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Bon je ne sais pas si ça mérite un sujet, mais il y avait du forage qui s'effectuait sur le terrain vague au coins de McGill et Le Moyne dans le Vieux-Montréal cette semaine. J'avoue qu'un petit projet sur ce coin serait bien. [sTREETVIEW]http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=rue+mcgill+montreal&hl=fr&ll=45.500483,-73.557786&spn=0.000002,0.002406&oe=UTF-8&gl=ca&t=h&z=19&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=45.500483,-73.557786&panoid=NTstzP4Q4fl_9EEXWiGzxw&cbp=12,87.02,,0,-1.72"]http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=rue+mcgill+montreal&hl=fr&ll=45.500483,-73.557786&spn=0.000002,0.002406&oe=UTF-8&gl=ca&t=h&z=19&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=45.500483,-73.557786&panoid=NTstzP4Q4fl_9EEXWiGzxw&cbp=12,87.02,,0,-1.72[/sTREETVIEW]

Je ne crois pas qu'on avait de fil pour ce projet. Nouveau projet de Développements McGill http://www.habiter.com/lachine/fr/

Nom: 435 McGill Hauteur en étages: 14 Hauteur en mètres: 44 Coût du projet: Promoteur: Architecte: Saucier + Perrotte Entrepreneur général: Emplacement: 435, rue McGill Début de construction: Fin de construction: 2016 Site internet: http://www.435mcgill.com Lien webcam: Autres informations: Tour de 33 000 p2, RDC : commercial. Étages 2 à 9 : bureaux. Étages 10 à 14 : condos Rumeurs: Aperçu artistique du projet: Maquette: Autres images: Vidéo promotionnelle:

McGill takes 12th spot in global ranking ELIZABETH CHURCH From Thursday's Globe and Mail November 8, 2007 at 5:05 AM EST An international ranking of universities has put Montreal's McGill University in 12th spot, the highest rank to be reached by a Canadian institution. The annual rating, done by London-based Times Higher-QS World University Rankings, moved McGill up from its 21st placement last year. Ten other Canadian universities made the top 200 list, with the University of British Columbia finishing in the 33rd spot and the University of Toronto in the 45th. "This is such a source of pride for us. It shows that McGill is moving in the right direction," principal Heather Munroe-Blum said. The placement means McGill is now the top-ranked public university in North America, she said. It also demonstrates that the practice of concentrating resources on areas of excellence such as neuroscience, developmental biology and law is showing results, she added. "We have chosen our spots very carefully in areas where we can be leaders in the world." The rating, which was to be released this morning in London, comes at an important time for McGill as it looks to tap its network of alumni for a major fundraising campaign and is striving to increase its profile. Harvard University once again was placed at the top of the international ranking, which was conducted by an independent firm, sold off by the owners of the Times of London in 2005. Oxford, Cambridge and Yale all shared second place. The survey considers a number of factors in its rankings and gathers input from more than 5,000 academics around the world.

Proposition: A feasibility study to consider the addition of various options in proximity to McTavish Street to facilitate access to the Belvedere Kondiaronk/Chalet and other areas up the hill from downtown, especially for seniors and the mobility/physically challenged, but also to serve other users. Objective Making the Mont-Royal and other points up the hill more accessible As it now stands, as far as reaching the lookout or chalet is concerned, the Peel steps and various inclines encountered are out of the question for many, including families. The closest alternate route by public transit is via Guy, plus 2 buses and a walk. That is not very convenient for many. Another important consideration is that there are no elevators in the Guy metro for people who need them. The McTavish route could let people off in the Allan Memorial Institute parking lot, a few steps from the Route Olmstead which has a much gentler slope for going the rest of the way to the lookout. If a bus route is the option selected, the service could be seasonal, or only in service on week-ends, holidays and special events. Other options for the mountain could be a funiculaire or an electric shuttle that would travel on the Olmstead Road at a reduced speed about once an hour. Advantages A more convenient route would be an enticement to visit the mountain, and more often, since it would be much simpler and quicker for tourists and montrealers to reach the lookout. It would also ensure that the chalet be better utilized since it would be so much easier to get to, no matter the season. More concerts and special events could be held there throughout the seasons. Since the McTavish line would run though the McGill Campus, it would also be a N-S shuttle of sorts, getting McGill students and employees between the various campus buildings and the REM/Metro/downtown. This line could also be used for residents in the Square Mille, McGill Ghetto as well people going to games at Molson stadium or the other McGill athletic facilities. Being part of the Fleuve-Montagne makes it an natural draw for tourists and this line is only steps away from the main tourist office on Square Dorchester as well as Sainte-Catherine and may major hotels. People could also transfer to the ave des Pins bus for other points east and west. The line is a short hop from McGill Metro, the REM and Central Station, making it part of the hub. The route could be extended further southward to the Tourist office at Dorchester or widened to cover a broader area if need be. This line would be an alternative to the bus lines that run north, on Guy and du Parc. Easier public access means fewer private cars and tour busses traveling to the mountain, and fewer vehicles on the road. A fee structure could be put in place to include the shuttle and funicular, or just the shuttle to the site (reg. STM bus pass) (close to the Grand Escalier et the Route Olmstead). Access to PVM & Olympic Tower are in the ($20-25). The Kondiaronk summit on Mont-Royal is a major tourist attraction. Let's facilitate access for all groups & promote another way to experience the mountain. Image 1: McTavish Funicular Shuttle Route (in orange) Image 2: Funicular (universal access) inspired by the one in use at Montmartre (Paris)

Une Proposition pour faciliter l'accès au parc Mont-Royal de Axio Strategies / Robert Laramée pour Fleuve/Montagne http://slideplayer.fr/slide/2735906/

