“Every single standard-issue piece of mid-century modernist strategizing happened here,” says Michael Sorkin in the roundtable discussion appended to The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big. The book, a catalogue accompanying the homonymous exhibition held nearly two years ago at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, proves this claim beyond any doubt. Montreal not only thought big in the sense of pursuing large-scale urban projects intended to facilitate predictions of exponential population growth and geographic expansion, but it also experienced the kind of bold imagination that speaks to the sense of mission with which Montreal pursued its identity as an international metropolis. The catalogue documents a unique moment when a constellation of forces including entrepreneurs, politicians, and visionary thinkers made possible vast changes in the physical form of the city. And yet, while it was a decade of innovation on many fronts, including cultural and political awakening, it was also the moment Montreal’s fortunes began to change. For just as the city embarked on some of the most remarkable architectural and urban projects of the mid-century, such as Expo ’67, another transformation was in the works. Like so many cities whose fame and wealth arrived with industrialization and commerce, in the 1960s Montreal suffered from the redirection of capital flow westward and, specifically, from the opening in 1959 of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the subsequent scaling down of its port. These events affected the city’s economic fortune and, eventually, undermined its place as the unchallenged dominant Canadian city.

The radical transformation of Montreal during the 1960s took shape at all scales of activity, from urban renewal and slum clearance to the building of the Place-Ville Marie complex that realized the postwar avant-garde’s dream of the megastructure. Expo ’67 intended to display the panoply of contemporary architecture, and it unquestionably celebrated the decade of mobility, mass communication, and technology. It also celebrated Canada’s centennial birthday—and this is surprisingly little noted in the book—at the very moment when Quebec’s political and cultural awakening initiated some of the most politically tumultuous events within the confederation. Today the reality of this exuberance for growth and change, as evidenced in the city infrastructure, tells another side of the story. Despite the best-laid plans, the tenacious politicians, the panacea of planning, the money, and the drastic social transformations within Quebec, the imagined future of Montreal would only be realized in part. For example, the current mass transit system speaks of an imagined metropolis whose network needs to serve just over two million and not the five to seven million predicted in the 1960s.

André Lortie, curator of the exhibition and the catalogue’s editor, readily admits the difficulty of documenting architecture, as well as historical and urban change, within a timeframe bracketed by periodization: the 1960s. Montreal shared with other cities in the world the basic indicators of change such as increased mobility, population growth, uncontrolled development of peripheries, the desire to forecast the future through planning, and the focus on infrastructures for travel, especially highways as the means of unifying metropolitan regions. Many of the events paving the way to Quebec’s social change—the awakening of a political consciousness and mobilizing culture—began before the 1960s, and many of the consequences were realized far beyond the end of the decade. Nevertheless, the emergence of a vocal political identity, the naming of the Quiet Revolution, and the coming to power of Mayor Jean Drapeau all take place in the 1960s, becoming among the key factors that set Montreal’s transformation apart from other cities.

The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big is comprised of two major essays and a roundtable discussion that serves clearly articulated purposes. An essay by Marcel Fournier introduces Montreal’s social, political, and cultural context, while the second essay by Lortie focuses on urban and architecture developments connecting Montreal more broadly to the international situation. The transcript of a roundtable discussion moderated by Lortie with Sorkin and Jean-Louis Cohen successfully mobilizes the visual and textual materials in a satisfactorily speculative conversational mode. As an artifact, the book is very well organized, clearly conceived to cut a path between a work with scholarly ambitions and one geared to general audiences. The volume is richly illustrated with a wealth of visual materials culled from various sources, including archival photographs, political photo-ops, cartoons, planning diagrams, architectural drawings and sketches, all of which provide a sense of being fully introduced to the richness of the cultural moment. Among the most successful and thoroughly engaging aspects of the catalogue—a truly invaluable learning tool—are the short explanatory sidebar vignettes accompanying the illustrations. They put faces and projects to names of players and events, making history come alive with a certain sense of immediacy and vividness of the exhibition experience. The catalogue is bookended with photographs by Italian photographer Oliviero Barbieri of contemporary Montreal. The book’s strength and at times its weakness rest with the ambition to bring together under the guise of urban transformation a complicated social, political, and cultural history.

While the vignettes and illustrations are very effective, the essays are not equally up to the task of juggling facts and interpretation. Montreal-based sociologist Fournier had the difficult task of introducing the spectrum of sweeping social changes that radically affected life in Quebec and Montreal during the 1960s. He barely attempts to position the experience of the city within pervasive changes that marked this period as an era of upheaval and rapid transformation around the world. In general, the events of protest, rise of mass culture, aestheticization of politics, democratization of education, increased bureaucracy, and technical efficacy all characterized the 1960s. Fournier, a well-respected scholar in his field, touches upon all the important points but does not succeed in working the material facts; in other words, he does not historicize the events to achieve a balance between the specifically local, its relation to the built environment, and a more comprehensive view. This is disappointing given the opportunity at the distance of more than thirty years to update critical materials on one of the most dynamic and complicated moments in the history of Quebec and Canada, the effects of which are for many still profoundly felt and lived. Fournier’s essay jumps from minute detail, whose significance would only be understood by those with intimate knowledge of Montreal’s cultural and political scene, to the most generalized statements. Boilerplate assertions such as, “There had been a Great Darkness, a time of introversion; after came Modernity, and an opening up to the world” (31), or vague remarks on art being synonymous with freedom, leave the non-expert reader uninformed and the informed one irritated. Only in the last paragraph does Fournier hint at the possible critique of this moment, writing that, “The importance of the changes that occurred and the crucial role played by the artistic community are two of the more persistent ‘myths’” (51), and that, “The Quiet Revolution is subject to more debate now than ever before” (51). By implying that much of what has just been read is under critical scrutiny can only leave the reader exasperated.

Lortie’s essay, diametrically opposite to Fournier’s, does an admirable job of juggling the specificity of facts, protagonists, architectural projects, and historical events, placing Montreal’s extraordinary transformation within the dynamics of urbanization occurring in most large Western urban centers. The major themes of the decade are addressed within the context of Montreal’s ambitious plans and are also cast within a discussion of the period’s architectural discourse. It is interesting to learn how adherents to high modernism sought to implement their beliefs in what Lorie calls the “CIAM’s ultimate dream” (111). One of the remarkable aspects is the intersection of these planning strategies and the more experimental revisionist thinking associated with Team X or Expo ’67. The architectural documentation accompanying this discussion attests to a sophisticated and ambitious cultural milieu. Lortie’s text equally addresses the positive and progressive forces as well as those operating against change. Again, the dominant motif is one of geographic expansion played out in the building of highways, transportation nodes, and housing settlements, with the most symbolic of these gestures being the realization of Place Ville-Marie. In Lortie’s essay one comes to understand how political will, social implications, and economic interests participated in giving Montreal the combination of experimental architecture and new urban form.

The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big is a testament to how cities really change. It takes local initiative and vision, national and international expertise, a vested interest in the quality of the built world, and technocratic skills to implement change. And, of course, it must be the right moment. As Sorkin rightly claims, everything happened in Montreal in the 1960s. For this reason, the book is an important document, both introducing Montreal as a specific case and covering many of the big themes of postwar urban expansion. If the texts sometimes struggle with the unwieldy task of delineating the complexity of the unique events of Montreal’s urban narrative, the visual apparatus offers a rich compendium of this particular moment in urban and planning history.