ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
COVER SHEET FOR SUBMISSION 2022-2023
PROGRAM: Projective Cities, Taugh MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design
NAME: Alison Bartlett
SUBMISSION TITLE: RESONATE BEASTS
DEMYSTIFYING THE ROMANTICIZATION OF THE FRENCH-CANADIAN IDENTITY
COURSE TITLE: Dissertation
COURSE TUTOR: Platon Issaias, Hamed Khosravi
DECLARATION:
“I certify that this piece of work is entirely my own and that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of others is duly acknowledged.”
Signature of Student:
Date: 24 April, 2023
impurity of Englishness. It is the point of contingency, where the proper and the aproper — the appropriated — are brought into tension and architectural markings become imbued with a symbolic order, enabling the construction of identity to embody a mythic form. An underlying issue to defining the French Canadian and Quebecois nation is the shifting conceptualization of the pure French identity with the plurality of the rapidly modernizing and globalising Canada. Questions of national identity, sovereignty and Quebec’s place in Canadian federalism remain an ongoing issue.
Through a multi-scalar survey, three case studies—the wayside cross, the seigneury grid and the French-Canadian farmhouse— challenge the esteemed creed mummified by French-Canadians: Pays-Paysages-Paysans (Countries-Landscapes-Peasants) in which the nationalist party uses as leverage in the construction of French-Canadian identity.
The intention of this thesis is to reveal how ones that threaten the nationalist movement’s propaganda and are therefore silenced in attempt to hermetically embalm a romanticized ideal. It understands that space is never neutral and thus it should not be the intent. Rather than relegating the past to the past, Resonate Beasts proposes gestures of re-articulation per case study: formal re-readings of architectural artefacts influenced by the critical art practices of Donald Judd, Francis Alys and Gordon Matta-Clark who in their own regards, address themes of monumentality, mythmaking, and materiality.
The three projective re-readings of the wayside cross, the seigneury grid and the French-Canadian farmhouse serve not to break the symbolic order perpetuated within the French creed, but to complicate it, to poke holes in it, to fragment and shatter it with the aim of a never-ending process of engaging new subjectivities, re-articulating concealed histories and demystifying the proper by tarnishing the pure.
To quote William Butler Yeats’ poem3, The Second Coming: Turning and turning in the widening gyre; The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
3. The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats / Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and /everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. /Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are / those words out / When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert / A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. / The darkness drops again; but now I know /That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The following document Resonate Beasts should not be read in any conclusive or absolutist resolution. Rather, it is a compendium of rehearsals,1 of re-enactments, that occupy—in reciprocal negotiation—two states: that of the observer and that of the actor. The role of the observer encompasses the gathering of research materials: images, drawings, land surveys, biographies and other archival documents that begin to inform the narrative, or in this case, the narratives. On the other hand, the role of the actor proceeds to re-read these distilled narratives, offering new means of representation, of gestural re-articulations.2
This investigation is, at its most fundamental, an inquiry into subject-object relationships within the context of nationalist rhetoric and instrumentalization. It is interested in identifying the symbols and deconstructing the mechanisms employed by nationalist movements that propagate an idealized—a romanticized—image. Such agendas mobilize a regime of representation that ultimately permits a singular objective narrative to hold hostage over the subjects’ experiences.
Therefore, this thesis intends to deconstruct the process of romanticization in relationship to the construction of nationalist ideologies, which intrinsically inform cultural identity and by association, the status quo. This document will not provide an absolute resolution by designing a new symbol, building or urban plan, as this would inevitably result in falling victim to yet another colonial projection or re-placqeuification . Rather, it offers a space of mediation—of rehearsal—to poke holes in and fragment the symbolic whole in pursuit of the representing new subjectivities.
1. Jean-Louis Barrault “The Rehearsal the Performance.” Yale French Studies, no. 5, 1950, doi:https:// doi.org/10.2307/2928918, 3, Where Barrault notes the difference between a performance and a rehearsal as “During the rehearsals, all problems must be faced and solved. In the performance, each problem must have been solved. The performance is a happening. It is the intrinsically poetic moment; the moment when, with the spectators’ presence contributing the final drop, the chemical precipitate appears.” He notes that it is the period of facing unsolved problems in real-time, rather than those already solved where, “Now is the time for mapping things out, for discipline and construction.”
2. Miessen, Markus, and Zoë Ritts. Para-Platforms : On the Spatial Politics of Right-Wing Populism. Sternberg Press, 2018, Mahmoud Keshavarz. Sketch for a Theory of Design Politics, 13-15. Keshavarz suggests the definition of articulations as a link between two different elements, binding incongurencies, they are materially embedded in the processes of social and political formations that have become engrained in a certain preferred combination through history over time. Situating linkages is an important term, because it is introducing possibility between two, previously considered, heterogeneous element.
projects, with zero tolerance for adaptation to the present. They become inflated in states of heightened threat that ultimately result in a process of perpetual romanticization. These projects are reliant upon symbols within the physical environment, what Jacques Ranciere calls the Distribution of the Sensible,2 in which physical artefacts—aesthetic carriers—inform the perceiver with the logic of power structures; those that are represented and those that are Other than. Certain aesthetic carriers become instrumentalized within nationalist agendas; becoming symbols of rejection of adaptation and plurality; of Otherness. They become symbols of a romanticized past, indulgent for an ideal that can never be returned to, which inevitably always leads to failure.
French-Canadian Identity Crisis3
Resonate Beasts looks at this phenomenon with particular focus on the longstanding crisis in Quebec, Canada. It is an instance of struggle for cultural preservation—hardly a novel concept—since Quebec’s own internal colonizing efforts in the mid-nineteenth century to suppress England’s usurpation of power in 1759, claimed during a thirty-minute battle in Quebec City’s Plains of Abraham. Since 1534, the French established reign marked by Jacques Cartier with a nine-meter-tall wooden cross on the eastern coast of Canada, known today as Gaspé, of which held a plaque with three lilies and a declaration that read “Vive Le Roi De France.” In the two centuries of reign over the territory established as New France, the indoctrination of land, class and economy was imbued with French values. It is these values of sacramental pureness that came under threat when countered with the impurity of Englishness. This becomes the point of contingency where the proper and the aproper— the appropriated—are brought into tension and the creed Pays-Paysans-Paysages (Countries-Peasants-Landscapes) takes prominent form—in defying pride—of the true FrenchCanadian embodiment. The irony that must be mentioned, lies of course within the circumstances responsible for creating the idealized French-Canadian image: propagated within the artefacts of cooperating countries, the peasant lifestyle and the rural landscapes that all stand defiantly amongst the scars of a successful colonial project are, in effect, products of revocation. They represent the rescindment of the new English reign, facilitating a process of internal colonization that became so deeply ingrained into the culture that it remains, to the present
2. Jacques Rancière and Gabriel Rockhill. The Politics of Aesthetics
The Distribution of the Sensible. London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Under this notion, it rejects a single authority that concerns itself with maintaining the status quo, suppressing other manners of acting, which he refers to as Othering. Those that are Other than, are not categorized within previously established and defined identities, places and spaces.
3. The term “French-Canadian Identity Crisis” is used throughout this document in context of the Canadian nationalist movement’s rhetoric, from their perspective of their own identity being threatened by the ascending authority of Others. It should by no means be understood as a binary issue between the French and the English. While historically, it was the English who first threatened the integrity and purity of the French culture, by today’s standards to assume a binary condition is a dangerous simplification. As many nationalities emigrated to Canada defining its multi-cultural demographic; and as the province of Quebec became home to those other than English or French speaking—known as an Allophone—”the English” becomes a representative term of “the Other;” in that their presence has the potential to tarnish the French-Canadian virtue. The state of crisis and Quebec’s relationship with it is rigorously analyzed in Ian Morrison’s Moments of Crisis: Religion and National Identity in Quebec.
4. Ian A. Morrison. Moments of Crisis, UBC Press, 1 Sept. 2019, 5-8.
5. Richard Foot. “Separatism in Canada,” The Canadian Encyclopedia.” Accessed February 26, 2023, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, 2019, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/ article/separatism.
6. “The FLQ and the October Crisis,” The Canadian Encyclopedia.” 2022, Accessed February 26, 2023, www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/ timeline/the-flq-and-the-octobercrisis.
day, as the haunting ideal of what must be preserved and returned to; the beasts that continue to resonate.
Since the early nineteenth century, Québec has been in a state of crisis where the beginnings of French-Canadian nationalist groups, such as The Patriots, began to take form in political arenas, infusing questions of national identity, sovereignty and the place of Québec and French-Canadians within Canadian federalism and the remainder of North America. An underlying issue to defining the French-Canadian and Québécois nation is the shifting conceptualization of the pure, religious and traditional notions of French identity with the tarnished, secular and modernizing role in the globalization of Canada. The question at the root of these debates circles back to “the determination of the values of which the boundaries of pluralism, and therefore, belonging in Quebec are to be based. (…) It concerns the nature and limits of national identity and, therefore, of the nation itself.”4
In Québec’s vulnerable instability and melancholy for nationalism a sequence of contemporary revolts has plagued the nation since the 1950s when the separatist movement was re-established through subsidiary and fringe political groups.5 These groups continued to gain a proliferation of votes into the mid 1960s, with the most prominent being the FLQ, garnering notability in the October Crisis of 1970. It was the only instant during peacetime in Canadian history that the Armed Forces were deployed, imploring the War Measures Act to diffuse a tenuous year of terrorist attacks involving over 200 bombings, dozens of robberies, kidnappings and murders of the British trade commissioner and the cabinet minister.
This was the zenith of socio-political unrest that had been building since the early 1960s, a period referred to as “The Quiet Revolution,” which stood in vehement defense of conservative ideology, comprising of outdated traditional values that sought to preserve the purity of the French culture and language. Over the next few decades, various measures were passed in attempt to diffuse tensions and improve federal-provincial relations by establishing policies of official bilingualism at a federal level to dissuade nation-state rhetoric and encourage francophone participation into the remainder of Canada as a single united nation.6 However, tensions continued to be a strenuous presence and in 1991 the separatist movement established a political party
at federal level called Bloc Québécois. In the national electoral field, this meant Canada now had five parties of electoral influence. An underlying issue to defining the French Canadian and Quebecois nation is the shifting conceptualization within the relationship of religion and the secular to national identity. Until the mid-twentieth century, Catholicism had defined national identity and embedded the lived experience into relics that held onto the image of a cultural heritage. On November 7, 2013, the Charter Affirming the Values of State Secularism and Religious Neutrality and the Equality between Women and Men and Providing a Framework for Accommodation Requests...also known as the Charter of Values was introduced. This bill sought to accommodate pluralistic religious symbols and practices in the public sphere, a long-standing, tenuous debate since the early 1990s. It is this pluralistic state that opponents of the Charter of Values deem threatening to their national identity as FrenchCanadians. Today, this crisis can most overtly be seen through rigid preservation efforts in the passing of Bill 96 in May 2022, mandating a ‘French First’ language policy. This is enforced by the ‘Language Police,’ who ensure all social, governmental, and independent sectors abide ‘French first language laws’ and abstain from publicly displayed religious symbols and clothing. The ‘French First’ language policy penetrates the politics of the aesthetic field, not only through signage, but by literally making French heard on a daily basis.
While the October Crisis marks only the beginning of modern Quebec’s socio-political instability—as these issues persist today in varying deviations—it questions features of crisis that enable highly influential power structures to ascend on the premise of romanticization. Crisis can be understood as responding to a threat which inherently requires a concurrent acknowledgement of the established conditions with those it is rejecting. This means that the essential features that define the separatists’ movement are not always explicit but rather implicit in what is being revoked: globalization, secularization, plurality of which implies values of tradition, religion and hegemony.7 In the very declaration of crisis, this explicit-implicit relationship is triggered, destabilizing values in disproportionate potencies with associated physical artefacts.
The Process of Romanticization
It is in a moment of crisis where reconstitution is directly
7. Morrison. “Moments of Crisis,” 9-11
Fig. 003, Newspaper clipping discussing English and French Quebec and the insinuating language laws.
Fig. 004, Newspaper article from the national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, articulating the residual effects of The October Crisis.
Fig. 005, News bulletin for a national radio program discussing ongoing issues for English Quebec.
8. Mark Cousins, The Ugly I, II, III. Arq Ediciones. 2020. Cousins builds on Lacan’s Object petit a and Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of the lost object, as one that is never recovered and rather in the process of searching a new object will surface, but it will never satisfy, thus inevitable failure, inciting a perpetual loop of desire of another chronological order.
9. Roland Barthes. “Mythologies.“ Points, 1957, 136
correlated to what is being undone. In this perpetual process of romanticization: of articulation, de-articulation and rearticulation, the nation is never reproduced in the identical form it seeks to return to. It craves the lost object,8 evoking a fantasized state in between the economy of desire (anchored in the past) and that which will satisfy (anchored in the present). This romanticized, idealized state survives off the mythic: becoming an enabler that short circuits the signifier and the signifier in favour of preserving the idealized—and consequently propagated status quo—image of nation, culture and identity. In its simplest form, myth is a means of communication, it is a mode of signification where the sign—a summation of the signifier and the signified—become disproportionate to that which it signifies.9 This new mythic entity suppresses and mutes the affiliation between the material object anchored in the present symbolic order and the extrapolated signification of the idealized past. This aversion to shifting meaning over time—the re-territorialization of the present—creates a gap that grows in every moment of crisis, in every revolt or political action; it enables a perpetual re-evaluation of terms that will never replicate the past but will always create something new. In attempt to close the gap, it becomes filled with romanticization, which produces an excess of meaning, of latent idealizations that will never attempt to close the gap of correspondence between the Symbolic and the Real, latent idealizations and present reality. Satisfaction will never be fulfilled.
This analysis therefore identifies three physical artefacts in the Quebecois landscape and urbanization of Montreal: the wayside cross, the seigneury grid and the French-Canadian farmhouse. Each are exemplary architectural artefacts enabling a two-fold investigation: first through addressing the process of romanticization—the larger theoretical framework—into themes of monumentality, mythmaking and material deadliness and second, by deconstructing the means by which the FrenchCanadian nationalist movement embed these artefacts into the production of a culture and identity. The wayside cross, seigneury grid and French-Canadian farmhouse, have become aesthetic carriers caught in the tropes of romanticization; instrumentalized in the separatist movement to preserve an idealized symbolic order of the past, the propagated true authentic identity of French-Canadians rooted in the creed Pays-Paysages-Paysans. This romanticization has prevented the nationalist movement from accepting the historical continuity and the adaptation of
meaning and in large part, the encompassment of secularization each artefact has come to adopt today. Therefore, it is not the intention to establish a new symbolic order, as it is cultural hegemony that has created this predicament and, as previously mentioned would fall victim to the colonial paradox of replacqueification. Rather, ResonateBeasts seeks to engage in what the nationalist party continues to avert: the re-territorialization of symbolic meaning through acts of re-articulations that challenge the romanticized mythic status quo of the pure French Canadian identity.