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/university-club-of-montreal-giving-up-its-percy-nobbs-designed-downtown-digs University Club of Montreal giving up its Percy Nobbs-designed downtown digs SUSAN SCHWARTZ, MONTREAL GAZETTE More from Susan Schwartz, Montreal Gazette Published on: December 21, 2017 | Last Updated: December 21, 2017 9:41 PM EST University Club in Montreal, as seen from the main entrance on Mansfield St. ALLEN MCINNIS / MONTREAL GAZETTE SHAREADJUSTCOMMENTPRINT The University Club of Montreal is selling its Mansfield St. clubhouse, a gracious limestone and brick building that has housed the private club since it was built in 1913 — six years after it was founded as a place for men with university degrees to gather. It was designed by Percy Erskine Nobbs, an influential architect trained in the Arts and Crafts movement and known for exquisitely crafted buildings designed on an intimate, human scale. The clubhouse was classified by the Quebec government in 1986 as a historical monument, which means that the exterior as well as much of its interior is protected by the Loi sur le patrimoine culturel as a heritage space and no modifications can be made without approval by the ministry of culture and communications. Membership in the club is stable at about 700, so that is not the issue. But money is. The building “requires major renovations,” according to a notice on the club’s website, and “the cost of maintaining it is just too high now,” club president Gabriel Zaurrini said this week. Members learned at a special meeting in mid-September that the clubhouse would be sold and the mandate for the sale has been given to the CBRE real-estate firm. Several letters of intent, which are not offers but preludes to offers, have been received. “Interest is high,” Zaurrini said on Thursday. It is hoped that a decision about a buyer will be made by the end of the first quarter of 2018. Meanwhile, the clubhouse will close at the end of December; the art and the furnishings of value will go into storage. The club will relocate for 2018 to the Saint James Club on Union Ave. While no decisions about its eventual location are to be made before the building is sold, Zaurrini said options include buying a smaller place, renting or the possibility of merging with another private club. GALLERY: UNIVERSITY CLUB OF MONTREAL 1/20 From a look at private clubs in North America that are thriving, the club’s leaders have gleaned some ideas about “ways to bring value to our club,” he said. One way might be to incorporate a business centre. “A lot of members, older and not so old, do not have offices,” he said. “What we are looking at is a more adapted place.” Times and mores have changed. The heyday of the private club has passed. Fewer people linger over lunch these days or afternoon bridge or billiards the way they did in the club’s earlier days. Nobbs, a native of Edinburgh, was 28 when he came to Montreal in 1903 as director of the McGill University School of Architecture. Most private clubs of the day were formal spaces, observed architect Derek Drummond, a former director of McGill’s school himself, in a 2007 history of the University Club. In choosing Nobbs to design the clubhouse, members “were virtually assured of a more relaxed ambience than was to be found in the other clubs. Nobbs had a reputation for designing unpretentious, yet exquisitely crafted, buildings.” Features he incorporated into the clubhouse include a glorious curved staircase, fireplaces featuring finely detailed design, university shields on the stained-glass windows and on the ceiling of the first-floor university room — Nobbs loved heraldry and designed the McGill coat of arms — and two stained-glass windows in the stairwell in remembrance of those who served in the Great War. Nobbs also designed some of the lighting fixtures and furniture, including comfortable wooden chairs and two dozen brass-topped tables, no two exactly alike. Art, most of it Canadian, serves to burnish the patina and atmosphere of the clubhouse. It’s a congenial place with a wonderful atmosphere, as one longtime member put it. “It’s quiet, restful and interestingly decorated — the idea of a place like home but not home. ” Among his better-known Montreal commissions were several McGill buildings and the Drummond Medical Building. Nobbs was also an artist and an artisan and skilled designer of everything from decorative plasterwork to stained glass. And he was an accomplished athlete who represented Canada in fencing at the 1908 Olympics — and an expert fisherman. “He was a man of extraordinary talents,” said Montreal architect Julia Gersovitz. The clubhouse was designed on the principle of an English club — as a well-designed sequence of experiences from the low ceiling and relative darkness of the entry hall, “giving the members not only a room in which to wait for others but also a chance to adjust to the light and ambience of the clubhouse,” as Drummond wrote, to the more generous proportions, higher ceilings and brightness of the rooms on the upper floors. There have been modifications over the years — in terms of space and also membership. It began as a men’s club, for one. In the early 1920s, a “ladies’ annex” was added to the main building. Women, however, were restricted to the ladies’ dining room — “penned in,” as Gersovitz put it — unless they were with a member, and were admitted as members only in 1988. Jews were admitted in the 1960s. In 1973, the requirement for a university degree was dropped. But in many ways, the University Club remains as it was in the time of co-founders Stephen Leacock, the humorist and writer and a professor in McGill’s department of economics and political science, and the soldier, doctor and poet John McCrae, who wrote In Flanders Fields.

Le jeu s'appelle Megapolis et il y a déjà depuis quelques mois des édifices montréalais -essentiellement des pavillons d'Expo 67 et le Stade Olympique. Le pavillon de l'Ontario pastiché : Habitat 67 presque méconnaissable : Le pavillon de la France/Casino de Montréal pastiché : Le Stade Olympique : Le 1000 qui existe depuis plus de deux ans : Le 2-22 : Et voici toute une collection mise en ligne aujourd'hui : Dans mes environnements : en premier lieu le Château Champlain qui dans le jeu s'appelle "L'hôtel de Montréal" Le 1250 qui prend le nom de Tour Marathon Puis les tours "Bureau de l'entreprise de télécommunications" (Aon), la tour "Bureau du boulevard de Maisonneuve" et finalement la "Tour McGill".

McGill prévoit se joindre à l'ÉTS pour établir un centre de recherche dans Griffintown: le Quartier d'innovation (QI) devrait au départ prendre la forme de 2 bâtiments, un pour chaque université. Les partenaires espèrent créer un effet d'entraînement et attirer les entreprises faisant de la recherche dans le quartier. http://www.quartierinnovationmontreal.com/ http://www.mcgilltribune.com/news/mcgill-reveals-more-about-future-quartier-d-innovation-1.2748613?pagereq=1#.TzVDUcgU6Jp Source: http://www.montrealitesurbaines.com/

Nom: 1200 McGill College Hauteur en étages: 24 Hauteur en mètres: 84 Bonjour à tous! Je suis un lecteur d'MtlUrb depuis un an maintenant. J'adore la passion que tout le monde ici a pour l'architecture à Montréal, même si elle est négative parfois! Je suis bilingue, mais je préfère écrire en anglais, donc vous pouvez me répondre en anglais ou en français. Merci! La Tour Rogers in the state that it is today is a disgrace to McGill College, one of the most beautiful streets in Montreal. If you are not familiar with the rusted and faded building, here it is: Bellow is my vision to refresh 1200 McGill College. The renders were created in Revit 2017, I'm studying to be architectural technologist and making these renders are a part of the job. The renderings that usually come with a proposal are created by a team with very powerful computers. I made these renders on my laptop at home in my free time, I still think it turned out well: In my vision, the bronze aluminum sections of the elevations would be replaced by a silver aluminum. This finish would be nearly identical to the finish on Place ville Marie, I think that would be a noteworthy integration. The windows would be replaced with black reflective windows, like the ones being installed on the new Holiday Inn on R.L. For the brick section, I would replace the brick with black prefab concrete slabs like the ones on Tour Des Canadiens. I also chose to add a billboard that would be used to advertise CityTv and Breakfast Television Montreal (I wanted to put a screen under the billboard, but didn't). This is done on the CityTv building in Toronto: I know some of you hate prefab and billboards, but I think in this situation they add character to a TV studio building. I did not do any design work on the commercial section facing St Catherines, so in the render it is just a glass box. If you have any ideas for the vision, let me know! If I have free time, maybe I will add some suggestions and post new renders. Thank you!

Photo prise lorsque je voulais tourner de Président Kennedy vers Bleury: Le groupe de piétons juste devant ma voiture n'attend pas pour traverser, non ils sont en plein dans la rue à jaser, je leur fais signe poliment de se tasser sur le trottoir, ils ne réagissent pas, klaxonne, ils m'envoient chier alors qu'ils sont pertinement dans le tort! Ensuite, arrive dans le vieux-mtl, je marche sur McGill, un cycliste roule sur le trottoir est alors qu'il y a une piste cyclable sur la même ostie de rue! Quand on parle de respect et partage de la route, ca s'applique à tout le monde, mais dans notre ville il faut croire que tous ne sont pas nés avec la civilité nécessaire pour vivre dans une grande ville!

Quelqu'un sait quelle est la nature des travaux au 460 rue McGill? Je passe devant à chaque jour et c'est juste aujourd'hui que j'ai remarqué l'ajout d'un étage supplémentaire.

