There is a lot to say about Montreal, most of it positive. So let’s get the negative out of the way. The Old City in Montreal has some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, inspired by French and Italian styles. These are wonderful, human-scale, ornately decorated buildings. Many of them in the old city were originally offices and are now being converted into luxury condominiums.
And then there’s the Black Box and its Growth.
The Black Box is a nondescript Modernist structure, clad in black granite with dark windows. Unbelievably, it faces onto an historic square that is framed on three sides by the Basilica of Notre Dame de Montreal , a wonderful old Art Deco building, a red brick structure from 1888, and what looked to be an old government building.
What this moronic piece of crap is doing here in this beautiful setting is anyone’s guess. Apparently Montreal’s city planners wondered how it got there, too, because after it was completed, and people had time to contemplate what was lost to build it, the city passed much more stringent requirements for new construction and renovation.
It was too late, however, to save millions of eyes from this monstrosity. The building itself is bad enough, because of its banal design and its incongruous location. But as bad as it looks on its own, it gets worse. Check out the main entrance to the building in the photo to the right. It is on the side of the structure that thankfully does not face the Place d’Armes.
What in the name of Mies van der Rohe’s bunghole is that supposed to be? Is that floating black box supposed to mark the entrance? Is it meant to be inviting? Is that supposed to be a plaza under there? Few things, other than picking out your own casket, would be as depressing as ducking under that pointless box stuck on a box to get to and from work each day. I think the clinical term for a structure like that is “malignant.” Only seriously invasive surgery or some kind of detonation could correct a hideous attachment like that. The architect should be ashamed, and probably flogged. And maybe he was. The Indignant Citizen has never seen anything that bad anyplace else, so maybe the Black Box was this architect’s—and that term us used loosely here—only building.
Montreal certainly should have known better, given what it had to work historically. But then other cities also should have known better than to build some of the same kind of crap that fouls their skylines.
Buildings like the Black Box suck the soul out of wonderful public spaces like the Place d’Armes and historic downtowns like old Montreal. Maybe one day we’ll tear them down to make room for humanly-scaled and artistic buildings, the same way they tore down whatever was there before the Black Box to make room for it.
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