The thesis comprises three dossiers, each focused on the wayside cross, the seigneury grid and the French-Canadian farmhouse, which respectively address secondary themes of monumentality, mythmaking and material deadliness. Each dossier becomes a space of mediation that strings together moments of history into three acts of appropriation: the first act addresses the physical artefact in the initial appropriation of land by colonial France, the second act discloses their shift in spatialization and form as the English take reign and the province secularizes and globalizes, and the third act is the proposal; a projective re-reading of the artefact. Supported by a parallel narrative that looks to the critical art practices of Donald Judd, Francis Alys and Gordon Matta-Clark—who each question the role of representation and aesthetics—Resonate Beasts re-articulates the wayside cross, the seigneury grid and the farmhouse to engage with new pluralities that have historically been denied cultural adaptation under the premise of threatening the integrity of the romanticized FrenchCanadian identity; and hence continue to resonate.
COUNTRIES THAT CANNOT HOLD
THE WAYSIDE CROSS
(1534-PRESENT)
STATEMENT OF REIGN
THREE ACTS OF APPROPRIATION
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
JACQUES CARTIER FOUNDS NEW LAND, MARKING FRANCE’S NEW TERRITORY AND REIGN WITH THE FIRST CROSS.
FARMERS ERECT THEIR OWN CROSSES DELINEATING ROADSIDE LANDMARKS, PROPERTY LINES & FUTURE PARISHES. NEW SYMBOLS ARE ADDED,SHIFTING THE OBJECT INTO SECULARIZED TERMS.
THE WAYSIDE CROSS IS RE-READ THROUGH ACTS OF DUPLICATION TO ENCOMPASS THE OBJECT’S FORMAL AND SYMOBLIC MUTATIONS.
1. Sensual cues as per Rancière, includes not only those within the visual field, but also smell, sound, taste.
2. In Rancière’s, “The Distribution of the Sensible,” defines the status quo as the sensual authority that informs the cultural logic.
ACT I
THE WAYSIDE CROSS
(1534-PRESENT)
STATEMENT OF REIGN
3. Lucas Van Rompay, et al. “The Long Shadow of Vatican II.” UNC Press Books, 1 July 2015, p. Chapter 5: Quebec’s Wayside Crosses and the Creation of Contemporary Devotionalism, 180
The monument, monumental and monumentality are pertinent themes amongst the subject-objecthood relationship in the context of nationalism; where nation building is informed through, in part, by sensual1 cues, aesthetic carriers that enforce a singular political ideology and by default, mechanisms of representation advising the status quo.2 This is the construction of a singular reality, a universalism filtered through the preferences of a single agency enabling a “colonial projection” that continues to fuel contemporary battles over objects in the public arena today. The wayside cross, in even its most stable of circumstances, was always an object in flux,3 an object of monumental power and resonance that became deeply entangled in the tropes of romanticization.
JACQUES CARTIER FOUNDS NEW LAND, MARKING FRANCE’S NEW TERRITORY AND REIGN WITH THE FIRST CROSS.
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
Fig. 007, Jacques Cartier’s route in the Bay of Gaspé and marking of new territory with a wooden cross measuring 9 m tall. The crew had initially sought initially for shelter from a storm and with fortuity, discovered land, known today as eastern Canada. The 1534 exploration did not result in any further territorial discoveries on their return route back to Saint-Malo, France.
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Jacques Cartier’s return route to France. The 1534 exploration did not result in any further discoveries or territorial claims.
Fig. 007
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Fig. 008, Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspé, signaling allegiance between the two territories under the reigning power of the King of France, Francis I.
Fig. 009, An etching of an drawing, “drawn on the spot” by Cap. Hervey Myth of Miramichi, a french settlement in the Gulf of SaintLawrence.
Ancestral Origins
Under the direction of the King of France, Francis I, a wooden cross was first mounted upon Jacques Cartier’s successful expedition in 1534 westward to the New World. Twenty days after leaving his home port of Saint-Malo in Brittany, France, the crew came across the rocky territory of what is known today as Gaspé, on the eastern coast of Canada. Formally, these two perpendicular wooden posts stood at nine meters tall and bore two plaques. The first was a shield of three fleurs-de-lys (white lily) a symbol of French royalty denoting perfection, light and life,4 while the second, “Vive le Roi de France” was a declaration to the longevity of the King of France. In honour of their new colony, the same wooden cross was mounted at Cartier’s departing port in Saint-Malo. Symbolically, the sum of these components was united in representing French reign over a new colony and territory, one that would endure for the next two centuries.
The French-Canadian national myth understands the Quebec Croix-de-Chemin, Path of Crosses, to be associated with their distant ancestral heritage that goes beyond Jacques Cartier and his first marking of land with a singular cross, extending into the region of Brittany, France, from where he hailed.5 However, the marking of land with crosses wasn’t only practiced in France, but throughout all of Catholic Europe. They were popularized in the thirteenth century, originally being made of stone, wood or iron and carved with ornamentation. In the fifteenth century, professional artisans were hired to depict symbols from the passion of Christ and Jesus’ crucified body was slowly incorporated onto the object. It was not until the French were defeated in 1759, in which England took reign that the French Quebec elites became sharply aware of their vulnerable position; to the potential reality of the French-Canadian identity becoming obsolete.6 The wayside cross was first documented in the 1896 issue of the Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, proposing these wooden crosses as the “perfect encapsulation of religious nationalist ethos.”7 The wayside cross became instrumental in propagating French identity, “rooted in a romantic vision of the peasant farmer—simple, unchanging and catholic”8 that provided symbolic reinforcement throughout the Quebec landscape of the French-Canadian people. In part, this spurred a construction boom of wayside crosses across Quebec throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
4. Serge Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” UBC Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https:// ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aaschool/detail.action?cID=3412619, 90
010,
5. Van Rompay. “The Long Shadow of Vatican II,” 177-178.
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
The cross in Gaspé is therefore, by no means, seen as a blight of colonial imposition but is celebrated as a symbol of historical significance and serves a fundamental role in Canada’s heritage.
In 1934, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s landing, the Historic Sites and Monuments of Canada commissioned by the Government of Canada, revealed a monolithic granite cross standing ten meters tall and weighing over forty-two tons. A team of artisans carved the cross from a single block of granite in a quarry across from Quebec City called Riviere-a-Pierre. The cross travelled by rail for over twelve hours before it reached its destination on Queen Street in downtown Gaspé, across from the Place Jacques-Cartier business center. The raising of the cross involved a ceremonious effort incorporating a team of horses and tractors to operate the pulley and cable system. It has subsequently been relocated twice but stands, since 2012, at its new commemorative site at the water’s edge near the Gaspé bridge with an honorary plaque, “Gaspé, Cradle of Canada” instilling the—otherwise irrelevant—town and cross together as a prominent place in Canadian history.
It is important to note the style and material that was chosen for the commemorative replicative cross at Gaspé, did not take influence from Quebec’s respective wayside crosses that had, by 1934, experienced a huge construction boom and scattered the rural landscape but rather, resembled those in Brittany, France. Meanwhile, the wooden cross at the port of Saint-Malo still stands today in its original form.
Fig. 011, Image of the pulley and chain system mounting the new monolithic granite cross marking the 400th anniversary of Cartier’s landing. Since the cross’ first location in downtown Gaspe across from the Jacques Cartier business center, it has since moved twice. Today it sits on the water’s edge, near the Gaspe bridge.
Fig. 012, An old postcard featuring a photo of the 400th anniversary monolithic granite cross, overlooking its third and current position at the water’s edge near the Gaspé bridge.
1. A rural grouping of houses
2.
THE WAYSIDE CROSS
(1534-PRESENT)
STATEMENT OF REIGN
ACT II
FARMERS ERECT THEIR OWN CROSSES DELINEATING ROADSIDE LANDMARKS, PROPERTY LINES & FUTURE PARISHES. NEW SYMBOLS ARE ADDED, SHIFTING THE OBJECT INTO SECULARIZED TERMS.
While the cross in Gaspé stands in questionable pride of France’s colonial assertion, the object nevertheless proliferated as parishes and civilians saw its symbolic importance as motivation to raise their own. Between the 1870s and 1950s, there was a widespread resurgence of wayside cross construction throughout rural Quebec that was in response to three circumstances. The first two reasons for the raising of crosses during this period were direct influences from Europe that sought, firstly, to commemorate the founding of a new parish or school and, secondly, to protect against disease, death, forest fires, drought and agricultural pests. The third reason is unique to Quebec and a consequence of the widely dispersed agricultural settlements, which prevented families of a rang1 from visiting the parish church on a regular basis.2 Therefore, the crosses were raised at more convenient and accessible intervals that served as a
Van Rompay. “The Long Shadow of Vatican II,” 178 FLEUR-DE-LIS Fig. 014, Quebec’s national flower, the fleur-de-lysproxy for rangs to gather for prayers. The crosses were adorned with instruments of the Passion such as the ladder, the lance, the Sacred Heart, a rooster and an abstracted sun (sometimes depicted as a circle), taken from the crown of thorns. They were unique from those in Europe, through their white coating of paint and low position to the ground often in an encircled garden. The crucified body of Jesus was absent, which may be a consequence of Quebec’s lack of funding and artisanal sources compared to those in Europe rather than an intentional choice.3 Today, there are nearly three thousand crosses throughout rural Quebec, with twenty-six classified as historical monuments.
The wayside cross became a prolific symbol amongst the Laurentian territory as individual farmers and families mounted their own alongside the roads and in front of their houses. However, in the perpetual attempt to return to the idealized object anchored in the past—the object with lost significance and exists therefore as a resonance, a beast of the past—a new one will always be created.4 In this string of continuous replications, holding the symbolic order always in its romanticized state, mutations start to incur where new symbols are formed, old ones lost and inevitably create a new object, a kind of exalted Frankensteinian monument. Styles and symbols changed, where for instance the literal depiction of popular devotion to the Sacred Heart became abstracted into a stylized heart; the cross continued to move further away from Christian devotion and started to adopt agricultural piety. Ultimately, the crosses came to be associated with le seigneur (the Lord; owner of the land and management of the peasants) and were honoured as protection against climate devastations, poor health and unexpected death.5 Even as the semi-feudal system was abolished in 1854 (where in the British system Crown land could only be acquired through petition to the Governor),6 devotion to the seigneur was transferred onto the prosperity of the land. The month of May was traditionally known in religious contexts as the Month of Mary, where residents of rangs would gather to pray a novena, a nine-day devotion, or if a priest was available, to hold a mass. However, these prayers were largely focused on the prosperity of the land and plantings. It is during this period, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that the crosses started to shift from objects of colonial France indoctrinated through the Catholic institution to demonstrations of agricultural prosperity. A survey taken in 1970, reinforces this changing demographic that revealed over eighty percent of prayers were focused on
Fig. 015, The rooster on the wayside cross symbolizing Intruments of Passion.
4. Mark Cousins, The Ugly I, II, III. Arq Ediciones. 2020. Cousins builds on Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of the lost object, is never recovered and rather in the process of searching a new object will surface, but it will never satisfy, thus inevitable failure, inciting a perpetual loop of desire of another chronological order.
Fig. 016, The ladder on the wayside cross symbolizing Intruments of Passion.
3. Van Rompay. “The Long Shadow of Vatican II.” 180 5. Van Rompay. “The Long Shadow of Vatican II,” 183 6. “Welcome to the Quebec Family History Society.” Accessed 7 Mar. 2023. www.qfhs.ca.
Fig. 018, An illustration of a painting by H. Bunnet of the Farm of Saint Gabriel. The wayside cross is depicted to be prominently visible to passers-by. The original painting is in the McCord Museum in Montreal.
Fig. 018
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
Fig. 019
Fig. 019, Map demonstrating the location of the wayside crosses known as the Croix de Chemin (the Path of Crosses) along the Saint-Lawrence river.
Jacques Cartier’s return route to France. The 1534 exploration did not result in any further discoveries or territorial claims.
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
the concerns of the land and the sustenance of the approaching harvest season.7 This entanglement between religion and a more secularized agricultural devotion heightened abruptly as the twentieth century approached the decade leading up to the October Crisis in 1970. The 1960s were known as the Quiet Revolution, in which the tensions surrounding secularization garnered inescapable attention as the province experienced rapid urbanization and secularization. This required disentangling the Catholic institution from its historical role integral to the operation of affairs amongst civil society in rural areas, entailing the transference of healthcare, education and local politics to be managed by state-led institutions.
HAMMER ROOSTER
Fig. 020, The hammer on the wayside cross symbolizing Intruments of Passion.
ENCLOSURE
PLINTH HAMMER ROOSTER FLEUR-DE-LIS SUN PLIERS ENCLOSURE
Fig. 021, The pincers on the wayside cross symbolizing Intruments of Passion. Drawn by author
FLEUR-DE-LIS SUN PLIERS LADDER
HAMMER ROOSTER
In this moment of post-October Crisis—in the deep affectual field of Quebec’s Catholic malaise—a process known as patrimonialisation incurred, where past religious objects evolve into the cultural heritage (through a kind of retrospective awareness); and symbols that once reinforced the Catholic institution’s propagations were no longer property of the Church. Instead, religious objects and rituals became integrated as immaterial heritage in the shift towards a collective secular identity. As infrastructure continued to modernize into the late twentieth century, many wayside crosses were knocked down in the widening and repaving of roads. Along with the forces of natural decay and a weakened devout population, these objects began to disappear.8 However, under the notions of patrimonialization, the wayside cross held greater importance to the Quebecois, not as a religious object, but as a secularized symbol deeply ingrained into their cultural heritage and identity. Under the nationalist agenda, the symbolic order becomes confused between its potentiality of engaging with new subjectivities anchored in present symbolic order to include secular or other religious demonstrations and being relegated to its singular past. Threatened by a de-territorialization of the present (a rupture in the Symbolic), the separatist hysteria propagates the latter— in fear of the French Catholic distinction becoming conflated with and diffused into a secular cultural heritage—rescinding any potential symbolic mutation. This continued aversion between the past symbolic order and that of the present, which is ever evolving in the attempt to return to the old object, bequeaths an inescapable gap of excess meaning that can only be filled through the process of romanticization. The process inherently perpetuates further romanticization in the attempt to preserve the ancestral French Catholic past: simple, traditional peasant
8. Van Rompay. “The Long Shadow of Vatican II,” 175, “They were numerous once, these croix du chemin/ It was a sign of faith, from the people who came from France / Today, we have forgotten these croix du chemin/ like a wounded being, they attract pity”
Fig. 022, The lance on the wayside cross symbolizing Intruments of Passion. Drawn by author
7. Van Rompay. “The Long Shadow of Vatican II,” 180farmers—the object of lost significance, the beast of the past that continues to resonate.
However, the wayside cross that seeks to exist in the modernising and secularizing Quebec is not completely neglected. In the late 1990s, in an issue of the local community paper, there was a call for caretakers to help restore the crosses. The caretakers see the crosses as objects for everyone, “every practice of faith, for peace and community” a kind of spirituality that is exempt from religious practice. In this entwinement of religion that is so fundamental to defining the French-Canadian identity, the caretakers have become the force that closes the gap and anchor it in the present in compatibility with Quebec’s evolving modernization into the twentieth century. The role of the wayside cross and its monumental power began to engage other subjectivities than Jacques Cartier’s projected colonial reign, transitioning in meaning for who and what it represented.