Group calls for CP to give up Cote St. Luc rail yards. McGill urban planning to draft designs. http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/mobile/group-calls-for-cp-to-give-up-cote-st-luc-rail-yards-1.2950411 A former mayor of Cote St. Luc is calling for the removal of the CP rail yards. Robert Libman is leading a group calling for the rail yards to be taken off the island of Montreal. The yards take up about one-third of the city of Cote St. Luc, more than 200 hectares in the geographic centre of the island. "There's almost like this black hole in the heart, right in the middle of Montreal," said Libman. His Coalition for the Relocation of the St-Luc Rail Yards is going to lobby Canadian Pacific and multiple levels of government . The group acknowledges that buying out CP will take a fortune, not to mention the cost of decontamination. However it says the value of the land should be an incentive to sell. "In 2016, just the real estate value alone is reason for CP to consider moving their operations off island," said Libman. Libman said that he has heard countless complaints from people living near the yards from people frustrated by noise, smell and pollution. He said the yards are also the source of major commuting problems across a broad part of the island. The rail yards, and spurs from the yard, significantly limit the north-south connections in the region. Trying to afford a path over or under the yards has been one of the sticking points in the decades-old proposal to connect the two ends of Cavendish Blvd. Sources say negotiations with CP about crossing the rail spur that roughly parallels Vezina St. have also been one problem delaying the Blue Bonnets housing project. "[it] creates traffic gridlock, environmental concerns, safety concerns about rail yards being so close to a residential community," said Libman. He pointed out that the Turcot train yards are no longer used, moved out by the reconstruction of the Turcot Interchange and the displacement of Highway 20. Over the summer the Coalition will be seeking support for a petition to move the rail yards off-island - possibly to Les Cedres. Libman said the McGill School of Urban Planning will also work on designs for what could be done with the land if the rails are removed.

Nom: McGill University Healthcare Center - MUHC Hauteur: Coût du projet: 1 800 000 000,00 $ Promoteur: Gouvernement du Québec Architectes: IBI Group, HDR, Yelle-Maillé, NFOE Emplacement: Ancienne gare de triage Glen Début de construction: 2010 Fin de construction: 2015

Excellent reportage sur l'histoire des résidents de Milton-Park contre le projet Cité Concordia http://www.tou.tv/tout-le-monde-en-parlait/S01E09 http://www.imtl.org/montreal.php?vsearch=1&expo=MILTON&m=Milton-Parc%20ghettho%20McGill

Peut-être que certains d'entre vous ont remarqué que le 2020 University se faisait "retaper" un peu! Changement de fenêtre jusqu'à maintenant, mais mes sources à l'IA (les proprios) m'ont dit qu'il y aurait de plus gros changements à venir. Ils voudraient fermer la galerie marchande au niveau du Métro McGill. La terrasse serait complètement refaite. La base donnant sur Maisonneuve serait complètement transformée (vitrée, je crois), s'ouvrant à la rue et accueillant de nouveaux commerces. Voilà les changements, jusqu'à maintenant : Avant (vitres noires) - Après (vitres blanches)

Je vous met ici un lien à propos d'une thèse intitulée "Etude du projet McGill College (1984) en rapport avec le mouvement City Beautiful" effectué par Souhila MAR de la Faculté de I'aménagement de l'université McGill en 1998 -thèse de doctorat " présentée à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) en aménagement" Rien de moins !!! C'est donc du sérieux et c'est rigoureux !!! C'est une thèse de 640 pages -que je n'ai pas lu puisque je viens de la découvrir sur internet ce matin mais que j'ai parcouru en diagonal (et très rapidement, comme vous devez vous en douter). Je me suis surtout intéressé aux images dont celles qu'on peut voir à partir de la page 433 qui nous rappelle que le premier projet de Cadillac Fairview pour le site de la Place Montréal Trust devait inclure une salle pour l'orchestre symphonique de Montréal. [url=]http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ43711.pdf#page=1&zoom=25,-1722,827[/url] Bonne lecture !!

