The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name, which was on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal from October 2004 to September 2005. The catalogue presents a new study of a significant period of change in a major North American city. Like other CCA catalogues, it is a carefully produced book with high-quality illustrations. It includes a fascinating collection of visual material, and the essays are valuable contributions to the literature on architecture and urban planning in the 1960s, as well as to scholarship on Montreal. The project focuses on a period of time as much as it looks at a particular city, and this approach broadens the catalogue’s appeal.

Selected materials from the exhibition—plans, drawings, photographs, and documents—are reproduced in a series of vignettes dedicated to specific aspects of Montreal’s development. “The Players” introduces key figures involved in schemes that aimed to transform the city. Mayor Jean Drapeau, U.S. developer William Zeckendorf, architects Daniel van Ginkel and Blanche Lemco, and a few others are brought together under this rubric as a result of their strong personalities and important role in shaping the city. Another vignette, “International Architectural Influences and References,” includes sketches and plans for utopian projects, such as Kenzo Tange’s Plan for Tokyo (1960), Yona Friedman’s extension of Paris suspended above the Seine (1964), Peter Sigmonde and Alison and Peter Smithson’s Berlin-Hauptstadt competition design (1957), and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome for Manhattan. In this section, Montreal is presented as an internationally recognized site of experimentation in urban design. A comparison of schemes—for example, between Zvi Hecker’s three-dimensional model of downtown Montreal and Tange’s and Friedman’s spatial experiments—are used to support this position. Although the vignette is brief and does not attempt to fully explore the connections between Montreal initiatives and international projects, the visual materials themselves are suggestive.

While it obviously is not possible to reproduce the innovative display techniques used in the exhibition (multi-media projections, large-scale photographs, slide shows, and films) in book form, the heavily illustrated vignettes are an effective way to replicate the non-linear experience of the exhibition. Where the exhibit incorporates Eugene Boyko’s National Film Board of Canada (NFB) short Les Habitiations Jeanne-Mance (1964), the catalogue has a vignette on “Urban Ills,” which includes before and after photographs of the Jeanne-Mance housing project, along with the cover of a redevelopment plan by the city’s Advisory Committee on Slum Clearance and Low-Rental Housing. In contrast with these official materials, woodcuts by Yukari Ochiai from the NFB series Urbanose (1971) offer lyrical depictions of “urban ills.” The juxtaposition of diverse representations associated with a specific theme provides a sense of how urban problems were perceived and how they were diagnosed, both aesthetically and sociologically.

The first essay, “A Society in Motion: The Quiet Revolution and the Rise of the Middle Class” by sociologist Marcel Fournier, looks at the restructuring of Quebec society during the 1960s. Its aim is to provide a context for understanding concurrent changes to Montreal’s urban landscape. An extensive series of political reforms, introduced between 1960 and 1966 by the Quebec Liberal Party under Premier Jean Lesage, are commonly understood as having transformed Quebec into a modern society, and Fournier examines the impact of these political changes, arguing that the modernization of Quebec was accompanied by increased social mobility and an expansion of the middle class. This essay is an overview of the period, and it touches on a broad range of issues, including educational reform, social activism, new cultural initiatives, and the federalism versus separatism debates. Moving quickly from one issue to the next, Fournier outlines this eventful period known as the “Quiet Revolution.” His account attempts to convey the revolutionary spirit of the time with dramatic descriptions. In a section on the “young generation,” he writes, “Protest and militancy were the order of the day. The labour movement, bursting with energy, launched a series of strikes that left a deep mark on the city of Montreal . . .” (42). Despite his own somewhat romanticized picture of 1960s Quebec as a “society in motion,” Fournier concludes his essay by questioning the mythologizing of the “Quiet Revolution” (50). While readers unfamiliar with Quebec will no doubt find Fournier’s survey useful, the essay would have been more interesting to art and architectural historians if it had explored connections between urban development and relevant political, economic, social, and cultural issues.

The most substantial essay in the book is by the curator of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue, architect and planner André Lortie. In “Montreal 1960: The Singularities of a Metropolitan Archetype,” Lortie treats Montreal as a specific case study, but he argues that it experienced changes that were typical of other major cities in Western countries during the same period. His approach in this essay is informed by the project as a whole, and it is here that Lortie makes the case that it is possible to better understand the 1960s by becoming familiar with Montreal. He supports his premise by examining local, national, and international issues and by showing the relationship between initiatives in Montreal and ideas circulating at national and international levels. For instance, he explains how the federal government’s desire for centralization shaped everything from housing and transportation to culture and recreation. He shows that the new air and road transportation systems, which were designed to make all regions of the country accessible to all Canadians, were guided by the same rationale as the new support for performing arts centers. He connects Montreal-specific plans to international planning movements by comparing innovative aspects of urban development in Montreal, such as its multi-level downtown, with the ideas of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), an avant-garde association of architects. He turns to the analysis of Montreal by Reyner Banham, an eminent British architectural historian and critic, who was interested in the megastructures built at the site of the World’s Fair (Expo 67) and in the city’s core. Lortie explains that the experimental quality of the design for Expo 67 did not translate into radical projects in the “real” city, even as he shows how “a handful of dedicated visionaries,” including Archigram’s Peter Cook, used the international attention directed toward Montreal during Expo 67 to “launch [their] ideas into the wider world” (113).

An edited version of a roundtable discussion between Lortie, architect and critic Michael Sorkin, and architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen titled “Learning from Montreal” (after Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s pioneering study, Learning from Las Vegas (1972)), explores how Montreal in the 1960s was perceived from abroad. The conversation has been edited into short sections on, for example, influences, architectural landmarks, political issues, etc. Although these sections help focus the discussion, in many cases, interesting exchanges are cut short as another subtitle abruptly redirects the reader to a different topic. Moreover, Lortie’s comments on a few of the issues are explored more fully in his essay, and thus seem a bit repetitive here. The section would be more satisfying if there were longer exchanges on fewer topics and if there were smooth transitions from one issue to the next. Sorkin and Cohen both offer valuable insights on the role that Montreal architecture and planning played in an international context during the 1960s, and it would have been interesting to read more of their comments.

A few other aspects of the catalogue are worth mentioning. A preface by Phyllis Lambert, CCA founding director and Chair of the Board of Trustees, sets the tone for the catalogue with an account of some of the “social and cultural ferment” at the time (15). A contemporary photographic prologue and epilogue by Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri frames the catalogue with omniscient views of projects built in the 1960s, such as Place Bonaventure and Metropolitan Boulevard. A comprehensive bibliography, a list of architects and engineers active in Montreal in the 1960s, and a table of significant local, national, and international events in the 1960s all make this a valuable reference book. And as a result of its thorough research and attention to detail, it is a joy to use.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture is a research venue as well as a museum, and the catalogue successfully highlights both of these roles by reproducing visual material from the CCA collection. Overall, the catalogue presents a compelling view of the ways in which a new urban landscape was shaped, and it shows the important place of visual materials in negotiating these changes. The 1960s was an exciting time for the city of Montreal, and Lortie makes a convincing case. Anyone interested in the period will learn a great deal from this book.