ENCLOSURE
(index_e html)
(index_e.html) (mbb0000e.html) (mbp0000e.html) (mbf0000e.html) (mbh0000e.html) (mby0000e
28. Fig. 026-039 are photographs from Edouard Zotique Massicotte’s documentation of wayside crosses across the Quebecois countryside
3e html) print();)
Wayside cross with fleur-de-lis endpoints, adorned with a sun and a heart at its axis, a rooster on top and other devices. Saultsaux-Récollets,
YOUR COUNTRY. YOUR HISTORY. YOUR MUSEUM.
https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/barbeau/mb0715be.html
Québec, [191-]. © CMC/MCC, Edouard Zotique Massicotte, B557-6.27, CD2004-1257 © Canadian Museum Fig. 026, Papineauville, Quebec, 1992 Fig. 027, Saults-aux-Recollets, Quebec, 191- Fig. 026
028
Civilization.ca - Marius Barbeau(index_e html)
bp0000e html) (mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
(mbp0213e html)
(javascript:window print();)
Fig. 029
Fig. 030
Fig. 028, Saint-Telesphore, Quebec, year N/A
Fig. 029, Saint-Joseph-du-Lac, Quebec, 191-
Fig. 030, Replica, Grand-Pre, Quebec, 2008
Wayside cross with clover endpoints and niche on axis Saint-Joseph-du-Lac, Québec, [191-]. © CMC/MCC, Edouard Zotique Massicotte, B557-5.38, CD2004-1254 FRANÇAIS2/7/23, 10:36 AM
Fig. 031, Replica, Saint-Janvier-deWeedon, Quebec, date N/A
Fig. 031
Civilization.ca - Marius Barbeau(index_e html)
Civilization.ca - Marius Barbeau(index_e html) (mbb0000e html) (mbp0000e html) (mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
(index_e html) (mbb0000e html) (mbp0000e html) (mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
(mbp0213e html)
(javascript:window print();)
Fig. 032, Quebec, 1925
Fig. 033, Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, 1827
(mbp0213e html)
(javascript:window print();)
Fig. 032
Fig. 033
© Canadian Museum of History
Jubilee cross with fleur-de-lis endpoints, sun on axis and bearing the inscription, «Hommage au Christ Rédempteur», 1925. © CMC/MCC, Edouard Zotique Massicotte, 66357, CD96-763-0030
(mbp0000e html) (mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
mbp0213e html)
window print();)
©
HISTORY.
2/7/23, 10:34 AM Civilization.ca - Marius Barbeau(index_e.html)
© Canadian Museum of History
BACK TO EXHIBITIONS
(index_e html) (mbb0000e html) (mbp0000e html) (mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
(mbp0213e html)
(javascript:window print();)
(mbp0213e html)
(javascript:window.print();)
Wayside cross with fleur-de-lis endpoints, 1925.
© CMC/MCC, Edouard Zotique Massicotte, 66350, CD96-763-0029
HISTORY.
© Canadian Museum of History
(index_e html)
(index_e.html)
(index_e html) (mbb0000e html) (mbp0000e html)
0000e html) (mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
(mbp0213e html)
pt:window print();)
Wayside
2/7/23, 10:37 AM
(mbp0213e html)
(javascript:window print();)
(mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
Metal wayside cross with fleur-de-lis endpoints and rooster on top Bécancour, Québec, 1924.
© CMC/MCC, Edouard Zotique Massicotte, 60023, CD96-707-0001
YOUR COUNTRY. YOUR HISTORY. YOUR MUSEUM.
Civilization.ca - Marius Barbeau(index_e html)
© CMC/MCC, Edouard Zotique Massicotte, 62868, CD96-731
FRANÇAIS
BACK TO EXHIBITIONS
(index_e html) (mbb0000e html) (mbp0000e html) (mbf0000e html) (mbh0000e html) (mby0000e html)
(mbp0213e html)
(javascript:window print();)
© Canadian Museum of History
https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/barbeau/mb0724be.html
.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/barbeau/mb0729be.html
YOUR COUNTRY. YOUR HISTORY. YOUR MUSEUM.
© CMC/MCC, Edouard Zotique Massicotte, 65797, CD2002-140-014
1/1
© Canadian Museum of History
1/1
cross in Saint-Eustache, just erected, Québec, 1923.
1. New as defined by Mark Cousins, building on Lacan’s Object petit a and Freud’s lost object Mark Cousins, is never recovered and rather in the process of searching for the old object, a new object one will inevitably surface, but it will never satisfy. This inevitable failure, incites a perpetual loop of desire of another chronological order.
ACT III
THE WAYSIDE CROSS
(1534-PRESENT)
2. Cousins. “The Ugly,” 29-34, Where Cousins refers to the negative topography of the rejected existences, in the continuous search for the object of desire.
THE WAYSIDE CROSS IS RE-READ THROUGH ACTS OF DUPLICATION TO ENCOMPASS THE OBJECT’S FORMAL AND SYMOBLIC MUTATIONS.
In each attempt to resurrect the old object, with the embedded desire of the idealized object anchored within Jacques Cartier’s monumental wooden cross, new1 iterations were formed. It began to adopt new subjectivities that welcomed secularization and religions beyond Catholicism. This meaning anchors itself in the present day however is denied by the French nationalist movement as it is perceived as a new, foreign object, seeking to undermine the preservation of the idealized French-Catholic ancestry and ultimately dilute French-Canadian identity. But in fact, the categorization of the new does not ever exist. The new can only be understood as an absence of the old, that which is no longer there brought only into presence when countered with an alternative. This informs a negative topography2 of haunting pasts that are denied existence in the present symbolic order, while concurrently informing its very production.
Fig. 040
3. Tadeas Riha, Roland Reemaa, Linsi Laura. “Weak Monument: Architectures Beyond the Plinth.” Park Books, 2018. 14
4. Pewter is a malleable metal alloy of varying proportions of tin, copper, antimony and bismuth. Softer than aluminum, it’s melting point is 247290 degrees Celcius compared to that of aluminum’s at 660.3 degrees Celcius
5. See Fig. 054-071
Therefore, Act III engages in a critical material re-reading of the wayside cross that enables the presence of old and new symbolic orders to be acknowledged through repetitions of renegotiation to address new subjectivities. It recognizes the old, not as an absence, but what informs the negative topography as a charged void “supported by the fragments of the original.”3 Through the act of sand-casting pewter,4 it seeks to materialize the inevitable failure with romanticization, in that the object of desire exists only in the regime of representation and in the repeated attempt to return to the old, something new will inescapably be made.
The following steps explain the process of sand-casting.5 The sand is imprinted with the object of desired production, creating the mould to pour the pewter and cast the object. This process is conducted repetitively, using the newly casted object to create the subsequent mould, imprinting the old in the sand to inform the new. However, it is quickly realized that in the object’s attempt to replicate its predecessor, a mutation will always occur, breaking the romanticized hegemonic ideal and shifting the agency to the subject; ultimately engaging in new subjectivities that are inherently informed by its predecessor. The moulds, the imprints in the sand create a negative topography that become equally important to the positive object.
Fig. 042
Fig. 043, Step 5. Acquire enclosure of minimum cast dimension
Fig. 044, Step 7. Pack sand into acquired enclosure spread sand across surface area & pack in thin layers until a firm base is formed
Fig. 045, Set of instructions, steps 1 through 10.
Fig. 046, Set of instructions, steps 12 through 15 and re-casting steps 7 through 10 x2
Fig. 046
Fig. 048, Step 8 : Brush object with talk & firmly press into sand
Fig. 049, Step 10 Remove object from sand via pull mechanisms
Fig. 051, Step 13 Once pewter is melted, pour into sand mould to cast object
Fig. 050
Fig. 053, Step 14 : Once cool enough to touch, remove. The mould is now reaady to re-cast.
Fig. 052
Fig. 054
Fig. 055
Fig. 056
Fig. 054, min. 0.01
Fig. 054-071 Documents 18 stills at 5 second intervals capturing the process of casting and re-casting to produce four pewter casted wayside crosses, each a mutation of each other.
Fig. 055, min. 0.05
Fig. 057
Fig. 058
Fig. 059
Fig. 057, min. 0.15
Fig. 058, min. 0.20
Fig. 0.60
Fig. 061
Fig. 062
Fig. 0.60, min. 0.30
Fig. 061, min. 0.35
Fig. 063
Fig. 064
Fig. 065
Fig. 063, min. 0.45
Fig. 064, min. 0.50
Fig. 0.66
Fig. 067
Fig. 068
Fig. 0.66, min. 1.00
Fig. 067, min. 1.05
Fig. 069
Fig. 070
Fig. 071
Fig. 069, min. 1.15
Fig. 070, min. 1.20
Fig. 76, First sandcasted pewter wayside cross and objects
Fig. 077, Second sandcasted pewter wayside cross in casting sand
Fig. 078, Third sandcasted pewter sundial
Fig. 079, Fourth sandcasted pewter ladder
Fig. 077
Fig. 078
NOTES ON MONUMENTALITY THROUGH DONALD JUDD
The definition of the monument, monumental, monumentality1 has changed drastically from the eighteenth to twentieth century. Historically, monuments were created in honour of historical events, places or people. They were conceived of higher ideals including sovereign worship and a documentation of the nation’s achievements, subsequently informing places of commemorative rituals.2 This was the context in which Jacques Cartier planted a nine meter-tall wooden cross in honour of the King of France, Francis I, a monument to the French reign that became deeply embedded within French-Canadian symbolism, reverberating throughout the Laurentian territory in the form of an object that would come to be known as the wayside cross.
Over the course of the twentieth century however, the meaning of the monument became embedded with negative connotations, entangled in national rhetoric and political misuse, where
1. For the purpose of this discussion, these three terms are used intermittently as per description requires
2. Heike, Hanada. “Monumental_Public Buildings at the beginning of the 21st century.” Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig. 2021. 91
3. Ibid.
4. J. L. Sert, F. LŽger, S. Giedion. “Nine Points on Monumentality 1943.” Academia.edu, 2019, www.academia. edu/19870956/Nine_Points_on_ Monumentality_1943
5. The affectual field is a concept developed on the premise of Rossi’s urban artefact instilled with collective memories activating the ‘city as a theatre.’ This allows for introspection and access to multiple subjectivities, rather than one agential preference
6. Hanada. Monumental, 23
7. Hanada. Monumental, 91
8. As per German architect and academic Heike Hanada
9. MOMA. “Donald Judd. Untitled, 1969.” MOMA. Accessed March 08, 2023. www.moma.org/audio/3946. Judd disagrees in the interview that his work should be considered within the minimal art movement.
10. Donald Judd. “Donald Judd Writings.” Judd Foundation, 1975. Specific Objects, 1965,134-145
Fig. 082, Judd’s Untitled 1969, Untitled 1991 & Untitled 1989, xerox copied, acetone trasferred collage
“monuments of the past emerged from a fusion of idea and form rather than from social and political conditions.”3 The topic of monumentality did not escape modernist architectural discourse and in the later part of the twentieth century included the likes of Giedion’s ‘Nine Points of Monumentality,’4 Rossi’s recurrent urban artefact, Rem’s bigness or Venturi/Scott-Brown’s semiotic readings, each respectively addressing methods of reading an architectural object’s formal and symbolic conditions. In other words, it became an object of instrumental power to nationalist projects that sought to hold hostage over the affectual field: the potentiality of introspection that allows access to a multiplicity of memories and histories.5 In an environment already fraught with contempt over monumentality’s entanglement with fascist ideology, it only became exacerbated by modernism’s failure, further cementing notions of “anti-democratic aggrandisement and political claim to power, so much that an open discourse cannot take place.”6 The meaning of the monument underwent a transformation “into quite an unspecific object and one instrumental in constructing the identity of the modern state.”7 This is the point where, art and architecture distinguish themselves uniquely in approaching and comprehending monumentality.8 The protagonist of this historical break is the minimal art movement, in which Donald Judd—disapprovingly9—finds himself a part—and a critique—of. At the core of Judd’s work, he is questioning the relationship objects have with space; how the viewer is positioned and therefore how they are perceiving the object. He provokes themes of absence through degrees of visibility, colours, material and form.
These themes are expanded upon in his seminal 1964 essay, Specific Objects in which he critically analyses the future practice of art, questioning the very format and medium of his work and those of his peers. Through a deductive process, he describes the notion of a 3-Dimensional object: a singular thing, a whole entity (not a series of composites) that exists vulnerably in real space. It is not to be confined by a format, for instance the boundary of the canvas’ edge. It holds a relationship with its environment, whether that’s a wall, floor, ceiling…or nothing at all. As per Judd’s definition, the Specific Object is dependent upon the third dimension, the existence in real space, in order to remove the problem–the illusionary format—of the twodimensional canvas, of which his peers still use.10 Judd offers the subject a provisional agency to move around the object at their own will, enabling a sense of autonomy or as Michael Fried would
suggest, provides a sense of conviction: the ultimate success of art, holding the subject-object relationship in suspension and ultimately “accomplishes the dissolution of objecthood”11
Here Judd begins to flirt with themes of monumentality, not only in formality but in intentionality, when he refers to Marcel Duchamp’s drying rack as the purest example of a threedimensional object. The object becomes imbued with rhetoric, one that enables the subject’s potentiation of introspection (and thus the collapse of subject-object distinction). Through his use of voids, the specific object renegotiates objectivity’s hold on the subjective experience and offers potential for retaliation against conservative projections. While Judd’s essay is ultimately a critique of format and medium within the artistic practice in the late 1960s, it proves of worthy extrapolation in the attempt to address objects, such as the wayside cross, and the embedded monumental power activated by nationalist platforms to deny subjective experiences. If a “monument is a communication of societal values the society that has built them,”12 it must question how new mediums and formats of representation can deflate the symbolic propagations of the singular party to–as Judd’s specific object argues—return agency to the subject.
12. Hanada. “Monumental,” Essay by Adam Caruso. 100
Fig. 074 Marcel Duchamp’s bottle drying rack, 1914. Judd referes to this ready-made object as the ideal specific object
11. Michael W. Clune. “This Cannot Be Real: ‘Art and Objecthood’ at 50.” Nonsite.org, 17 July 2017, Accessed March 06, 2023. www.nonsite.org/ this-cannot-be-real/.
LANDS THAT CANNOT HOLD
THE SEIGNEURY
(1634-1854)
STATEMENT OF ECONOMY
FRENCH COLONIST COMPANIES BEGIN TO ARRANGE LAND INTO A CONTROLLED SEIGNEURIAL GRID SYSTEM ALONG THE SAINT-LAWRENCE RIVER
THE URBANIZATION OF MONTREAL DIVIDES THE LONG NARROW GRID SYSTEM INTO SQUARES AND PLAZAS THAT OFFICE TOWER BUILDINGS CONNECT TO VIA UNDERGROUND COMMERCE CHANNELS
THE LAND IS RE-READ BY SPATIALIZING FEUDAL TO CAPITALIST SYSTEMS OF LAND VALUATION THROUGH A COMPARISON OF HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL AXES AS QUEBEC BEGINS TO URBANIZE, GLOBALIZE, MODERNIZE
ACT I
THE SEIGNEURY
The Saint-Lawrence River enabled the success of the colonial companies’ “conquering” the land. Beyond serving as the initial trade route, it was the transportation corridor enabling settlement further inland (to what would later be developed into the Island of Montreal), while establishing key economic hubs. It was the driving force behind the orchestration of land that enabled the French to instill their European values into the harsh landscape of the Saint-Lawrence valley at the base of the Canadian Shield; a territory of granite rock sub-terrain, boreal forests covering the topographical plains. At first glance, it offered a barren landscape with a harsh climate and questionably arable land. The French however prevailed in their “conquering” of territory and began a series of irrevocable restructurings—appropriations— embedding European values into the creation of a mechanized landscape; one that proved to be a productive agricultural force
STATEMENT OF ECONOMYthat came to define the economy and society that still holds relevance today in its mythic entity.