via the New Yorker : FEBRUARY 28, 2015 Leonard Cohen’s Montreal BY BERNARD AVISHAI PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS VIA GETTY Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—a hymn to souls too carnal to grow old, too secular to give praise, and too baffled to mock faith—recently turned thirty. Cohen himself, now eighty, came of age in Jewish Montreal during the twenty years after the Second World War, and those of us who followed him, a half-generation later, can’t hear the song without also thinking about that time and place, which qualifies as an era. The devotional—and deftly sacrilegious—quality of “Hallelujah” and other songs and poems by Cohen reflects a city of clashing and bonding religious communities, especially first-generation Jews and French Catholics. Montreal’s politics in the early sixties were energized by what came to be called Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, which emancipated the city’s bicultural intelligentsia from Church and Anglostocracy. The pace of transformation could make the place half crazy; that’s why you wanted to be there. Religious thoughts seemed to be the gravest ones in Montreal then, insinuated, even inculcated, by its architecture, seasonal festivals, and colloquialisms. Cohen grew up in affluent Westmount, the best part of Mount Royal, about a mile from my family home in Snowdon—a neighborhood on a lower Western slope, where “the English” (as my mother called them) had no choice but to make room for Jewish factory owners, lawyers, and doctors. Towering over both our neighborhoods, impressing itself on our senses, was the dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory, Quebec’s great basilica, the dream palace of (the now canonized) Brother André Bessette, who healed the body and spirit of pilgrims—the place we simply called the Shrine. A. M. Klein, the first of the Montreal Jewish poets, wrote, “How rich, how plumped with blessing is that dome! / The gourd of Brother André! His sweet days / rounded! Fulfilled! Honeyed to honeycomb!” Its neon-illuminated cross was visible from my bedroom window, an imposing rival for the whispered Shma Yisroel of bedtime. The city’s ironwork staircases, its streets tangled around Mount Royal, carried the names of uncountable saints (St. Denis, St. Eustache, St. Laurent); the fall air was scented by rotting leaves and, on Rosh Hashana, polished synagogues. Fresh snow sharpened Christmas lights. Our curses, borrowed from Québécois proles, were affectionately sacrilegious mocks of the Mass: “calice,” “tabarnak,” “osti”—chalice, tabernacle, host. For Jews, a sense of rivalry was palpable, triangular, and almost Old Country in character. French public schools were run by the Catholic Church, English schools by the Protestant School Board, and some fifty per cent of Jewish students went to Anglo-Jewish day schools that embraced (and effaced) Old World movements: Orthodox, Zionist, folkish Yiddishist. Montreal’s Jews numbered well over a hundred and twenty thousand in those years. A great many men and women behind the counters of our bakeries, delis, and bookstores spoke (as did my father) the Yiddish-inflected English of immigrants who had come in the twenties. The Soviet revolution had changed the boundaries of Russia’s borderlands, closing Russian markets that had previously been open to Jewish merchants and textile manufacturers in Lithuania and White Russia (now Eastern Belarus), forcing them West—just when the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 closed America to more Jewish immigration. My father and his widowed mother and siblings were trying, in 1928, to get from Bialystok to Chicago, where an uncle lived. The port of Montreal was supposed to be their starting point, before heading down to the Great Lakes. It was where they stayed. (If the accents were heavier, you knew the new arrivals had come mainly from Romania or Hungary after the Nazi defeat, and had witnessed horrors that we did not speak about.) Jewish community life after the war was imbued with a sense of intensely felt tragedy, but so was traditional Judaism as a culture. The world of Yiddishkeit, three generations back for New York intellectuals, was just one generation back for us. Compared with “Dick and Jane” in our English readers, the characters of the Hebrew bible—their violence, jealousies, and treacheries—seemed like family. On a streetcar ride up Queen Mary Road, where the Shrine stood, a nun once told me that I had “the look of Abraham” on my face. Another, apparently reading my mind, asked me if I knew what it meant to have sinful thoughts. (She also kindly shared an amusing word game, so her Inquisition ended with grace.) The largest English talk-radio station had a call-in show on Sunday evenings on which the vexingly courteous Pentecostal Pastor Johnson explained why Jews, in rejecting Jesus, were sadly damned. Most of his callers were Jews who debated and denounced him. Unlike in the United States, Jews in Quebec did not have a neutral civil space to melt into. We had nothing as stipulated as the American Constitution; our liberties derived organically, within the tradition of British Common Law. Canada’s money had a Queen on it, not the founding fathers. The institutions of Jewish Montreal created places in which we fell back on ourselves. The heads of our welfare services and of the Y.M.H.A., the public library, the free-loan society, and political congresses were local celebrities. The family of the liquor baron Sam Bronfman, who supported these institutions, were our nobility. The progressives among us didn’t go to Reform synagogues; we just went to Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, and irregularly. If we got sick, we went to the Jewish General Hospital. My father, a Zionist leader who travelled to Israel in 1954 as if on the hajj, often admonished me with the famous aphorism of Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth-century liberal philosopher, that I should be a Jew at home and a human in the street. I understood Mendelssohn more readily than, say, Leonard Bernstein, who, teaching us sonata form on television, seemed human pretty much everywhere. Tolerance meant dialogue and reciprocal recognition, not assimilation. A few years ago, I walked through Bialystok with a historical map of the now destroyed Jewish city—before the First World War, Jews comprised about half the population—and found my father’s house. I was struck by how familiar Montreal’s large immigrant Jewish neighborhoods might have seemed, at least on the surface, to my father in 1928, when he arrived at the age of fourteen: the same hard winter and the same thick-walled constructions, the same forested hills, the same churches, the same easy insular Yiddish dominating commerce in textiles and clothing—the shmate (“rag”) business. The same farmers who had, a couple of generations back, been peasants, speaking a strange national language, working in our factories, speaking against us from hearths and pulpits yet greeting us warmly and with a practiced humility. The same sense that, by contrast, the propertied classes, our local nobility, would tolerate Jews so long as we helped them get richer but did not cross some invisible boundary—the presumably unavailable daughters. In his iconic Canadian novel, “Two Solitudes,” Hugh MacLennan describes Quebec as being defined by two competing cultures, nested in two little nations that were also classes, French and English. The gruff, brilliant, promiscuous Irving Layton—who had been an acolyte of Klein, and who became Cohen’s mentor and advocate—observed many years later that Montreal actually had three solitudes—a Jewish one, too, sitting somewhere between the others. Commercial life was English, so Jews as a community were drawn to the Anglophone world, narrow only in Quebec. Yet immigrant Jews engaged more poignantly, pushing and pulling, with French religious culture, which was locally engulfing. Catholic priests and nuns were ubiquitous public servants, tending to the French population, largely subsidized by provincial taxes and dominating Quebec’s French universities, hospitals, and social agencies, as well as the public schools. Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, installed in 1953, was a kindly man, concerned for the poor, who ended his days as an African missionary (“a mensch,” my father called him), and the equal of any mayor; he kept anyone under sixteen from entering a movie theatre, except when Walt Disney films made the rounds. In the thirties and forties, the Church in Quebec had been ultramontane, and the not silent partner of the reactionary National Union Party of Premier Maurice Duplessis, who ruled, with a five year interruption, from 1936 until his death, in 1959. He had been xenophobic, populist, ambivalent about the war against Hitler, and classically (if discreetly) anti-Semitic. Behind the scenes, this political establishment instructed French voters, many of whom lived in far-flung farming villages where parish schooling was limited. They were barely literate and easily swayed. Duplessis presided over an apparently impregnable majority, rallied against sinful Montreal—Cardinal Léger sought to ban bingo—and used the provincial police thuggishly, turning it into a personal force. But the war and its aftermath gradually put the Catholic Church on the defensive. The exposure of Québécois soldiers to the triumph over Fascism, the penetration into the countryside of radio and television, the inescapable guilt that Catholic intellectuals felt about the death camps, the Second Vatican Council in 1962—all of these unleashed dissent. The Church’s chief critics were dazzling, cosmopolitan French Canadian intellectuals: Jean Marchand, the charismatic, leftist union leader; Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the editors of Cité Libre magazine (Trudeau would eventually lead the federal Liberals to victory in 1968); and René Lévesque, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s most famous French-language host. When, in the 1960* election, the Liberal Party came to power (Lévesque joined the Liberal’s cabinet as the resources minister), the priests and nuns began losing their grip on the city’s schools and social services, and Quebec entered the humanist insurgency of the Quiet Revolution. The arts began to flourish: the Comédie-Canadienne blossomed, and the filmmaker Denys Arcand joined the National Film Board, producing award-winning French-language documentaries. The University of Montreal and community colleges were infused with provincial funds, and their graduates took social-service jobs in a new, fiercely secular Quebec bureaucracy. Public schools, still divided by language, were taken over more firmly, and funded more lavishly, by the regional government (though the formally “confessional” nomenclature—Catholic and Protestant—was not finally abandoned until 1998). By the spring of 1963, the Quebec government had nationalized old English-owned power companies, disturbing the peace of the residual Anglostocracy. In this loosened political atmosphere, Jews—who voted “Liberal” as faithfully as we conducted Seders—emerged into the culture. We grew infatuated with Trudeau’s federalist idealism. He was elected from a largely Jewish Montreal constituency and remained there throughout his years as Prime Minister. The Quiet Revolution transformed Montreal, at least for a while, into a kind of Andalusia: contesting religious-linguistic cultures rubbing each other the right way. Jews shared professional and literary ties with les Anglais, but we shared an affinity with French Catholics, for religious traditions that were thickly esthetic and that we, each in our own way, both loved and loved to distance ourselves from. We also intuitively understood congregational routine, authoritative interpretation of sacred literature, the prestige of historical continuity—we understood that messiahs matter in this world, that the divine emerged within the precincts of a discipline, commandments, and the mass, all of which produced decorum before they produced grace. As Cohen writes in “Hallelujah,” you cannot feel so you learn to touch: works, not just faith alone. Our rivalry with Catholics at times seemed fuelled by an unacknowledged tenderness, theirs for our historical struggles, professional erudition, and exegetical trenchancy, ours for their majestic spaces, genuflecting hockey champions, and forgiving, suffering servant—a Jew, after all. “I love Jesus,” Cohen told his biographer, Sylvie Simmons. “Always did.” But, he said, “I didn’t stand up in shul and say, ‘I love Jesus.’ ” My mother—the amiably innocent scion of another Bialystoker family—took me, overdressed (oisgeputzt), to Eaton’s department store to see the Christmas pageantry; and then, more reverentially (and to my father’s dismay), she took me to the Shrine’s wax museum, to see depictions of the passions of the saints. When I first heard a recording of Judy Collins’s iconic rendition of Cohen’s “Suzanne,” at McGill in the fall of 1967, a year after my mother’s sudden death—heard about the lonely wooden tower and its occupant searching out the drowning—it occurred to me that I had never expected much empathy from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It also occurred to me that Cohen, whose father had died when he was nine, knew loss, and that the distance from mama’s boy to ladies’ man could be short. Which brings me, finally, to McGill. If our emancipation was not in civil society, it was on that campus. The university had been chartered in 1821 to provide English and Scottish Protestants a colonial piece of the Enlightenment, above the atavism of habitant manors and parishes; the student population at the Arts and Sciences Faculty, in the mid-sixties, was something like forty-per-cent Jewish. Cohen was a legend by the time I got there. He had graduated in 1955, and had published three books of poetry and two novels; the National Film Board had made a fawning documentary about him. It was at McGill that Cohen found Irving Layton (he said of Layton, “I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever”). Klein, Layton’s teacher, had been there in the thirties, studied law, and went on to simultaneously write “The Rocking Chair,” a poetic tribute to French Canada, and edit The Canadian Jewish Chronicle. (Secretly, he also wrote speeches for Sam Bronfman). By the time Cohen got to McGill, Klein had fallen silent, spiralling into, among other sources of melancholy, a never-completed exegesis of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” For our part, we found at McGill a kind of finishing school to make ourselves more sovereign, like Cohen was. There was no need for young Jews to offer Quebec some new model of political insurrection—no American-style howl. The restrained, verbose liberalism of John Stuart Mill seemed insurgent enough, even for Trudeau and Levesque. So was the tolerance—the scientific doubt—of the Scottish enlightenment and the lyricism of English and Irish poets, from Wordsworth to Yeats. Hemmed in by Jewish and Catholic sexual norms—and also by Victorian prissiness—the first right that we thought to exercise was the right to Eros. Cohen told Sylvie Simmons that he was first inspired to write poetry when, in his teens, he read, in English translation, the work of the Spaniard Federico García Lorca. But, like many other Jewish youths at McGill, he shuttled between the debating union and the traditions of the English, immersing himself in the study of liberty and literature as in a yeshiva. This open-spirited time of cross-fertilization did not last. The Quiet Revolution, which prompted Trudeau’s federalism, in time gave rise to a more stridently nationalist idea, encouraged by Charles de Gaulle on his trip to the 1967 World’s Fair, and soon championed by Lévesque, too: that Quebec would be better off as an independent country, maîtres chez nous (masters of our own). Spooked by the vitality of English culture in Montreal, and by the fact that many more French were learning English than the other way around, separatists began agitating for an end to English-language education for new immigrants and English signs in the city. Socialists among the separatists, recalling Lévesque’s nationalization of the power companies, began calling for the nationalization of banks and large businesses. At the beginning of the sixties, radical separatists—impatient with the Liberals’ nonviolent democratic methods—had formed the Front de Libération du Québec, or F.L.Q., and gone underground. By the end of the sixties, they had placed bombs in the stock exchange and in mailboxes in English neighborhoods. In 1970, after a spate of F.L.Q. kidnappings (a Quebec minister, Pierre Laporte, was murdered), Trudeau imposed martial law. The city was roiled by arrests; a friend at McGill known for his New Left sympathies saw his flat raided; the police confiscated books, including, he laughed nervously, one entitled “Cubism”. Lévesque despised the violence of the underground, but was undeterred in his commitment to pursue national sovereignty democratically, ultimately through a referendum. In 1968, he had founded Le Parti Québécois. Jews, like most English-speaking residents of Quebec, were shocked when Lévesque was unexpectedly elected Premier in 1976. This proved the cue. Tens of thousands moved to Toronto. Some Jewish intellectuals, professionals, and artists stayed, but most left, and the amity of the sixties dimmed. Cohen kept a house in Montreal, but as his fame as a songwriter grew he spent little time there. Nevertheless, something of his native Montreal could not be shaken off—the short, sweet tradition of which Cohen was, in a sense, the end. In his 1978 poem “The Death of a Ladies’ Man,” Cohen writes of a lover’s “high religious mood” brought low by the dangers of desire: “She beckoned to the sentry / of his high religious mood. / She said, ‘I’ll make a space between my legs, / I’ll teach you solitude.’ ” You hear the resonances of Cohen’s own religious mood, and Montreal’s, in the lyrics of many songs—“Sisters of Mercy,” “Story of Isaac,” “Who by Fire,” “If It Be Your Will”—culminating, perhaps, with “Hallelujah.” The resonances and the losses are even clearer, I think, when you go to the start of the tradition—roughly, Klein to Layton to Cohen—rather than hear only its end. Klein’s 1947 poem “The Cripples,” about French Catholic worshippers at St. Joseph’s Oratory, which I quoted from earlier, reaches this climax: They know, they know, that suddenly their cares and orthopedics will fall from them, and they stand whole again. Roll empty away, wheelchairs, and crutches, without armpits, hop away! And I who in my own faith once had faith like this, but have not now, am crippled more than they. There you have it: a freethinking Montreal Jew, in whose bones the Torah was bred, inventing precise English lines to express envy for French Catholic piety. “Anything beautiful is not your own,” Cohen told a Jewish student newspaper in 1966. “When I write, I place myself in contact with something much more glorious than anything I can pull up from within myself.” Poetry was unlocked by reverence. But reverence might, ironically, embolden the poet to cross boundaries, to perhaps court one of those beautiful Westmount girls. And if you did, if you touched the dew on her hem, you could throw your crutches away. *Correction: A previous version of this post misidentified the election year that the Liberal Party came to power.

