Chapitre
Adamczyk, Georges, (2002), McGill University, 9780771705972, In this presentation, I intend to offer an interpretation of
the Old City of Montreal as a modern inspiration for the
present architecture. Here, modern is far away from
Beaudelaire’s Spleen and from the optimistic attitude
changed into anxiety of the pioneers of the movement.
The idea of modernity, its spirit, is in the artifacts, History
embedded in forms and materials, rather than in
manifestoes. The new Montreal architecture stands as
an exemplar way of making architecture with inherited
material from the recent past and the possibility it gives
for facing contradictions of the real world. Nothing virtual
nor actual, but things moving as life, always at the limit
of another possibility within urban commune culture and
contemporary aesthetic dialogue between ends and
forms. To say it, using Henry-Russell Hitchcock words,
our living architecture may well be called merely modern. I shall conduct my presentation like an urban walk,
tracing back the course of the century from early premodern
structures to the latest works by contemporary
architects., Why modernism refuse to die ?