Restructuring the Land
The seigneurial system was not officially introduced until 1628, almost a century after Cartier’s founding of New France, when the initial fur trade networks started to disintegrate for a system of a greater assertive colonial powers. In the early seventeenth century, France was concerned with domestic affairs (the Thirty Year’s War that held King Louis XIII’s attention) allowing small private companies to conduct their own lucrative fishing and fur trade businesses.1 Cardinal Richelieu, who held national reverence as a Catholic bishop and France’s secretary of state, installed two systems that would instill fundamental profits and control over New France, while concurrently asserting European values into the landscape. First, he merged one hundred merchants from hundreds of small private companies into a single entity, known as the Company of One Hundred Associates, which quickly established prominence: holding rights to land not only in New France, but longitudinally across the Americas from Florida to the Arctic. Over thirty years of operation, it came to distribute approximately seventy-four seigneuries, thus curtailing into Richelieu’s second installment. The seigneury2 was a semi-feudal system that operated under a multi-tiered power structure with the King of France, King Louis XIII, holding ultimate title-ship and the seigneurs (the lords) as local correspondents.3 This twofold presence proved to be the remedy King Louis XIII needed to first, pacify and populate the seigneurial fields and second, build a strong economic and social framework for rural colonization.4
Seigneurs were assigned long strips of land that measured on average three arpents.5 While the widths and lengths varied, all were defined by their fronteau—the front edge of the plot outlined by a road or waterway. The seigneur-habitant (lordpeasant) relationship not only informed one’s class and economy but the spatial settlement amongst the land. The first step in colonizing—”in making the land”6—into a European agriculture was to deforest the landscape.7 Trees were imbued with economic and symbolic meaning and became a defining element in the making of the land. From a utilitarian perspective, seigneurs felled timber for building mills and roads, in addition to the habitants’ needs to build homes, fences and provide heating. Many tense conflicts—sometimes resulting in the rearrangement of
1. “Company of One Hundred Associates.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Accessed February 08, 2023. www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/compagnie-des-cent-associes.
2. The seigneury was a standard land management practice under French regime over its new colonies, informing the settlements in Louisiana and New Oreleans to develop into the typological ‘Shot Gun’ houses
3. As the fishing and fur trade failed to sustain, so did the monopoly of the One Hundred Associates, and direct management of the land transitioned under control of French Crown.
4. Colin MacMillan Coates. “The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec.” Internet Archive, Montreal [Que.] McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000, archive.org/details/metamorphosesofl0000coat/page/12/mode/2up, 49-53
5. Arpents were the French area metric, where 1 arpent is equivalent to roughly 3,418 square meters. When the English began surveying land in the 18th century, leagues became the new metric, where 1 league is equivalent to roughly 4,000 meters.
6. Serge Courville, Quebec : A Historical Geography, UBC Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/aaschool/detail.action?docID=3412619,174. From the beginning of French reign, colonization was understood by all as an opportuntiy to “make land” that wasn’t previously profitable.
7. MacMillan Coates. “The Metamorphoses,” 36
Fig. 084, Ship breaking through the frozen Saint-Lawrence River
Fig. 085, The Saint-Lawrence valley sits at the bottom of the Canadian Shield, made of monolithic granite rock
Fig. 086
Fig. 086, Archive image of cadastrals showing the value and ownership of land
seigneurial boundaries—would arise in establishing the maximum travel distances to forested land. The distinction between these two land conditions was not only aesthetic, but also determined the value of taxable land. Cultivated land was the productive economic force with a tax valuation of fifty shillings per acre, while forested lands were only taxed at one shilling per acre. This valuation therefore provided a limit to the maximal extents one would be interested in deforesting.8
By the mid-seventeenth century, the gulf of the Saint-Lawrence was populated by a few thousand settlers, known amicably as “les habitants”9 whose homes were built no more than one and a half arpents in distance from each other. The land was further spatialized through the architectures of the habitant and manor estates, which created visible hierarchies: that of production and that of enforcement. The habitants lived close to the water’s edge—the fronteau—in proximity to the banal mill for productive efficiency, while the seigneur’s house was further inland. Land at the edge of the water quickly became the most valuable and foundational to social and economic organization. Consequently gristmills,10 built and maintained by the seigneur, became defining landmarks and productive elements of the seigneuries, dotting the edge of the Saint-Lawrence, secondary rivers or tributaries that extended much further into the landscape. By working the land, the peasants earned their keep, paying rent through agricultural produce.11 This semi-feudal system is how the French asserted their presence, in an urgent manner, defining the characteristics of the land that were reminiscent of old France and “reflected colonial officialdom.”12
The Idealized Landscape
While these economic and productive forces defined the SaintLawrence territory, they also indoctrinated the pacificated habitants with European ideologies of landscape that became deeply intertwined in French-Canadians’ own criteria of idealness, contending with any newcomer’s perspective. Documented in the late eighteenth century, British travelers along the SaintLawrence River commented “disparagingly on the lack of trees near the habitants’ homes. (…) the trees are all cut away around Canadian settlements and the unvarying habitations stand in endless rows, at equal distances (…) without a tree or even a fence of any kind to shelter them.”13 The effects of the French agricultural colonization not only fundamentally restructured the economy and labour field but instilled European values that came
8. MacMillan Coates. “The Metamorphoses,” 36
9. “Les habitants” refers to the farmers or peasants. However, it was a title they were honoured to have and deeply defined their identity. They are also referred to as the habitants in english.
10. The grist mills, used by the habitants to refine harvests, was colloquially referred to as the banal mill for its transactional exchange, sustaining the habitants’ livelihood.
Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 55
11. Colin MacMillan Coates. “The Metamorphoses,” 13
12. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 91-92
13. Colin MacMillan Coates. “The Metamorphoses,” 37
Fig. 088, Landscape view of the seigneury plots in the SaintLawrence Valley
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
25 50 100 0 km
090
25 50 100 0 km
Jacques Cartier’s return route to France. The 1534 exploration did not result in any further discoveries or territorial claims.
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Upon Jacques Cartier’s return to Saint-Malo, they erected a replica of the cross at Gaspe signalling allegiance between the two territories under reigning power of the King of France
Fig.to define the mechanisms of class and identity that still informs ideals of the Quebecois picturesque landscape today, where “the practical labour of generations of habitants irrevocably altered the bases of society.”14 While, the life of the habitant involved laborious farming in objectively challenging geographic and climatic conditions, their status was not pejorative, rather their work and lifestyle was a source of fundamental pride. A strong sense of identity became associated with the life and lands of the habitant, instilling values of rural ideology: “love of work, simple pleasures and a quiet life echoing the rhythms of nature.”15
As the nineteenth century landscape began to show signs of industrialization under the new English reign, the picturesque rural landscape started to take mythic form as the prophesied utopia, beginning to embody the role of the protagonist in novels and paintings. Two novels in particular stand out as defining the cultural perspective at the time, Roman Paysan (Novel of the Land) and Charles Gurin. They are both built around prevalent themes of the time such as, “property lost to the English, the ruin of the family forced into urban exile and the privatization and chance restoration of property.”16 They demonized the English, who become vehemently associated with progress and modernization, tarnishing their picturesque landscape and way of life. This only provoked increased tension and divisiveness between the two cultures where, “if the French-Canadian ‘race’ wanted to survive and avoid being stripped of its arpents, it must stay on them, cleave to agriculture and Catholicism with patience and resignation.”17 This was further illustrated in the paintings of the Francophones. While landscape was a popular setting to paint among Francophones and Anglophones, they were depicted in vastly different ways. Francophones focused on rural settings, painting nature and open fields, home to “the famous colonization lands where the ecumene was created”18 and was portrayed as the achievement of ultimate beauty and balance. Conversely, the Anglophones painted the same rural landscape, yet rendered different qualities; one of industrialization, manufacturing and transportation that communicated a real sense of labour rather than leisure. It calls back into question the terms of which colonization is defined for the French, not as a negative imposition but as a positive potentiation associated with the agricultural development and the agrarian lifestyle, in that “colonization means the dedication to agriculture of a previous unoccupied ideal and generally wooded piece of land. Colonization creates new land.”19
14. Colin MacMillan Coates. “The Metamorphoses,” 12
15. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 91-92
16. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 163-164
17. Ibid.
18. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 165
19. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 174
Fig. 091 Scale 1: 50. Map Chambly seigneurial plot with secondary fiefdoms. Settlements were kept close to the water for productive and thus economic value. Concession lines divided the land horinzontally away from the waterfront, losing value respectively.
Arts and literature became the mediums that enabled myth to sustain a stable breeding ground. As the utopian landscape of the habitants became tarnished through industrialization and urbanization, which was restructuring the Saint-Lawrence valley throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the French only became further entrenched in the past. Myth enables signification to become disproportionate to that which it signifies; it is a means of communication that silences the affiliation between the material object anchored in the present symbolic order and the extrapolated signification of the idealized past, of the picturesque agrarian landscape. Crystalized within cultural expressions such as novels and paintings, it is on the premise of myth that blinded the French from two factors that thrust the province of Quebec into economic downfall: first in their denial of the shifting labour force to meet new global market demands and second, of their own capitalist values embedded in their agrarian lifestyle. This ignorance and adoption of the shifting environment, welcome a period of intense retaliation and despair.
Fig. 093, “A Canadian Pastoral,” 1900 by Canadian painter Horatio Walker, depicting agrarian labour amongst the landscape.
Fig. 094-099 Scale 1:200 A study of urbanization between the old city of Montreal compared to the still rural fields across the Saint-Lawrence River five decades
Fig. 094, Urbanization development 1655
Fig. 095, Urbanization development 1665
Fig. 096, Urbanization development 1675
Fig. 095
Fig. 097, Urbanization development 1685
Fig. 098, Urbanization development 1695
Fig. 099, Urbanization development 1705
Fig. 100, Seigneury settlement plan at the River of Jesus
Fig. 101, Seigneury settlement and mill plan at Mouline du Cap de Mardelaine
Fig. 100
Fig. 102, Seigneury settlement organization along the Saint-Lawrence River. Clearly showing concessions within fiefdoms and the plot’s frontage along a waterway
Fig. 103, Seigneury settlements at St. Vincent du Paul
Fig. 104 Seigneury settlements at St. Vincent du Paul
Fig. 105, Seigneury settlements at Trois Rivieres
Fig. 106, Seigneury settlements at Hochelaga
Fig. 105
Fig. 107
Fig. 108
Fig. 108, the Ramsay seigneuries
THE SEIGNEURY
STATEMENT OF ECONOMY (1634-1854)
1. Courville. “Quebec A Historical Geography,” Time for change! was a reaction to the political tension and was focused on the urban population’s eagerness to “break with the past and embrace modernity,” 253
ACT II
THE URBANIZATION OF MONTREAL DIVIDES THE LONG NARROW GRID SYSTEM INTO SQUARES AND PLAZAS THAT OFFICE TOWER BUILDINGS CONNECT TO VIA UNDERGROUND COMMERCE CHANNELS
62. Colin MacMillan Coates. “The Metamorphoses,” 164
“Le temps que ca change!”1 is an appropriate exclamation of the rapid period of change Quebec experienced in mid-twentieth century, shifting an agricultural land to an industrial one. After the conquest of the British claimed power in the battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, the idealized landscape underwent a series of changes that shifted the means of production and the value of land. The English not only lacked the skills to maintain the farmland, but also the interest. The rural ideologies that thrived under a semi-feudal system began to weaken in the authoritative presence of the new industrial, capitalist urbanization. The status of the agrarian lifestyle was in a vulnerable state and tensions between the two modes of existence only spurred the “intertwinement of French-Canadian nationalistic sentiment and agrarian economic potential.”2 The abolishment of the seigneury system into crown land was not completed in one instance, but
through a series of episodic movements, it was finally eradicated into a structural resolution in 1935. As changes to the landscape became further institutionalized, tensions only grew between the French and the newcomers, which was premised on an innate sense of ignorance to a changing world.
Internal Colonization Efforts
The period post WWI marks the first wave of industrialization, in which the province witnessed rapid industrial growth with “manufacturing driving the economy at the expense of the countryside.”3 A rural exodus began as urban city centers started to develop into two primary cities, Montreal and Quebec City. In fear of losing not only their labour forces but preservation of their cultural identity, Quebec’s colonization department attempted to re-occupy these vacating farmlands through three assistant programs between 1932-1938. These programs clearly evidence and reinforce the degree of threat the francophones felt under the new English authority. While the hypocrisy may seem evident by today’s terms, in that French-Canadian identity is a by-product of colonization, the cultural power of myth allows for an impaired awareness. The French did not understand the process of colonization to be exploitive but rather a positive force—“the making of land”—that encouraged productive landscapes aligned with agrarian values.
Quebec’s colonization department first implemented the Gordon Plan in 1932, which sought to incentivize jobless city dwellers with farm experience to occupy a portion of the Laurentian valley that was recently deforested due to the construction of the new Quebec City-Winnipeg Transcontinental railway (built in 1908-1913). The motivation to develop agricultural land in the shadow industrial and modern advancement exemplifies the tenuous rejection of progress and informs the backwardness4 of the francophone mentality. In 1935, the Vautin Plan was introduced as a solution to the rising unemployment rate among the urban population, under the prophetization that “colonization and a return to the land must be considered as natural undertakings, an efficacious solution of a permanent nature for the problems arising from unemployment.”5 The final plan was an enhancement of the Gordon plan that narrowed its focus on unemployed married couples that both held farm experience. As the decade continued into the late 1930s, these plans failed to achieve long term stamina, even as the government continued to add incentives, offering grants for the purchase
3. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 178
4. Backwardness, introduced by economists Pierre Harvey, John Dales and Norman Taylor as a pyschological problem in the Quebec’s identity issues, is now commonly used to describe its nationalist movement’s refusal to adapt to modern economies and the global world. “One of the hardiest themes in Quebec’s political and intellectual repertoireIt was the so-called economic backwardness of French-Canadian society.” Courville. “Quebec A Historical Geography,” 252.
It resulted in a period of severe economic downfall and lagging education systems. However despite these obvious blights, they continue to romanticize the past and resist the present, where “by relating material poverty with a lack of education and then charging the Church with what is called “the backwardness of the French-Canadian,” Britishers are again urging upon them the English and American way of life.” The saying ““Get an education”–meaning an English-American education–”and all will be well” is the English-American advice to his French countrymen.”