FRANÇAIS McGill et Concordia affirment que les exigences de Québec nuisent au recrutement 9 février 2015|Giuseppe Valiante - La Presse canadienne| Actualités en société L'Université McGill Photo: Neil Howard CC L'Université McGill Des universités anglophones québécoises affirment avoir des difficultés à recruter des professeurs étrangers en raison des exigences en français qui deviennent un obstacle lorsqu’elles tentent d’attirer chez elles des individus hautement spécialisés en provenance d’autres pays. Des professeurs et recruteurs des universités McGill et Concordia affirment que le processus complexe d’immigration au Québec, qui s’appuie sur un système de points, les place dans une situation désavantageuse en comparaison avec les institutions des États-Unis et des autres provinces canadiennes. En 2013, le gouvernement péquiste avait haussé les exigences en français pour les immigrants qui faisaient une demande de résidence permanente, une décision qui a causé des maux de tête aux recruteurs, selon des dirigeants de Concordia et McGill. En entrevue, la ministre de l’Immigration Kathleen Weil a indiqué que le gouvernement libéral avait donné plus de flexibilité au processus en décembre, mais les universités le considèrent toujours comme trop compliqué. Ghyslaine McClure, vice-principale exécutive adjointe à McGill, affirme que son université a de la difficulté à embaucher des professeurs renommés pour des chaires de recherche. Selon elle, les candidats dans la quarantaine et cinquantaine n’ont pas nécessairement envie de suivre plusieurs cours de français par semaine, en plus de leurs tâches de recherche. Elle ajoute que les candidats doivent également remplir trop de documents et passer trop d’étapes avant de pouvoir s’établir au Québec. Reconnaissance spéciale « Nous aimerions obtenir une reconnaissance spéciale indiquant que les professeurs d’université sont des travailleurs hautement spécialisés et qu’ils ne devraient pas avoir à faire face à tant d’obstacles, a dit Mme McClure. Les professeurs et autres éminents spécialistes sont dans une catégorie différente. » Le gouvernement libéral a discrètement apporté des changements en décembre, allouant davantage de « points » aux immigrants détenteurs de doctorats et permettant ainsi à certains de ces candidats de laisser tomber les exigences en français et d’obtenir une résidence permanente. Cette résidence permanente est importante pour les professeurs, et dans certaines institutions comme à Concordia, elle est essentielle à l’obtention d’une permanence. Stanton Paddock, professeur de journalisme à l’Université Concordia, espère pouvoir profiter de ces nouvelles règles. M. Paddock dit avoir été « pris de panique » lorsqu’il a quitté les États-Unis, en 2013, pour découvrir la quantité de cours de français qu’il devrait suivre. Son doctorat pourrait maintenant lui permettre de passer outre les exigences en français. Les nouvelles règles lui permettent de rencontrer un agent de l’immigration qui déterminera si M. Paddock est suffisamment adaptable pour vivre au Québec. D’autres professeurs, comme Emer O’Toole, de l’École des études canado-irlandaises de Concordia, ne s’en font pas avec les exigences en français. Mme O’Toole, qui vient d’Irlande, avait déjà étudié la langue avant de s’installer au Québec. « Apprendre le français a été l’une des raisons qui m’ont réjouie de m’installer ici », a-t-elle lancé. « J’aime la langue [mais] je peux comprendre que cela puisse être pénible pour quelqu’un qui ne possède pas de bases [en français] », a-t-elle ajouté. Mme Weil prend note des recommandations visant à réformer le processus d’immigration. La ministre a ajouté que certains groupes d’employeurs estimaient que les exigences en français pour les immigrants nuisaient à leurs affaires. « Les groupes d’employeurs ont soulevé le problème au sujet des exigences de langue, a-t-elle dit. L’opinion générale [du gouvernement] est que nous devons être très prudents et qu’il est important que les gens parlent français. » sent via Tapatalk

