasse. In the privacy of artists’ studios (Tulp Films, 2022), Maxime-Claude L’Écuyer bears witness to the artistic creativity of some of these occupants until the day when land speculation put an end to their activity. Furthermore, by locating Ateliers C/W at this well-known address in the Montreal artistic community, Lambert raises a dimension of art history that should lead us to question ourselves.
As the tandem Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reminds us, in What is philosophy ? (Éditions de Minuit, 1991), architecture is the first of the arts. Starting with the house and the territory, the activity of integrating one’s habitat into an environment proves to be a primordial gesture. However, we may wonder what this primacy means in the context of the urban development of a large city.
In Lambert’s novel, Céline Wachowski is proud to offer Montreal an architectural gem that will bring her long career to a close. Despite her open and progressive spirit, she forgets the harmful effects on the social structure and the evictions that this would entail, implying, by the same token, that the construction of a building can sometimes neglect the area on which it is located. builds in particular because the future of municipalities remains in the hands of people whose vision stops at their ambition.
According to Olivier Barancy, author of Plea against above-ground urban planning and for reasoned architecture (Agone, 2022), several contemporary architects “now only put their abilities at the service of their prestige and their remuneration”. They conceptualize plans not to meet the needs of their residents, but to please developers. This approach remains characteristic of someone “who is content with the creative gesture [dessin minimaliste, croquis, etc.]without worrying much about the destination of the building, nor its users, nor its insertion into the environment.”
The architectural development of a city must not be reduced to a service or an industry whose purpose is solely to build. Although at first glance utilitarian, city architecture must also promote pride in belonging to a more egalitarian, more friendly living environment.
At a time of peri-urban sprawl, the impact of climate change on our way of occupying the territory, the imperative to preserve heritage, how do architecture and more specifically urban planning contribute? to the implementation of a living space which positively influences our way of existing?
Already, in 1950, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre spoke of the right to the city, that of finding one’s place as an individual and being able to participate fully in the affairs of the city. […]. In collaboration with users, architects should be able to change things by creating residential blocks promoting “places within the urban space conducive to living together”.