Burton Ledoux “French Canada: A Modern Feudal State.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 17, no. 2 (1941): 206–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26448362. 14
5. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 178
Fig. 109, Advert for Montreal in both english and french
Fig. 109 111.
Fig. 110, The Saint Lawrence bay showing the urbanization of Montreal, surveyed in 1938-1939
of animals, building materials or the production of honey and maple sugar production.6 Quebec’s attempts to capitalize on unemployment rates in cities by mobilizing jobless emigrants to farmland, resulted only in short-term success, failing to, as they had hoped re-invigorate its quickly disintegrating way of life and cultural identity. As WWII was ending, a second wave of industrialization swept the province, exacerbated by changing economies and globalizing market demands, Quebec’s rural exodus was never stabilized. Herein lies the inevitable failure of romanticization, propagated through mythic cultural power, French Quebec continued to favour the agrarian lifestyle and economic development that “worked against the prevailing thrust of economic growth and therefore failed repeatedly.”7
New Urban Forms
As the latter half of the twentieth century progressed new territorial organization began to re-shape the ever-present remnants of the seigneurial grid. A system of primary and secondary roads evolved that allowed the front of the lot access to a central street, while the secondary streets subdivided the old long and narrow farmlands to create alleyways. These new blocks were referred to as urban islets and informed the structure of Montreal and Quebec City’s downtowns, exuding a modern progressive city. However, in comparison to other provinces, in particular Ontario, Quebec was lagging in economic performance and infrastructural development. The government concocted a massive “urban-catch-up plan”, employing a team of sixty social science specialists and researchers, who conducted surveys and analyses into a ten-volume report submitted in 1966.8 However, the hysteria amounted to very little, except for exacerbated tensions as the government continued to favour urban development at the expense of rural towns and agricultural production. Ultimately this was a period of stagnancy, where very little resolutions were made and tensions only spurred, “it was a period marked by proposals and discussions, problems and criticism—the kinds of tensions inevitably aroused by the encounter between tradition and modernism in the middle of an economic crisis.”9
However, as the sixties progressed and the university system was reformed, profiting from heavy investments, cities started to benefit from a new wave of skilled employees in the business and finance sectors. Montreal became the epicenter for business, not only for Quebec, but momentarily, for Canada. Even as massive
6. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 185
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Architecture (CCA), Canadian Centre for. “In Search of a Public Image.” ww.cca.qc.ca, 1990, Accessed on March 08, 2023. www.cca.qc.ca/ en/articles/issues/9/let-us-assureyou/32750/in-search-of-a-publicimage.
OLD MONTREAL
Fig. 112, Image of Montreal during the construction boom in the late twentieth century
Fig. 113, Image of the underground city: shops line the corridors connecting office tower plazas and inner-city tranist stations
construction projects carved through the urban islets with expressways flanked by competitively designed multi-purpose buildings, Montreal’s downtown development was still informed by the seigneury grid—a resonating presence of the past that came to inform the future office tower boom. This new typology that exuded modernism, progression and the global economy redefined the downtown core, resulting in mega-construction projects in the 1960s and 70s.10 Additionally, it redefined the boundaries of the old seigneurial grid system into one of large plazas flanked by high-rise office towers, which provided new public places for gathering, to host events or parades. This novel typology employed capitalist values, where new mechanisms of production and profit became associated with a new kind of land occupation: one of verticality that penetrated deep into the Laurentian territory and competed amongst the new skyline, announcing Montreal as global participant. In concurrence, consumerist facilities exponentially multiplied, resulting in a proliferation of shopping centers, chain stores and hotels that “emerged as symbols of cultural identity and new prosperity, revitalizing whole districts.”11 Amongst the seigneurial remains, land was no longer occupied horizontally, but reaped capital opportunities of the sub-terrain in the form of a complex underground tunnel network, connecting the burgeoning intercity transportation infrastructures with the street-level plazas.
One development that became an important cultural beacon, while defining the epicenter of Montreal’s new downtown was Place Ville Marie. Covering seven acres—three blocks of land— this new “civic and commercial complex transformed Montreal’s downtown and sparked the creation of its underground city, a subterranean network of retail space, plazas, and transit.”12 Between 1955-1962 a forty-two story, one-hundred-eightyseven-meter-high office tower began to emerge into the skyline, of which ten thousand people would come to conduct business on the forty cantilevered floors occupying nearly one acre of horizontal space. I.M. Pei’s new civic center, which defined the three-block plaza and connected with the retail and transit corridor underground, reflected true modernist form and spirit. Place Ville Marie refuted any expression of ultramontanism, challenging the favoured Collegiate Gothic style of the FrenchCanadians.13 Its severe plan, defined by its cruciform shape that organized the building into four narrow wings and provided ample interior light, lacked in ornamentation and expressed new feats of technology and engineering. This was the monument
10. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 274
11. Ibid.
12. “Place Ville Marie.” www.pcf-p.com, Accessed on March 12, 2023. www. pcf-p.com/projects/place-ville-marie/.
13. Architecture (CCA), Canadian Centre for. “In Search of a Public Image.” 1990. Accessed on March 06, 2023. https://www.cca.qc.ca/ en/articles/issues/9/let-us-assureyou/32750/in-search-of-a-publicimage
14. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 252
15. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 165
of the future generation, one that accepted the plurality of the progressive, globalizing world, rather than one that hung desperately onto its ancestry.
Pierre Harvey, a prominent scholar of the French-Canadian Identity Crisis understands the French-Canadian conservatism as a psychological problem that rejects the victors value system and in turn overrate their own, “thus turning inward amid the insecurity of English domination.”14 He stresses that the FrenchCanadian rejection of capitalism is taken as Ango-Saxon heresy, establishing their backwardness mentality, a pervasive summation of the identity crisis in its totality.
A retrospective critique of the nineteenth century Francophone paintings provides an alternative perspective to the idealized agrarian scenes and foreshadows a subconscious awareness of the confusion of inflated myths and consequential tensions. In depictions of the picturesque landscape, the habitant homes and rural life are said to declare virtues of agricultural work and simple pleasures of family life aligned with the rhythms of nature in the denouncement of the Anglophone’s industrialization and commercialization of land. However, the home of the habitant is always depicted beside the road with its back to the landscape, focused not on the fields, but on the roads bringing those passing them by.15 This reveals the tenuous, dialectical relationship between tradition and modernism that was always present despite conscious acknowledgment; where the past was preserved through the rhetoric of myth, a mutated idealness that in return enabled the confrontation of the future.
Fig. 114, Entryway into the shopping concourse in the underground city.
Fig. 116, Place Ville Marie, designed by I.M. Pei constructed between 1958-1962 section, scale 1:50
Fig. 118, Urbanization of Montreal with and the underground city network, scale 1:2000 123.
Fig. 119, Place Ville Marie standing as Montreal’s new monument
Fig. 120, Place Ville Marie served as a new public gathering place
Fig. 121, Place Ville Marie’s three acre plaza served as a new public gathering place, hosting events, gatherings and parades
Fig. 121
Fig. 122, Place Ville Marie’s 3 acre plaza served as a new public gathering place, hosting events, gatherings and parades
Fig. 123, View over the urbanizing city, looking onto the Saint-Lawrence River
Fig. 124, Place Ville Marie’s 3 acre plaza served as a new public gathering place, hosting events, gatherings and parades
THE SEIGNEURY
(1634-1854)
1.
ACT III
THE LAND IS RE-READ BY SPATIALIZING FEUDAL TO CAPITALIST SYSTEMS OF LAND VALUATION THROUGH A COMPARISON OF HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL AXES AS QUEBEC BEGINS TO URBANIZE, GLOBALIZE, MODERNIZE
Through the inflation of myth, the Francophones remain firmly attached—and convinced by—the picturesque and virtuous landscape of the seigneurial grid, even amongst the rapidly shifting economies and urbanization.
This romanticized, picturesque landscape conveying ideal notions of agrarian virtues survives on the back of mythmaking projects. In this mentality, the mythic entity becomes an enabler that short circuits the signified and the signifier in favour of preserving the idealized sign, while suppressing any contending new adaptations. It rejects the new in favour of the familiar and therefore remains in a perpetual propagation of an image which can never be satisfied.1 As a result, the mythic force seeks to replicate a past framework that—ignorant to the changing realities—ultimately costs its own livelihood. In the
Cousins. “The Ugly” Part II, 24-34 STATEMENT OF ECONOMY
Fig. 125
shift away from rurality and towards urbanization, boundaries were redefined, not only across the surface, restricting the long seigneurial fields into urban islets, but also vertically.
The Chambly seignorial land plot is drawn in plan and Place Ville Marie in section, chosen to represent the axis of land of which they are deriving value. By creating a device to re-read the landscape, the drawings are scrolled simultaneously. It becomes a co-dependent act of observing each rhetoric and the comparisons of deriving value and power through different means, in the same landscape. Both have a boundary, one between water and land, the other between earth and sky. This boundary is the operator of value. Value is derived from the operations on the water and within the ground that generates the possibility for each system respectively to sustain itself. Therefore, the re-reading of these two land systems seeks to spatialize the feudal and capitalist systems of land valuation through a comparison of horizontal and vertical axes. The seigneurial system provided the structure for the capitalists to build from. It is an act of re-reading the land that seeks to rewrite the landscape’s narrative that does not promote divisiveness but rather in finding the familiarity within the new.
Fig. 126, Side elevation view of landscape re-reading device, scale 1:8
Fig. 127, plan view of landscape re-reading device, scale 1:8
Fig. 126
Fig. 128, Front elevation view of landscape re-reading device, scale 1:8
Fig. 129, Axonometric view of landscape re-reading device
Fig. 128
Fig. 130
Fig. 131
Fig. 132,133, front view of device of re-reading feudal and capitalist landscapes, counter-clockwise rotation
Fig. 132
Fig. 134
Fig. 135
Fig. 136
Fig. 137
50 143.
CHAMBLY VILLAGE Fig. 138, The Chambly seigneurial land plot and settlement patterns plan, scale 1 :
Fig. 140, Plan of Chambly seigneurial land plot: water’s edge, scale 1:50
Fig. 140 145.
Fig. 141
Fig. 142, Plan of Chambly seigneurial land plot: concession 1, scale 1:50
Fig. 142 147.
Fig. 143
Fig. 144, Plan of Chambly seigneurial land plot: concession 2, scale 1:50
Fig. 144 149.
Fig. 145
Fig. 146, Plan of Chambly seigneurial land plot: concession 3, scale 1:50
Fig. 146 151.
Fig. 147
Fig. 148, Plan of Chambly seigneurial land plot: concession 4, scale 1:50
Fig. 148 153.
Fig. 149
Fig. 150, Plan of Chambly seigneurial land plot: concession 5, scale 1:50
Fig. 150 155.
Fig. 151
NOTES ON MYTHMAKING THROUGH FRANCIS ALYS
Mythmaking is a form of communication; it is a language that— building upon semiotics1—succeeds in suppressing the message of the sign, thus reconstructing it into a new entity. The sign is the associative totality of the signifier and the signified, it is a supplementary consequence, a third element that is dependent on the direct alignment between the initial object in question and its symbolic message.2 However, under the hypnotic power of myth, the sign is dislocated from its symbolic order and proceeds to endure a series of mutations that deny historical continuity and favour a new constructed associative meaning.3 This is the premise of which the French-Canadian nationalists have built their picturesque landscape upon, desperately grasping to a past that vehemently averts the denies a new symbolic order. This informs the critique of French-Canadian backwardness4 that enables their continued efforts to inflate the image of the past landscape, an idealized notion that finds reality only
1. Barthes. “Mythologies,” 133
Where he denotes the fundamental development Saussure laid for the grounds of semiology and subsequently mythology to be developed where “myth in fact belongs to the province of a general science, coextensive with linguistics, which is semiology.”
2. Ibid.
3. Barthes. “Mythologies,” 137, Where he gives examples of material objects to include photography, painting, posters and rituals, where these objects of “mythical speech” may be different at the start but “are reduced to a pure signifying funtion as soon as they are caught by myth.”
4. Backwardness as per the socio-economic critique of the French nationalist movement’s refusal to adapt to modern, international influences as noted by John Dales and Norman Taylor in Courville’s “Quebec: A Historical Geography,” 252
5. Mark Cousins. “The Production of the New.” Mark Cousins Lecture Series Archive. Architecture Association. 13 March, 1998. Accessed July 22, 2022. https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/ markcousins/15
6. Russell Ferguson. “Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal.” David Zwirner and Hammer Museum. 2007. http:// francisalys.com/books/HammerBook. pdf. 12
7. Tate. “Francis Alÿs Born 1959 | Tate.” Tate, 2010. Accessed March 06, 2023.www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ francis-alys-4427.
8. Ferguson. “Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal,” 101
in their propaganda. In the face of the changing mechanisms of economy, society and culture, they continue to turn their backs, informing a misconstrued inflation of excess meaning in desperate preservation of their picturesque agrarian landscape.
The act of changing perceptions is fundamentally difficult and goes against the natural instincts of the psyche, which innately seeks to return to the old and familiar absolute and rejection of any re-territorialization of meaning. Humans are pre-disposed to this condition, wired with a conservative mentality to avert the new for familiar mechanisms of pleasure.5 Mexico City based Belgian artist Francis Alys understands the psyche’s pre-conditioned repulsion to change and the consequential mythmaking projects that re-write history accordingly. His critical art practice therefore engages in the re-articulation of objects, boundaries and materials that do not seek to determine another absolute, but encourage the condition of doubt in the attempt to deconstruct mythological narratives.6 He occupies the space between politics and poetics to analyze individual memory and collective mythology engaging in “cyclical acts of repetition and mechanics of progression and regression.”7 His methodology however is somewhat of an oxymoron, whereby he addresses the creation of myths not through attempt to re-align them to a presumptuous accuracy, but to re-direct its forces to procreate new ones. In order to address politically charged constructions of boundaries, he engages in the role of the actor to perform new myths, stories and anecdotes that re-inform the romanticizers of the present condition, to “jolt one into the present circumstance.”8 He gives agency to the audience, to the perceivers to interpret the acts and therefore the opportunity to instill their own social meaning and cultural power.
9. Jean-Louis Barrault, “The Rehearsal the Performance.” Yale French Studies, no. 5, 1950, p. 3, doi:https:// doi.org/10.2307/2928918. 3
Through methodological acts of walking, revisiting and repetition, Alys engages in a rehearsal mentality, a period of negotiation where problems are faced and solved as they are proceeding in real-time. This mentality that is foundational to his work, lies in dialectical tension with the performance, where problems have already been solved.9 He not only takes the role of the actor, but also of the observer.
In 1995, Alys sought to materialize the otherwise untraceable act of walking by holding a punctured can of paint, marking his path through the streets of Sao Paulo by a thin blue wobbly line. Entitled The Leak, it was meant to achieve nothing other
than materializing an otherwise ephemeral act that through its transference into the medium of photography could be disseminated, operating in a continual act of re-telling. He revisited this work in 2004 but this time in the context of the allegorical Green Line that defined the pre-1967 border between East and West Jerusalem.10 Alys walked the allegorical Green Line with a can of leaking green paint, insinuating the one that Moshe Dayan had used in 1948 to establish the border on a map of Jerusalem and materializing the otherwise mythic state of the border. He laments on the importance of simple acts and narratives “so that these actions can be imagined without an obligatory reference or access to visuals…so that the story can be repeated as an anecdote, as something that can be stolen.”11 In other words, these acts content to his interest in creating new myths that address present conditions.