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/15-wishes-for-montreal-in-2015 15 wishes for Montreal in 2015<article itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/NewsArticle" id="post-430336" class="post-430336 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-local-news tag-education tag-homelessness tag-montreal tag-politics tag-social-issues l-article" style="margin: 0px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1;"><header class="entry-header" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;"> KATHERINE WILTON, MONTREAL GAZETTE More from Katherine Wilton, Montreal Gazette Published on: <time itemprop="datePublished" class="entry-date published pubdate" datetime="2015-01-03T16:23:47+00:00" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">January 3, 2015</time>Last Updated: <time itemprop="dateModified" class="updated" datetime="2015-01-03T16:23:49+00:00" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">January 3, 2015 4:23 PM EST</time> </header><figure class="align-none wp-caption post-img" id="post-439490media-439490" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="http://wpmedia.montrealgazette.com/2014/12/montreal-que-november-25-2014-the-skyline-in-montreal.jpg?w=1000" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" itemprop="description" style="margin: -1px 0px 0px; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> The skyline in Montreal at dusk Tuesday November 25, 2014. John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>SHAREADJUSTCOMMENTPRINT As Montrealers rang in the New Year this time last year, a gloomy cloud hung over our city. In the midst of an unforgiving winter, our social peace was being threatened by a divisive debate over the Parti Québécois’s proposed charter of secular values, which would have restricted public employees from wearing or displaying conspicuous religious symbols. With a spring election on the horizon, the fear of another referendum hung like a dead weight from many of our shoulders. Poor job prospects and political uncertainty persuaded some of our fellow citizens to leave for greener pastures in Ontario and Western Canada. No matter where we turned, it was hard to escape the bad news. The Charbonneau Commission continued to uncover tales of corruption, our road network remained in abysmal shape and commuters fretted about the safety of the Champlain Bridge. But one year later, the mood seems lighter. “Montreal is back,” insisted Denis Coderre, the city’s populist mayor who has been trying to set a new tone. Coderre is already at work planning the city’s 375th birthday celebrations in 2017. He says the festivities and related development projects will have lasting benefits for residents, such as a pedestrian link from the mountain to the river. But many wonder whether Coderre has a vision and long-term plan for a city that is still facing employment and demographic challenges. So what’s in store for Montreal in 2015? The city will get several new hospitals when the McGill University Health Centre opens this spring, and the city’s skyline is filled with cranes — but surely more needs to done to enhance our quality of life. We asked 15 Montrealers who are well-connected to their city for their suggestions on how to make the city a more enjoyable place to live in 2015. Here are their ideas, in their own words. Raphaël Fischler, director of McGill University’s School of Urban Planning <figure id="attachment_439425" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Raphael Fischler is director of the School of Urban Planning at McGill University. Courtesy of McGill University. Picasa</figcaption></figure>The new year must see progress in ongoing efforts: reducing the high-school dropout rate, helping the homeless find permanent housing, repairing old infrastructure, greening the city. It must also see two goals reach the top of the political agenda: making public spaces, facilities and buildings universally accessible; and anticipating the transformation of older suburbs. Montreal is a difficult place for people with limited mobility, be they children in prams, adults in wheelchairs or elderly people using walkers. The winter is an ordeal for them, but even the summer is difficult because of inadequate infrastructure in streets and buildings and in the transit system. Universal accessibility must become a priority. As central neighbourhoods continue to gentrify, low-income households, including immigrants, are moving away from the centre, in particular to suburbs built in the 1950s to 1970s. The residents of such suburbs will need better access to public transit and services than is currently the case there. It is imperative that we start planning to meet the challenge of suburban poverty. Yves Laroche, owner Yves Laroche Galerie d’Art <figure id="attachment_439485" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Yves Laroche in his art gallery on St. Laurent Blvd. in Montreal. Vincenzo D'Alto / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>I wish that Montreal could get its good mood, its collective happiness, back. I hope the people who are negotiating the public-sector contracts for the city of Montreal and the unions all put a little water in their wine and come to some agreement. This city has been in such a grumpy frame of mind lately. You can see it in the faces of the policemen and the firemen and the city workers. Visitors to the city tell me that they feel it, too. It is weighing on all of us. But what I wish for most of all is for the young, emerging artists who make this city what it is be left alone to create their own personal imprints without being boxed in by teachers or dealers or art-buyers who tell them what will sell, what’s in vogue, what colours are best. I wish we would begin to see outsider art from the worlds of tattooing and graffiti and comics with fresh new eyes. Matthew Pearce, chief executive officer of the Old Brewery Mission <figure id="attachment_439429" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Matthew Pearce, CEO of the Old Brewery Mission. Marie-France Coallier / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>In 2015, I want Montrealers to join the Old Brewery Mission in imagining a city where every citizen has a place to call home and no large numbers of people are resorting to shelters and soup kitchens for their survival — month after month, year after year. Further, I want us all to resolve to own the social phenomenon of homelessness and each contribute in our own way to significantly reduce the amount of men and women who find themselves on the street. The city and the province have recently issued their respective action plans on homelessness and so, for 2015, I want to see … action. Specifically, solutions to homelessness exist when we act collectively to create diverse affordable housing options with the appropriate counselling supports, adapted health care services and preventive measures to ensure people remain housed. See the end of homelessness as we know it today. It will work. Coralie Deny is the director general of the Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal <figure id="attachment_439431" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Coralie Deny, director general of the Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal, behind a staircase that was built from wood recovered from Georgian Bay in Lake Huron. Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>In 2015, there will be a lot of talk about planning and development in the Montreal region. We hope that it will be done with sustainable development in mind and that the changes will improve the quality of life. Some of the important issues will be the adoption of Montreal Island land-use development plan, urban plans for each city on the island, a parking policy, an updated transportation plan and the plan for repaving Ste-Catherine St. W. These plans will provide us with guidelines on how Montreal will be shaped. The plans must be precise and visionary and take into account principles that will be followed in all parts of the island. There must be improvements in public transport service and more bike paths. We need to promote Montreal as a walkable city, develop our streams and improve access to the river. We should also establish a network of connected green spaces, revitalize neighbourhoods and spruce up their commercial streets. If we work together, 2015 can be a pivotal year for Montreal. Heather O’Neill, author <figure id="attachment_439439" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Author Heather O’Neill lives in Montreal and writes about the city. She is photographed with her dog Muppet at home on April 25, 2014, at her desk where she spends most of her time writing. Marie-France Coallier / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>There’s an unhealthy fixation on young people in our society now. We try to micromanage every minute of their day and spend absurd resources on them. And I think they should be just left in peace to lie around in the libraries and daydream and doodle strange sea creatures in the margins of their notebooks and to engage in philosophical discussions with their pet mice. On the other hand, I think that we as a city should take better care of our elderly citizens. Transportation is really difficult for many of them. There are so many elderly who are abandoned and alone and neglected, prisoners in their own homes. There is no place for them in society and they are treated as though they are burdens. I just think they need to be valued and respected more. We’ve become a little callous in our attitudes toward the elderly. Everyone needs to accept that this is a part of life and one of our basic obligations. Better aid needs to be given to home care for seniors and those family members, often only one person, who have to shoulder all the responsibility of taking care of them. Eric Dupuis, chef-owner Dominion Square Tavern and Balsam Inn <figure id="attachment_439441" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Eric Dupuis, chef and co-owner of the Balsam Inn poses for a photograph at the newly opened restaurant in Montreal, Wednesday, December 17, 2014. Graham Hughes / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>We should exploit our European side more, with its lifestyle and traditions. That way we would make our city more vivante and exciting for residents and tourists. Let’s create more vibrant neighbourhoods by letting them develop their own personalities instead of passing so many laws and rules meant to over-protect our society. And as individuals we should stop being insular and share more time with our neighbours. Montreal should have terraces everywhere, even in winter. We should have more small markets where producers come to sell their goods. These are both ways of encouraging outdoor living in winter. We should let parents bring their kids into bars (not night clubs) when they go out for a drink with their friends. We should have l’apéro every evening of the week, not just on Thursdays. Bring back that old European spirit we had back in the day! Kim Arrey, nutritionist <figure id="attachment_439442" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Kim Arrey, a dietician/nutritionist prepares a yogurt and apple snack in her home in Montreal, Wednesday December 17, 2014. Vincenzo D'Alto / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>This will be the year that we show the world that Montreal really is different from other cities in North America and that we take very seriously the challenge of providing nutritious, healthy, delicious food to all our citizens at an affordable price. We will start with our hospitals and long-term-care institutions, ensuring that the meals served to patients will play a key role in establishing better health. Budgets will be adjusted so that food is considered medicine, and an integral part of the care plan of each patient. Rooftop gardens at the superhospitals will provide the kitchens with fresh, nutritious, tasty produce. Grocery stores on site will help our patients purchase affordable, nutritious food, as prescribed by our dietitians and doctors. Insurance companies will reimburse clients for the visits that they make to the dietitian, and the government will give us a tax credit for purchasing health-promoting food. The goal would be not just to prevent nutrition deficiencies but to promote good health through good nutrition. Yves Desjardins-Siciliano, president and CEO of VIA Rail Canada <figure id="attachment_439453" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> President and CEO of Via Rail, Yves Desjardins-Siciliano in the Montreal offices, on Thursday, December 18, 2014. Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>My wish for 2015 is to see more Montrealers travelling by train to Québec City, Ottawa or Toronto, and any points in between or beyond. Every time Montrealers choose the comfort and safety of the train, where they can put their time to good use — they are helping to reduce their environmental footprint, reinforce the importance of their national public transportation service and support the growth of Canada’s economy in the 21st century. Montrealers, like all Canadians whether they live in large metropolitan areas or in smaller communities in between, have in VIA Rail a reliable rail system that allows them to get wherever they need to be without the use of their cars. At VIA Rail, we believe that inter-modality is everyone’s business and, in cooperation with our public transportation partners, we offer an alternative that helps unclog our highways and makes getting in and out of our cities easier and more enjoyable. Robert Green, a history teacher at Westmount High School <figure id="attachment_439450" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Westmount High School history teacher Robert Green. John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>In 2015, I would like to see an end to politicians attempting to accomplish their goals at the expense of vulnerable public-school students. Last year, it was teachers and students from various religious minorities being stigmatized by the Parti-Québécois government’s proposed charter of values; this year, it’s (Quebec Premier Philippe) Couillard attempting to balance the budget by asking vulnerable students to pay for all the tax cuts the previous Liberal government had doled out to the rich. Montreal’s public schools have a high numbers of students with special needs and students from low-income families. These are inevitably the students most affected when budgets for education and other social services are cut. When Mr. Couillard was running for election, he stated that he saw education as an investment in Quebec’s future. It would be nice if in 2015 he showed this was more than empty rhetoric by doing two things: 1) reversing the cuts to public education; 2) dealing fairly with the province’s teachers in upcoming contract negotiations. Craig Sauvé, Projet Montréal city councillor for Saint-Henri — Petite-Bourgogne — Pointe-Saint-Charles district <figure id="attachment_439457" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Craig Sauvé, Projet Montreal city councillor, at city hall. John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>For 2015, I hope that improving the quality of life for citizens is truly a high priority for all levels of government. I hope that Quebec seriously re-thinks its transportation strategy: the government should reconsider its plans for the $600-million Highway 19 project and instead reinvest the money in important public transit projects such as the LRT (light-rail train) on the Champlain Bridge, a West Island mobility plan and the extension of the métro’s Blue Line. At the city level, I hope that Mayor (Denis) Coderre shows some leadership on transport. In 2014, the STM has had to cut bus departures because of budget cuts; they are now in catch-up mode. Our neighbourhoods need more bus and métro service, not less. We also need more investment in bike paths to promote healthy, active transport. Affordability and economic fairness are on the minds of all Montrealers, our governments need to implant measures that will make it easier for families to make ends meet: keep housing affordable, stop hiking STM fares and hydro rates, protect affordable, quality daycare and education. I also hope that all levels of government invest in greener neighbourhoods, green energy initiatives and protecting our valuable green spaces, such as Meadowbrook Park. I hope that 2015 is a year of peace, joy, understanding and working together. John Archer, wealth adviser for RBC Dominion Securities <figure id="attachment_439465" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Financial adviser John Archer in Montreal. Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>From a financial adviser’s point of view, the state of an individual city does not really impact financial markets or investment portfolios (unless, of course, you own Montreal’s municipal bonds in your investment portfolio or within your mutual fund or pension plan). However, the city does affect the adviser’s quality of life and that of his or her family. From a quality of life point of view, I have three items on my Montreal wish list: Firstly, I would like to see a drastic improvement of our homelessness issue. Just once I would like to walk freely from Atwater Ave. to Peel St. without being accosted for money every block or so. Secondly, I would like to see an improvement in programs and employment opportunities to help our youth thrive economically in the city. If our children cannot see a future here, and they continue to abandon us, then that will be our greatest loss. Thirdly, I would like to see a coordination of road construction along with our traffic flow and control. There is nothing more frustrating than driving on one of our many streets under construction than waiting for an intolerably long light and seeing that there is absolutely no work nor reason for the closed lane to be blocked off with orange construction cones. Surely our traffic flow can be better managed under these situations. Maria Liliana Madriz, co-owner of Cachitos, a Venezuelan restaurant on Ste. Catherine St. <figure id="attachment_439471" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> María Liliana Madriz in Montreal on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013. Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>I wish for the sharks not to bite so much. When you start a small business with all your savings (and countless working hours), you expect a fair amount of permits, taxes, and expenses to bite at your hard-earned income. My wish concerns the hidden taxes that keep biting at you every day: like the 30 free parking spaces that were removed in my area, only to become viciously hounded metered spots, leading clients to pay $52 for the few extra minutes they take to say goodbye. Or the added 25 cents per litre we’re charged for gas in Quebec, affecting our shopping, commute and errands. Or the hikes in rent due to raised school and property taxes. Or the felony of having an English sign that, God forbid, is close in size to the French one, even though the most profitable season is summer, which brings English speaking tourists. To name a few. And then, at the end of the day, while drinking a scotch to forget all of the above, you realize that the scotch also cost you more than it ought to, and that there’s nothing you can do about it, except to drink it slowly and hope that the bites won’t bleed you out. Geoff Molson: Owner, president and CEO of the Club de hockey Canadien, Bell Centre and Evenko <figure id="attachment_439476" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Montreal Canadiens owner Geoff Molson speaks at the funeral for former Montreal Canadiens captain Jean Beliveau at Mary Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal, Wednesday, Dec.10, 2014. Paul Chiasson / THE CANADIAN PRESS</figcaption></figure>I think this city thrives when the Montreal Canadiens go a long way in the playoffs. I hope we can bring that to the city. And I hope that businesses start to thrive in Montreal and this becomes a destination for businesses to invest in. I can feel it coming. There’s a new wave of optimism in the city. It’s refreshing because it wasn’t always that way in the past decade or so. Just look around the city and see all the (construction) cranes. That’s one reason to be optimistic. But also look at the world economy. Compared to what’s happened in the rest of the world, Montreal and Canada survived quite well in difficult times since 2008. From where I sit, I need to equip Marc (Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin) with a winning organization for the fans to enjoy. From a business perspective, to do my part, I just need to keep investing in our city and bringing new festivals, a winning hockey team and more business, like the condominiums around our (Bell Centre) building. I hope others do that, as well. Debbie Friedman, trauma director for the Montreal Children’s Hospital <figure id="attachment_439478" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Debbie Friedman is trauma director of the Montreal Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at the McGill school of medicine. </figcaption></figure>I consider it a true privilege to work in the field of health care. Collaborating with many committed individuals who have dedicated their lives to helping others is rewarding and meaningful. Diminished budgets, cuts in salaries, corruption scandals and new laws often detract from what health care should be about namely: the patients and their families. Working in the field of trauma you are reminded all too often about how precious life is and how essential it is to be able to offer timely, expert care. This year, a new chapter begins in the history of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, and the McGill University Health Centre at the Glen site. As trauma director, I am committed to seeing our Pediatric and Adolescent Trauma Centre flourish in its new home. I am confident that despite the challenges we face in health care today, the people I work alongside will be focused on what we do best: providing the highest level of specialized care to our patients and their families. As well as training a new generation of health care professionals, conducting research, and working closely with the public, the media and governing bodies to develop and implement effective injury prevention strategies. As for Montreal, I would hope that a city that has so much potential would get back to the business of thriving and embrace its unique heritage, thereby encouraging our youth to build their lives here in Montreal. Life is precious and those of us working in the area of trauma see the tragic reality of injuries all too often. Danny Maciocia, head coach of the Université de Montréal Carabins football team <figure id="attachment_439494" class="wp-caption post-img aligncenter" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="photo url" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="margin: 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text wp-caption" style="margin: -1px 0px 2em; padding: 10px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; vertical-align: baseline; zoom: 1; text-align: right; background: rgb(12, 12, 12);"> Universite de Montréal head football coach Danny Maciocia. Pierre Obendrauf / Montreal Gazette</figcaption></figure>People giving back … as far as professional athletes or even university football players (and others from) athletics. Just trying to give back to the community … getting involved, trying to make an impact, trying to make a difference, trying to influence people’s lives on a positive note. Because at the end of the day, I’m sure they look at several of these individuals as role models. So, just give back, make an impact and, like I said, try to make a difference and bring some core values in their message in 2015. </article>