The Paradox of Praxis 1, also called Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, is another act of walk he performed in 1995, albeit this time pushing a block of ice. For nine hours, Alys pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City, documented in a condensed four-minute, fifty-nine second video, the cityscape is observed around him, as the ice slowly melts into a pebble-sized ball of which he kicks until it finally melts into a puddle. Alys occupies the role of the actor and observer, documenting new perceptions of the cityscape, where “it is through them that the work continuing into the future, its narrative rehearsed again and again for as long as the story continues to circulate, changing a little in each telling, while retaining a core of meaning.”12
Alys engages in the temporal element of myth, in that, in distancing the source from its origin through new mediums and re-enactments, it comes to embody a spirit of its own, its own forceful entity that embeds itself into a new formation of historicity. His work plays with the positive potentials of myth that—rather than asserting a new fundamentalist ideology — rewrites the fragments of past into new narratives, new concoctions. Barthes found that for one to reflect upon myth, one must lend themselves to history to “reflect on the existing notions that claim be ‘natural’ and ‘universal’ despite their origin.13 Perhaps under this framework of myth, the French-Canadian grasp on the past ideals of the picturesque landscape should not be re-aligned with a new assertion of accuracy, but re-directed. In a coalescence that engages all fragments of the collective conscious, a new
10. Ferguson.
101
11. Ferguson. “Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal,” 103
12. Ferguson. “Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal,” 106
13. Ferguson.
114
“Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal,” “Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal,”language can be created, in future orientation, to supersede the reality of the current identity crisis into the re-writing of a new history, a new mythic narrative.
ARCHITECTURES THAT CANNOT HOLD
THE FARMHOUSE
(1634-PRESENT)
STATEMENT OF PRODUCTION
THREE ACTS OF APPROPRIATION
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
A MEANS OF LIVING OFF THE LAND THROUGH THE ARCHITECTURAL ORGANIZATIONS OF THE FRENCH SETTLERS OF WHICH USED RESOURCES FROM THE LAND TO BUILD STRUCTURES AS WELL AS SUSTAIN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION
THE ENGLISH REIGN TOOK ADVANTAGE OF IMPROVED TECHNOLOGIES AND QUARRIED THE GRANITE RICH EARTH WITHIN THE QUEBECOIS LANDSCAPE. THIS RESULTED IN A NEW TYPOLOGY OF BUILDINGS CALLED GREY STONES
THE BUILDING MATERIAL PROFILEES OF THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH ARE RE-READ INTO A NEW ARCHITECTURE, ONE THAT WHILE PRODUCED FROM THE LANGUAGE OF MATERIAL OFFERS NEW FORMALITIES
THE FARMHOUSE
(1634-PRESENT)
1. Cousins. “The Ugly Part II,” 21 Where building on Freud’s lost object, in the proposal that an object exists twice; first in the regime of representation and second as its substance of existance, Cousins says “This proportionality, in which the exterior ‘overcoats’ the interior, in which the object as representation contains the object as existence, has the necessary consequence of changing the nature of distinction between the exterior and the interior.”
ACT I
A MEANS OF LIVING OFF THE LAND THROUGH THE ARCHITECTURAL ORGANIZATIONS OF THE FRENCH SETTLERS OF WHICH USED RESOURCES FROM THE LAND TO BUILD STRUCTURES AS WELL AS SUSTAIN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION
The French-Canadian farmhouse and Montreal greystone typologies will be analyzed through two components: the totalizing material surface that occupy the Symbolic and subcomponents informing its construction. This analysis seeks to understand the mechanisms of how the representative surface informs the summation of the total aesthetic; the totalized image1 of which symbolic identities were instilled for the habitant and urban dweller respectively. It finds traction within the process of romanticizing; a process which preserves the symbolic order of the past and therefore enables a suspended distance between the subject and object. The subject remains at a safe distance from the object, from the totalized image, which inherently protects its integrity from being punctured; from the sub-components being revealed. Therefore, the farmhouse and greystone hold a tenuous yet reciprocal relationship in which they are each
other’s Other, being repressed for the preservation of their own summations. Both typologies represent the associative other: the French-Canadian habitant seeking to return to an agrarian lifestyle and the English foreigners who brought an international platform with them into Quebec, infiltrating its traditional values with the progresive and modern world.2 At the same time, it is important not to relegate the exterior surface condition to vanity, as they are deeply instructive to understanding the political, social and cultural context of the time. The following architectural readings seek to understand these contexts; the sub-components that inform the total summation of the surface condition and therefore inform the construction of associative socio-political identities.
The rural French-Canadian farmhouse stands as an architectural object that symbolizes the lifestyles and values of the habitant. While some date back to the fifteenth century and may appear, in contradiction to the urban oasis of Montreal across the Saint-Lawrence River, as corpses amongst inactive agricultural fields they are very much active within the socio-political rhetoric of the French-Canadian nationalists. They were primarily built as utilitarian structures to provide protection from the harsh climate, while serving agricultural needs. However, these pragmatic factors are secondary to its aesthetic that still acts as a symbolic object embedded within the psyche of the habitant identity. Through the process of romanticization, the realities of the challenging labour and lifestyle are forgotten, maybe through a bout of amnesia,3 but in any case, they are discarded from the lineage of history. This results in a summation of the image, the total anesthetization of the rustic, single-storey farmhouse typology that rarely altered from its logic over the course of two centuries.
Within the typological French-Canadian farmhouse, there are two variations respective of the habitant and seigneur class distinctions. The seigneur’s position of seniority however was somewhat muted within the architectural expression of their homes, as both parties were restricted to the resources of the land. This resulted in the two classes living in very similar structures built out of timber, fieldstone and mortar. While the geography of the Saint-Lawrence territory neutralized the architectural capacity to distinguish status, there is evidence reinforcing the strategic, albeit subtle employment of material to establish differentiation. The overall aesthetic was informed by the early settlers, who built these homes on the premise of French building traditions, which resulted in vast similarities to the cottages and farmhouses on the North coast of France4 (the region of Brittany, where Cartier and his crew had departed
2. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 250
3. Cousins. “The Ugly, Part II,” 25. Where Cousins anecdotally refers to the interiority as a consequence of amnesia, a forgotten memory masked by the exterior
4. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 113
in their conquest of New France.) However, one major variance was reflected in the contrasting geographies, in that French-Canadian farmhouses were structurally composed of timber rather than stone. Another departing factor from the farmhouses in France is that the French-Canadian typology never comprised of cohabitation with the farm animals. While this would benefit insulation properties and simplify construction, it reinforces the selective compromises undertaken by the habitants to establish small degrees of comfort when possible.5
The Habitant House
The home of the habitant demanded utilitarian prioritizations, not only in keeping construction costs low and techniques straightforward, but need to address the harsh climatic condition of Quebecois winters and hot dry summers efficiently. This resulted in an overall aesthetic being defined by primitive needs of shelter and few opportunities for ornamentation or grandeur. While there are some examples of square floor plans—that offer greater flexibility and ease of construction—the preferred floorplan was rectangular with approximate proportionality of 1.2/1.6 The most common type was the two-room floor plan, which were often the result of a modification made to a former single-room floor plan. The interior logic was dependent on the fireplace location, as each room required a source of heat. This resulted in two further variations: the central fireplace and two gable-wall located fireplaces, one placed in each wall, organizing the kitchen and sleeping quarters accordingly. Additionally, the location of the fireplace determined the favourable roof type. The gable structure was most effective against harsh weather conditions and did not require complicated construction techniques, while protecting the fireplaces within the walls from weathering. However, the pavilion and hipped roof structures were also used even though they were more expensive and complicated to build. Early on the gable structure roof type was favourable, but as advancements were made, it was realized the benefits of air circulation and thus proficiency in the centrally placed single fireplace. Additionally, the central fireplace could be used structurally for interior wall construction and since it did not cater the gable roof type, they became less preferable.7
Chimneys were an important feature not only to the organization of the interior floor plan and roof structure, but as a symbol of status, where “the habitant attached a certain amount of prestige to the notion of a house with more than one expensive and
5. Sarah Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec: 16001800.” 1977. tspace.library.utoronto. ca/bitstream/1807/91917/1/ Traditional_Rural_Architecture_Quebec_TSpace.pdf. 59
6. Ibid. All dimensions and proportional ratios are sourced from Srah Mckinnon’s Phd dissertation on the typology of rural French-Canadian Farmhouses. Her work is a compendium of first source surveys and of other Quebec scholars who provided secondary information including P.-G. Roy archives, Ramsay Traqua McGill drawings of houses, surveys conducted by the architecture department at Laval University as well as photo inventory from Inventair des Oeuvres d’Art.
Fig. 158, Typical habitant house
Fig. 159, Habitant House, double -room floor-plan, with one centrally placed chimney and no front porch: plan, 1:200
8. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 81
9. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 67
10. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 91
11. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 59
12. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 61, 75
13. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 250
inviting fireplace,” and ultimately resulted in the builder attaching a non-functioning chimney stack “to convey the impression of grandeur.”8 Herein lies a second example, through strategic building decisions, of subtle distinctions being established amongst the seigneurial communities. Additionally, while the roofs’ bellcast eaves that extended over the longitudinal exterior walls served first and foremost weather protection, they became defining characteristics of the total aesthetic, the whole image of the French-Canadian farmhouse.9
The farmhouses were consistently single-storey structures with an average ceiling height of 2.2 m and a small attic space to accommodate grain storage and additional sleeping space. The attic was accessible through an interior staircase and often featured dormers that enhanced the attic’s utility by providing greater spatiality and daylight. Along with the chimneys and bellcast eaves, the dormers operated in unison as key features of the symbolic facade.10 The rectangular shaped farmhouses were consistently organized with their longitudinal facades oriented to the south, south-east to maximize sun exposure for daylight and heat.11 The house’s only entrance was centered along this facade with one or two windows on either side. Window openings had to be strategically placed to accommodate cold winter and warm summer temperatures. This resulted in the openings of, on average, 1.5 x 0.7 m being placed along a minimum of three facades enabling cross-ventilation in the warmer months. Windows were operational as the roof structure was supported by the timber frame and opened inwards.12 They were representative of the classic French sixteenth and seventeenth century style; set in wooden casements that were divided into small square panes. The builders ensured the frames were set flush with the outside wall, covering the joint with moulding to minimize any further compromises to the structures insulative properties.13
The exterior walls maintained economic building strategies with the materials of the land to further ensure maximum insulation. These roughly 0.7 m thick walls were defined by a timber post structure of roughly 20-30 cm apart and rested on a wooden beam set on top of stone foundations set approximately 0.5 m from the ground. Fieldstone set in thick lime mortar filled the wall in between the posts of which the entirety was then rendered in thick plaster or stucco. Excessive plaster was applied that resulted in a thick wall dimension for insulative purposes, as well as to reduce the risk of the mortar cracking in sub-freezing
temperatures. It was imperative that the joints, especially at the openings, were prevented from direct contact with snow ice or rain.14 Pragmatics aside, this construction, bearing the name “colombage pierrote” (half-timbered) provided “perhaps most importantly, an aesthetic more satisfying (to the habitant) than the irregular mixture of rough stone and mortar, creating the impression the house may have been constructed of a more costly material.” 15
The Manor House
The manor house, also known as the seigneury’s facade, or estate was located further inland from the productive agricultural fields and homes of the habitant.16 As the habitant homes, they were products of the landscape and therefore had limited mechanisms of distinguishing their position of power to that of the habitant. The construction of the manor homes is consistent with those of the habitant, with only a few added ornamentations such as, stone dressings at the windows and doors. The main distinctions between the two rectangular farmhouses were the size and scale. The floor plan of the manor house had proportions averaging 1.6/1 and consisted of two stories with attics above. This additional height presented complex structural problems, limiting the second story from being fully reflected in the roof construction. Due to these constraints, the total height of the houses was not much greater than that of the habitant farmhouse, achieving a verticality of no more than 10 m.17 However, by compromising the interior vertical height of the attics, the seigneurs were able to overcome the restrictions through illusory strategies. The builders would extend the exterior walls into the second-floor windows and shorten the overhang of the roof on the front facade. While this required the roof to be built at uneven pitches and include a covered front porch to address the compromised drainage system, it ultimately provided a more substantial facade and illuded grandeur and prestige of “proper formal effect.”18
The chimneys in the manor house needed to heat the bedrooms on the second floor and therefore were much bigger than the ones of the habitant homes, measuring on average one meter wide. As the homes advanced and interior ductwork developed, pipes were connected from the chimneys along the bottom of ceilings to access other rooms. These heating advancements within the manor home lessened the interior structure’s dependency on fireplace location where “the effectiveness of one fireplace could be increased.”19 This operated inversely to the status
14. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 60
15. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 62
16. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 63
17. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 92
18. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 91
19. Mckinnon. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec,” 93
signification that chimneys provided for the habitants, where expressions of status when met with technological developments were not always expressed on the facade. Another differentiation of prestige between the manor and habitant homes was in the symmetricity of the windows. It is clear by this example that the habitant farmhouse employed windows for pragmatic intentions and could not afford the concern of symmetrical formalities often achieved within the expression of the manor house’s facade.
Fig. 167, Single gable-wall chimney habitant home near Ste. Petronille, Quebec
Fig. 168, Single central chimney habitant home with dormers near Beaumont, Quebec
Fig. 167
Fig. 169, Double gable-wall chimney habitant home with dormers and front porch
Fig. 170, The Pichette home has a central and double gable-wall chimneys as the house was expanded, as well as dormers
Fig. 171, The Herbert home has a central and double gable-wall chimneys as the house was expanded, as well as dormers
Fig. 170
Fig. 172, Gendreau house with double chimney gable-walls
Fig. 173, The two-storey Manor Mauvide house on the Island of Orleans with dormers and one large chimney suggesting internal heating
Fig. 174, Two-storey manor house with two large chimneys independent of wall structure
THE FARMHOUSE
(1634-PRESENT)
STATEMENT OF PRODUCTION
1. “Saint-Lawrence Seaway Opening,” YouTube video, April 13, 2014, 4:56, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5oSTTL-Qth4. Accessed 05 Mar. 2023.
ACT II
THE ENGLISH REIGN TOOK ADVANTAGE OF IMPROVED TECHNOLOGIES AND QUARRIED THE GRANITE RICH EARTH WITHIN THE QUEBECOIS LANDSCAPE. THIS RESULTED IN A NEW TYPOLOGY OF BUILDINGS CALLED GREYSTONES
The Saint-Lawrence River continued to be a source of economy, trade and a protagonist for change as the wave of industrialization accompanied the English reign. Even as the settlements along its edge clung firmly to its ground, the river shifted into a new role that served the global platform, turning outwards— through the land—rather than further inwards and in-land. On April 25, 1959, the opening of the Saint-Lawrence seaway was commemorated, inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II alongside President Eisenhower of the United States, prior to boarding the Britannia for a five-hour voyage across the newly opened water boarder into the United States, which was said “represented the greatest engineering defeat of modern times.”1 It served as reinforcement to newly forged relationships becoming not just symbols but key players in the restructuring and building of Quebec’s territory and economy that “was not only a monument
to future Canadian-American relationships, but an opening up to the global world.”2
As the mega-project world approached, Quebec continued to invest heavily and successfully into hydroelectric start-ups. These came to define the backbone of its global economy; declaring its position and competitiveness to the international world. This also resulted in a mining boom and subsequently mining towns that not only began to revitalize the economy but also the rural landscape, which had been increasingly dissolving in the twentieth century urban exodus. This trend was enforced by the creation of the Iron Ore Company of Canada in the early 1950s that “brought a foretaste of the mega-project world.”3 As the territorial and economic restructurings began to visibly shift urban grain and the demographics, tensions further increased with the French. The nationalists with resound rejection and to their own demise firmly held onto the past, demonstrating the beginnings of the socio-political critique referencing FrenchCanadian backwardness.4
The architecture of the city also began to reflect these new avenues of resource, with particular focus on the extraction of limestone, the most prominent geological material of the Laurentian territory. Available close to the earth’s surface primarily on the eastern end of the island, this four-hundred-fifty year old material became the predominant stone for building, as well for further processing into secondary masonry needs. The chalky calcareous component is formed under water through a process of accumulating organic and chemical agencies that, through shifting pressures in the earth, create a layered solid rock of lime and shaley material. These layers are deposited into the varying depths of the waterbed that are most conducive to accumulation and result in a lenticular form; with thicker bulging areas thinning out towards the edges that may stretch upwards of a couple hundred miles.5
Exponentiated by the building boom in the mid-late twentieth century, the extraction of limestone and production into construction materials did not only benefit the economy but defined the greystone buildings of Montreal. As the British started to acquire land within the city, they disseminated a new cultural identity through the use of limestone into two primary typologies: first, the warehouse storefronts built by English entrepreneurs and second, the greystone villas resided
2. Ibid.
3. Courville. “Quebec : A Historical Geography,” 257
4. Backwardness, introduced by economists Pierre Harvey, John Dales and Norman Taylor as a pyschological problem in the Quebec’s identity issues, is now commonly used to describe its nationalist movement’s refusal to adapt to modern economies and the global world. “One of the hardiest themes in Quebec’s political and intellectual repertoireIt was the so-called economic backwardness of French-Canadian society.” Courville. “Quebec A Historical Geography,” 25. It resulted in a period of severe economic downfall and lagging education systems. However despite these obvious blights, they continue to romanticize the past and resist the present, where “by relating material poverty with a lack of education and then charging the Church with what is called “the backwardness of the French-Canadian,” Britishers are again urging upon them the English and American way of life.” The saying ““Get an education”–meaning an English-American education–”and all will be well” is the English-American advice to his French countrymen.” Burton Ledoux “French Canada: A Modern Feudal State.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 17, no. 2 (1941): 206–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26448362. 14
5. M. F. Goudge, “Limestones of Canada: Their Occurrence and Characteristics Part III.” Internet Archive, Canada Department of Mines, 1935. Accessed 08 March, 2023. www.archive.org/details/limestonesofcana0000mfgo/page/2/ mode/2up?view=theater. 2-5
Fig. 176, Image of greystone shopfront typology
in by the English elites. The entrepreneurial force of the British, manifested through the warehouse storefronts, instilled burgeoning shopping districts such as the Square Mile, which, for instance held the greatest concentration of wealth in Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century.6 While of different programs, the English villas and their warehouse storefronts created a new presiding materiality that was representative of the organization and ambitions of the English masonry entrepreneurs, where “the activity and strength of this economy was remarkable in procuring, the cutting and delivering of stone and shows a maturing British Colonial accent.”7
Greystone buildings started to gain their own social identity and economic status for the urban dweller, akin to the “rustic materials” of the habitant, they came to inform neighbourhoods that still hold strong historic associations with the English bourgeoisie today. The Shaughnessy house is a particular example of British ascension, still residing—due to preservation efforts— adjacent to the once prosperous Square Mile neighbourhood in Montreal, it represents the ascension of English social and economic development. The 1874 villa designed and built by William T. Thomas, was originally intended as a duplex, maintaining a symmetrical composition of two semi-detached houses. However it was eventually converted into one large mansion when it was bought entirely by the Shaughnessy family.8 In 1973 it was designated as a national historic site of Canada for its exemplary expression of the Second Empire style fused with the Montreal greystone building tradition.9 The stately three-storey, rectangular house was flanked by two pavilions on either side of the longitudinal facades, the windows and doors were placed in balanced proportions to one another even as the windows took many forms of expression ranging from twostorey bay windows to Palladian and elliptical windows within the slope of the roof and tripartite dormer windows. Cast iron detailing provided a heightened opulence along the perimeters of the windows and the crestline of the mansard roof.10 The facade, built of rough greystone material was combined with more refined stone cornices and wood detailing that emanated the new technological capacities of the English along with their economic and cultural ascension.
However, the Shaughnessy house, which sat in good company with other opulent homes, set back along the tree-lined street facing the Saint-Lawrence River was under threat of extinction
6. “John Redpath.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Accessed on March 08, 2023. www.thecanadianencyclopedia. ca/en/article/john-redpath.
7. Lambert, “In Search of a Public Image.”
8. “Van Horne / Shaughnessy House National Historic Site of Canada.” HistoricPlaces.ca. Accessed on 10 March, 2023/ www.historicplaces. ca, www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/ place-lieu.aspx?id=18725.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
Fig. 178, Illustration of limestone
Fig. 179, View of historic Shaughnessy house prior to Peter Rose’s renovations
Fig. 180 View of historic Shaughnessy house at beginning of Peter Rose’s renovation and construction of the CCA.
in two concurrent manners. As technological advancements continued into the late twentieth century, the quarrying and extraction of limestone was no longer the most accessible resource in comparison to more feasible options, such as brick. This became the dominant material for wall construction amongst Montreal as limestone was faded out.
The engineering feat that enabled limestone extraction to produce a building material that proliferated the urban landscape of Montreal throughout the mid twentieth century had suddenly become outdated. The second manner of threat the greystones faced was the aggressive scale and speed of Montreal’s urbanization. The city of Montreal had reached a tipping point where, “activist groups felt that too much of Montreal’s traditional architecture was being destroyed in the name of urban renewal and progress, making the city unlivable.”11 As urban and infrastructural development grew exponentially, these buildings became at risk of demolition. Preservation groups such as Sauvons Montreal worked to preserve the greystone typology that had somehow escaped a singular preferential agency of the English and had become embedded into the grain of the city and valued as an important component of Montreal’s cultural heritage.
The Shaughnessy house lay as a relic of the past amongst the approaching highway and railway infrastructures that had replaced the previously tree-lined streets. While, the building had already gone through a series of amalgamations and configurations, it was given another opportunity for further transformation when purchased by architect (at the time), Phyllis Lambert. Lambert went on to found the Canadian Center for Architecture with this building, eventually hiring architect Peter Rose to preserve the Shaughnessy house, serving as the starting point for his addition. Rose’s addition, while in line with contemporary style, was built out of limestone. The new building, housing the CCA, protrudes from the Shaugnessy house, not in disgust but in honour. It enables historical continuation and recognition while provoking future trajections. It takes a position of heritage, validating historical adaptation as the protagonist of a future narrative by enabling a new platform for the repressed sub-components to be expressed into a new kind of surface materiality—marching forward into a new era of the city and its architecture.
Fig. 183
Fig. 184
Fig. 183, Image of greystone typology in private residences
Fig. 185
Fig. 185, Image of greystone typology in apartment buildings
Fig. 186, Image of greystone shopfront typology
Fig. 187
THE FARMHOUSE
(1634-PRESENT)
STATEMENT OF PRODUCTION
ACT III
THE BUILDING MATERIAL PROFILEES OF THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH ARE REREAD INTO A NEW ARCHITECTURE, ONE THAT WHILE PRODUCED FROM THE LANGUAGE OF MATERIAL OFFERS NEW FORMALITIES
In the analysis of the two typologies, the rural French-Canadian farmhouse and the Montreal greystones, the architecture was analyzed through socio-economic factors that enabled a reading of how these structures became intertwined within respective cultural identities.
The rural French-Canadian farmhouse stands as an architectural object that symbolizes the lifestyles and values of the habitant, while the greystones came to be associated with the rapid urbanization and modernization of Montreal instigated by the English. While geographically facing one another, from either side of the SaintLawrence River, their gazes do not meet but are rather held in a tenuous position. The farmhouse clings to the pure French pastoral lifestyle, while the greystone faces outward onto the international platform that enabled immigration, engineering and technological advancements. To the French-Canadians, this
as individual objects, representing the formal expression of the foundations, lintels, windows, softs or chimneys. These fragments are rearranged to inform new totalities, seeking to break the symbolic order that preserves the modality of the surface through fragmention. These rearrangements are preserved through photography, existing in an ephemeral, fluid moment that escapes any objective permanence, resonating only in the provocation of the imaginary. It seeks to challenge the integrity of the French-Canadian farmhouse’s totalized representation, where the romanticized aesthetic has become detached, masking the reality of any hardships that are engulfed in an idealizations, even if incompatible with the present. It strives to breach the condition of exteriority and trigger the moment when “the inside of the object bursts traumatically,”1 fragmenting the romanticizations of the nationalists to be expanded upon and accepting of multiple representations. 1.
Cousins. “The Ugly Part II,” 26
Fig. 189, Image of typical habitant house
Fig. 189 213.
Fig. 190, Re-reading of habitant house into a new material expression
Fig. 191, Axonometric view of the typical habitant house, re-read into a new material expression
192
194, 196
Fig. 192, Plan of chimney profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 194, Plan of plaster rendered wall profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 195, Plan of plaster rendered wall profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 196, Plan of veranda roof profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 197, Plan of plaster rendered wall profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. Fig. 193 Fig. 195 Fig. Fig. 197 Fig. 193, Plan of dormer profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 198, Habitant house typology reread into a new material expression, cast in plaster, scale 1:200
Fig. 200
Fig. 199
Fig. 201
Fig. 199, Rural Farmhouse material reading in plaster re-articulation a
Fig. 200 Rural Farmhouse material reading in plaster re-articulation b
Fig. 202
Fig. 203
Fig. 204
Fig. 205
Fig. 206
Fig. 207
Fig. 208 Fig. 209
Fig. 210
Fig. 211
Fig. 212
Fig. 213
Fig. 214, View of historic Shaughnessy house prior to Peter Rose’s renovations
227.
Fig. 216, Axonometric view of the Shaughnessy house, re-read into a new material expression Fig. 216Fig. 217, Plan of chimney profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 218, Plan of greystone facade profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 219, Plan of window lintel profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 220, Plan of greystone facade profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 221, Plan of greystone foundation profile re-reading, scale 1:200
Fig. 217
Fig. 218
Fig. 219
Fig. 220
Fig. 222
Fig. 223, Montreal Greystone material reading in plaster re-articulation a
Fig. 223
Fig. 225
Fig. 224, Montreal Greystone material reading in plaster re-articulation b
Fig. 226
Fig. 227
Fig. 226, 227, Re-articualtion of Montreal Greystone cast in plaster 231.
Fig. 228, 229, Re-articualtion of Montreal Greystone cast in plaster
Fig. 228
Fig. 230
Fig. 231
Fig. 230, 231, Re-articualtion of Montreal Greystone cast in plaster 233.
Fig. 232
Fig. 233
Fig. 234
Fig. 235
Fig. 234, 235, Re-articualtion of Montreal Greystone cast in plaster 235.
Fig. 236
Fig. 237
Fig. 238, Cornice material rereadings of farmhouse and greystone typologies in plaster
Fig. 239, Facade material re-readings of farmhouse and greystone typologies in plaster
Fig. 240, Plinth material readings of farmhouse and greystone typologies in plaster
Fig. 239
Fig. 240
Fig. 244, Habitant house typology reread into a new material expression, cast in plaster, scale 1:200 239.
Fig. 245, Montreal greystone building typology re-read into a new material expression, cast in plaster, scale 1:200 241.
NOTES ON DEADLINESS THROUGH GORDON MATTA-CLARK
The act of re-reading the exteriorities of the French-Canadian farmhouse and Montreal greystone typologies seeks to puncture the regime of representation, the totalized image, with the intention to reveal the repressed interiorities. It seeks to fragment the symbolic, which has been preserved through the process of romanticization and consequently inform the respective identities of the habitant and urban dweller. Thus, the material re-readings of the two typologies seek disorientation, which is familiar to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark in that, from his approach under the widely analyzed term ‘anarchitecture,’ is “not spatial transformation but a certain spatial exposure, a kind of forensic image of what is there, unseen but all too close.1 This invites the subject, who previously stood at a distance, to approach the object and engage with the interiority: the repressed sub-components that threaten the totality of the exterior’s representation. This this the revitalization of what
2.
3.
4. Davila, Thierry, et al. “Gordon Matta-Clark. Open House.” Genève, Mamco Musée D’art, 2020, 44
118. Wigly. “Cutting Matta-Clark,” 27
5.
once was perceived as ugly or dead, but in fact they were only playing dead.2 In other words, it could be described as the object existing twice, first as its interior existence and second as a representation of itself.3 Where the exterior representation seeks unity informed by a singular agency, the interior craves fragmentation that enables the sub-components to attend to a plurality of subjectivities in retaliation against the romanticized status quo, held hostage by hegemonic objectivity.
These concepts can be further explored through Matta-Clark’s work, of which is commonly associated with the term he developed in the early 1970s, in collaboration with his small artist group in the namesake exhibition: Anarchitecture. The premise of the exhibition exploring the meaning of anarchitecture consequently influenced Matta-Clark’s approach. It should not be understood as being opposite to architecture, in the sense that it is not an anti-architecture. Instead it is focused on an experience rather than the building in “an attempt at clarifying ideas about space which are personal insights and reactions rather than formal socio-political statements.”4 Through acts of spatial subversions such as undoing, unbuilding, destructing and defunctionalizing118 he sought to reveal what was already there in plain sight, but masked in orthodoxy and fundamentalist perspectives informing the status quo. Therefore, his work sought to expose the subcomponents, the interiorities that substantiate that which the hegemonic discourse represses.
In the early 1970s, he began the first series of cuts; encompassing a forensic approach to cutting squares into the walls and floors/ ceilings of abandoned buildings in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Among this series was, FLOOR ABOVE CEILING BELOW, cutting squares into the floor/ceiling of an abandoned building on East 27th Street. His work was not destructive however, but sustaining; by cutting holes into perforated spaces, albeit covered with finish materials, he exposed people and views to one another that had always existed but were previously invisible.119 His use of photography and film was integral to not only the documentation of his work but used to produce diptychs and collages that further subverted the spaces, revealing the invisible in plain sight. A collage of the same perspective from two different places is collaged on top of each other. In the background, the camera points upward through the hole in the ceiling, while in the foreground, the camera looks down at the same hole through the floor. The
Cousins. “The Ugly, Part III,” 41 Cousins. “The Ugly, Part II” 24 Wigly. “Cutting Matta-Clark,” 53 Fig. 247, Matta-Clark’s FLOOR ABOVE, CEILING BELOW & SPLITTING xerox, acetone trasferred collage 247.
pictures are overlapped at an angle engaging new spatial qualities and probing characteristics of a hole’s solidity. Whereby through an absence, the depth of the surface is exposed revealing the interior sub-components that fragment the realm of the symbolic by revealing the substantiated depth of the surface is not in fact empty. “Therefore, the holes do not only reveal the external layers of paint, plaster, wallpaper, tiles, fabric, carpet, linoleum or floorboards6 but reveal the object as existing twice, “a double effect, exposing the secrets of what is already there by dramatically altering it.”7
This cut series continued into one of his more famous works, SPLITTING, which he performed over the course of four months in 1974, from March to June, in an abandoned house in New Jersey. Dividing the house into two equal parts he engaged in an analytical process of cutting the house. The result was a crack; a gap between two fragments of what once was a whole. It extended through the width of the house, from the roof to the foundation, in what he described as “the scaffold of shareyed inspectors.”8 A series of photographs were assembled into a small white book that built on his previous collage work to create an effect that Laurie Anderson had earlier described as a “building element moving to prop up a line rather than a line being cut through a stationary building.”9
It is noted that Matta-Clark applies a constrained rigour of classicism by treating the house as a totality of which two equal halves are produced, an intervention that is “elegant because it is precise in its visual and architectural effects.”10 At the same time, he rejects the formal restraint of classicism and unbinds the object from the regime of representation, subverting the exteriority by exposing the sub-components that challenge the totality of representation. This activates a new sense of agency that liberates ways of seeing and doing.”11 He allows for the object to exist twice in the same plane—for the interior to burst into the exterior12—akin to a double-image exposure: re-inventing the object into new perspectives of existence.
6. Wigly. “Cutting Matta-Clark,” 61
7. Ibid.
8. Davila, Thierry, et al. “Gordon Matta-Clark. Open House.,” 45
9. Wigly. “Cutting Matta-Clark,” 177
10. Davila, Thierry, et al. “Gordon Matta-Clark. Open House.,” 46
11. Davila, Thierry, et al. “Gordon Matta-Clark. Open House.,” 45
12. Cousins. “The Ugly, Part II,” 26
1. Jean-Louis Barrault . “The Rehearsal the Performance.” Yale French Studies, no. 5, 1950, doi:https:// doi.org/10.2307/2928918, 3, Where Barrault notes the difference between a performance and a rehearsal as “During the rehearsals, all problems must be faced and solved. In the performance, each problem must have been solved. The performance is a happening. It is the intrinsically poetic moment; the moment when, with the spectators’ presence contributing the final drop, the chemical precipitate appears.” He notes that it is the period of facing unsolved problems in real-time, rather than those already solved where, “Now is the time for mapping things out, for discipline and construction.” 251.
CONCLUSION
As stated at the beginning, this is a rehearsal1 that—through the analysis and re-readings of the wayside cross, seignorial grid system and the French-Canadian farmhouse—seeks to subvert objects that represent single agencies and break the singular projection of a total image. Each are exemplary architectural objects that enable a two-fold investigation: first through addressing the process of romanticization—the larger theoretical framework—into themes of monumentality, mythmaking and material deadliness and second, by deconstructing the means by which the French-Canadian nationalist movement embed these artefacts into the production of a culture and identity. The wayside cross, seigneury grid and farmhouse, are aesthetic carriers caught in the tropes of romanticization; in the preservation of an idealized symbolic past instrumentalized in the separatist movement’s propogation of a true authentic identity. This is
prophesized in their creed, Pays-Paysages-Paysans (CountriesLandscapes-Peasants) that strives to evoke idealized forms of the Quebec nation, the rural landscape and the habitant lifestyle, which continue to reverberate throughout the corridors of the presently urbanized metropolis of Montreal.
The analysis operates within a rehearsal mentality; “a period of facing unsolved problems in real-time, rather than those already solved (...) It is in the intrinsically poetic moment; the moment when, with the spectators’ presence contributing to the final drop, the chemical precipitate appears.”2 With this in mind, the analyses and re-readings of each architectural artefact negotiates the roles of observer and actor to destabilize any pre-determined singular constructions of culture and dissolve prescriptive boundaries of identity into a state of mutation; adaptation, subversion and re-articulation.
The obvious question that arises therefore is why? Why should we care? What is the purpose of this investigation that seeks to release the object from the Symbolic; from the French nationalists’ acts of romanticization bred within the economy of desire, the regime of representation into the Real; the present day adaptation of a global, progressive city? If one totalizing statement may be allowed, it would be that totalization or cultural hegemony holds the subjective hostage, consequently disseminating a single preferential agency to project a universality over the multiplicit that preserves the gap between the romanticized Symbolic and the Real. This aversion to reterritorialize, or rather de-territorialize the symbolic anchored in the past to present day meaning informs nationalist rhetoric and prevents cultural differences from being expressed or represented. Francois Jullien’s concept of cultural inventiveness3 becomes fundamental therefore in understanding the danger of nationalism and the pertinence of mutation in addressing the global ailment of fundamentalist ideologies. When a culture is nostalgic for an identity rooted in the past, it becomes closed off to the possibility of the new; the unfamiliar or as Jullien denotes, the possibility of invention.
The French-Canadians sustain an exclusive projection of the wayside cross, the seigneury grid and the farmhouse that prevent any contentions in the present actualization of the secularization of the crosses, urbanization of the pastoral land and technological advancements in building materials. A sense of cultural loyalty
2. Ibid.
3. François Jullien. “There Is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity.” John Wiley & Sons, 28 May 2021.
suppresses the acceptance of the manifesting Other, the Beast that—despite ignorant denial, described by scholars as a psychological backwardness4—continues to resonate. Each rereading is premised on the enablement of invention; to remove the veil preserved by romanticization and reveal the emerging particularities of cultural adaptation. This can only be expressed through a kind of friction that invites the participation of the many, the multiplicit rather than the singular. If friction is not allowed then mutation is suffocated and flattened into a uniformed reproduction of itself, a projected, pre-determined universalization that chases the idealized Symbolic identity in perpetuity, with inevitable failure.
This is not the way forward. While avoiding any overly optimistic statement, historical continuity must be allowed to transform with that whom it constitutes. In the same manner, it must not be forgotten, or negated through re-plaquefication— destroying one monument for the creation of a new one—as this paradoxically perpetuates fundamentalist agendas yet proves to be, dissapointingly, the common strategy. Resonate Beasts offers an alternative strategy that celebrates a rehearsal mentality, which subverts prescriptive agendas; enabling real-time problem solving—inventive frictions that fragment the status quo—and poke holes in pre-determined narratives to ultimately faciliate the mediation of new perspectives between one an_other.
4. Backwardness, introduced by economists Pierre Harvey, John Dales and Norman Taylor as a pyschological problem in the Quebec’s identity issues, is now commonly used to describe its nationalist movement’s refusal to adapt to modern economies and the global world. “One of the hardiest themes in Quebec’s political and intellectual repertoireIt was the so-called economic backwardness of French-Canadian society.” Courville. “Quebec A Historical Geography,” 252.
1. Abonnenc, M. Arndt, L. Lozano, C. Crawling Doubles: Colonial Collecting and Affect. B42 Paris. 2016
2. Architecture (CCA), Canadian Centre for. “In Search of a Public Image.” Www.cca. qc.ca, 1990, www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/9/let-us-assure-you/32750/insearch- of-a-public-image. Accessed 22 Mar. 2023.
3. Barrault, Jean-Louis. “The Rehearsal the Performance.” Yale French Studies, no. 5, 1950, p. 3, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928918. Accessed 14 Mar. 2020.
4. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Points, 1957.
5. Birnbaum, Daniel, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein. Spacing Philosophy : Lyotard and the Idea of the Exhibition. Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2019.
6. Borden, Iain. The Unknown City : Contesting Architecture and Social Space : A Strangely Familiar Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Mit Press. 2001.
7. Bull, S. Paasche, M. Urban Images: Unruly Desires in Film and Architecture. Sternberg Press.
8. Canadian Encyclopedia. “The FLQ and the October Crisis | the Canadian Encyclopedia.” Www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, 2022, www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/timeline/the-flq-and-the-october-crisis.
9. Cerdá Ildefonso. General Theory of Urbanization 1867. New York: Actar.2018.
10. Coates, Colin MacMillan, and Internet Archive. The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec. Internet Archive, Montreal [Que.] : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000, archive.org/details/ metamorphosesofl0000coat/page/12/mode/2up. Accessed 9 Mar. 2023.
11. “Company of One Hundred Associates | the Canadian Encyclopedia.” Www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ compagnie-des-cent-associes.
12. Courville, Serge. Quebec : A Historical Geography, UBC Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aaschool/ detail.action?docID=3412619.
13. Cousins, Mark. “New Object. ““AA School.” www.aaschool.ac.uk, www.aaschool. ac.uk/markcousins/15. Accessed 22 Mar. 2023.
14. Cousins, Mark. “In the Midst of Psychoanalysis.” New Formations, #7 Srping I 989.
15. Cousins, Mark. The Ugly I, II, III. Arq Ediciones. 2020.
16. Davila, Thierry, et al. Gordon Matta-Clark. Open House. Genève, Mamco Musée D’art, 2020.
17. De Sola-Morales, Manuel. “Urbanity of Things.” From “Relational Theories of Urban Form : An Anthology” Kiss, Daniel, and Simon Kretz. Basel: Birkheuser. 2021
18. Foot, Richard. “Separatism in Canada | the Canadian Encyclopedia.”
Thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, 2019, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ separatism.
19. Giedion, Siegfried. “Nine Points on Monumentality.” https://www.academia.
edu/19870956/NinePointsonMonumentality1943. 1943
20. Goudge, M. F. , Limestones of Canada: Their Occurrence and Characteristics
Part III. Internet Archive, Canada Department of Mines, 1935, archive.org/details/ limestonesofcana0000mfgo/page/2/mode/2up?view=theater. AccesseXr. 2023.
21. Hartoonian, G. Walter Benjamin and Architecture. London: Routledge.2013
22. Hood, Walter, and Sara Zewde. “How Can We Share Space Together?” Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics, 2021.
23. Judd, Donald. Specific Objects. Judd Foundation, 1975.
Krauss, Rosalind E. ““Specific” Objects.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 46, 2004, pp. 221–224, www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20167648.
pdf?casatoken=uUa1M6XWpfYAAAAA:YlwC-O7Sczp1Db3SQb
R2QVb8tP295zbf0Cj8gf-QZAhAOwuLlBxz6GKxh1YGB3uFT3M8a7ETlu1
TJGZ1nXJvfDUsPlba7yhJsmnPIIYR0IWHZnU0. Accessed 8 Mar. 2023.
24. François Jullien. There Is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity. John Wiley & Sons, 28 May 2021.
25. Latour, Bruno . “Agency of Things.” From “Relational Theories of Urban Form : An Anthology” Kiss, Daniel, and Simon Kretz. Basel: Birkheuser. 2021
26. Ledoux, Burton. “French Canada: A Modern Feudal State.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 17, no.2 (1941): 206–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26448362.
27. Lucas Van Rompay, et al. The Long Shadow of Vatican II. UNC Press Books, 1 J July 2015, p. Chapter 5: Quebec’s Wayside Crosses and the Creation of Contemporary Devotionalism.
28. Madanipour, Ali. “Beyond Placing and Distancing: Public Spaces for Inclusive Cities.” Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics, 2021.
29. Mckinnon, Sarah. “Traditional Rural Architecture in Quebec: 1600-1800.” 1977.
30. Miessen, Markus, and Zoë Ritts. Para-Platforms : On the Spatial Politics of RightWing Populism. Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2018.
31. MOMA. “Donald Judd. Untitled, 1969.” MOMA, www.moma.org/audio/3946.
32. “Montreal-Stone.” CGEN Archive. Accessed March 08, 2023. www.cgenarchive.org/ montreal-stone.html.
33. Morrison, Ian A. Moments of Crisis. UBC Press, 1 Sept. 2019.
Ownership: A Social Media Pilot Project - E-Flux.” 2022. www.e-Flux.com. April 5, 2022.
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/449710/ownership-a-social-media-pilot-project/
34. “Place Ville Marie.” Www.pcf-P.com, www.pcf-p.com/projects/place-ville-marie/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2023.
35. Posts, Michael W. Clune Michael W. “This Cannot Be Real: “Art and Objecthood” at 50. Nonsite.org, 17 July 2017, nonsite.org/this-cannot-be-real/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2023.
36. Rancière, Jacques, and Gabriel Rockhill. The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution of the Sensible. London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
37. Riha Tadeas, Reemaa Roland, Linsi Laura. Weak Monument: Architectures Beyond the Plinth. 2018
38. Redpath, John. “The Canadian Encyclopedia.” Www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/john-redpath. Accessed 05 Mar. 2023.
39. “Saint-Lawrence Seaway Opening ” www.youtube.com, www.google.com/ search?q=saint-lawrence+seaway+opening&oq=saint-lawrence+seaway+o pening&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i22i30l3j0i390l3.4262j0j7&sourceid=chro me&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:06dcc7df. Accessed 30 Mar. 2023.
40. Stavros Stavrides.” Common Space : The City as Commons.” London Zed Books. 2016
41. Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space : Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Mit. 2002
42. Tate. “Francis Alÿs Born 1959 | Tate.” Tate, 2010, www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francisalys-4427.
43. Van Horne / Shaughnessy House National. Historic Site of Canada. Accessed on March 06 2023. www.historicplaces.ca, www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/ place-lieu.aspx?id=18725.
44. “Welcome to the Quebec Family History Society.” Qfhs.ca, qfhs.ca. Accessed 7 Mar. 2023.
45. Wigley. “Cutting Matta-Clark : The Anarchitecture Investigation.” Zürich, Lars Müller Publishers, 2018.
46. William Butler Yeats. “The Second Coming.” Poetry Foundation, 1920, www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.
National Library and Archives of Quebec, digital collections
Fig. 001-005, 009-012, 018, 019, 084-088, 092, 093, 100-110, 112-115, 119, 124, 158, 160, 163, 165, 167-174, 178, 181,189
Photographed by Edouard Zotique Massicotte
Fig. 026-039
Photographed by Author
Fig. 040-053, 072-075,198-201, 222-225, 238-240
Stills from video shot by Author
Fig. 054-071
Photographed by Genevieve Lutkin
Fig. 076-080,125,130-137, 152, 202-213, 226-237
Collages by Author
Fig. 081-083, with images sourced from MoMA’s online exhibition archives
Fig.153-155, with images sourced from Francis Alys’ website
Fig. 246-248, with images sourced from MoMA’s online exhibition archives
Drawings by Author
Fig. 006-008, 013-017, 020, 025, 089-091,094-099, 111, 116-118, 126-129, 138-151, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164, 166, 177, 188, 190-197, 215-221, 241-243