À l'ouest de la rue McGill entre la rue Notre-Dame et Saint-Maurice Demande de démolition pour permettre la construction d'un immeuble commercial et résidentiel

Photos taken by me on friday the 3rd of october 2014 in Milton Parc and McGill. Full set on Flickr.

L'église Saint-Joseph situé au 550 rue Richmond devriendra le Salon 1861 dans les plans du Quartier de l'Innovation. LE SALON 1861 ET LE LABORATOIRE DE CULTURE URBAINE Riche de son histoire et des nombreux artistes qui y ont habité, le territoire qu’occupe le QI continue d’accueillir de nombreux joueurs de la scène culturelle montréalaise : espaces de diffusion, galeries d’art et studios, notamment. Le Laboratoire de culture urbaine du QI profitera de cette effervescence et de l’expertise universitaire dans le domaine des arts afin de créer des occasions d’échange entre artistes, professeurs, étudiants et résidents du quartier. Le Laboratoire s’installera au sein du QI, dans le Salon 1861, qui pourra accueillir des projets de recherche collaborative, des expositions, des événements, des ateliers d’artistes et des organismes communautaires, tout en favorisant l’échange avec la communauté. Piloté par : Will Straw, professeur, Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études en communications, Université McGill et Natalie Voland, présidente, Gestion immobilière Quo Vadis. Ce site explique l'histoire de cette église : http://avantlautoroute.com/2011/01/10/leglise-st-joseph-rue-richmond/ Article sur la transformation : SALON 1861: THE AFTERLIFE OF L’ÉGLISE ST-JOSEPH Mark Twain has said of Montreal, “this is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window”. Quebec’s history has left the city with a wealth of beautiful churches that are now threatened due to lack of funds for upkeeping. The Église St-Joseph, located in Montreal’s Little-Burgundy neighbourhood, is an example of how the city is rapidly evolving while preserving its communities’ heritage. Starting this summer, Quartier de l’innovation, a McGill University and École de technologies supérieures initiative, will be working in partnership with Gestion Immobilière Quo Vadis to transform l’Église St-Joseph into The Salon 1861, which will host the Laboratory of Urban Culture while still remaining a fixture in the community. Conversion of churches to preserve the architecture and heritage is not uncommon in Montreal. In the city, there are many churches that have been given a second life and yet continue to create value for the community. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts converted the Erskine and American United Church on Sherbrooke West into a Canadian Art pavilion, completed in 2011, and a successful reinvention of the museum took place to integrate the church into its exhibits. Chic Resto Pop is the site of another converted church in Montreal accessible to surrounding residents. The former Saint Barnabé-Apôtre Church was sold for $300,000 in 2002 and converted into an affordable cafeteria large enough for 300 people. Le Saint-Jude spa opened in fall 2013 is the site of another converted church in the Plateau Mont-Royal district. The spa and health club was renovated into the century old church costing 2.65 million dollars and won the design excellence award in 2013 from Canadian Architect magazine. Soon the Laboratory of Urban Culture will be amongst the list of churches in Montreal that receives a prolonged existence and continues to benefit Montrealers. "a gathering for social or intellectual distinction through discussions, exchanges and ideas of all sorts." The idea for the Laboratory of Urban Culture emerged from a study mandated by the Quartier de l’innovation (QI) in 2012 to study the arts and cultural needs in the district. The QI is an innovative ecosystem located in Montreal’s historic Southwest district – Griffintown, Saint-Henri, Petite Bourgogne and Pointe Saint-Charles. It aims to increase collaboration between academia, the private sector, and the community, as well as encourage research and industrrial projects for social and cultural innovation. QI seeks to address needs and face real challenges, in order to improve the quality of life in its district. A collaboration between École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) and McGill University, since June 2013, the QI has developed into a non-profit organization that continues to develop impactful projects for the district. map of QI The zone marked in red is the area of QI The inception of the Laboratory of Urban Culture was a result of the study completed by Professor Will Straw, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. The direct conclusion was the need to create “a YMCA of culture”: or a neutral space in the community for the intersection of academia, arts and culture. The Laboratory of Urban Culture is establishing an accessible link between different stakeholders to promote arts and culture in the community. Around the same time, Natalie Voland, President of Gestion Immobilière Quo Vadis, had just made quite an astounding purchase: a church! Initially intended for conversion into condominiums, Voland sought efforts to maintain its heritage having realized its priceless architectural value. Built in 1861, l’Église St-Joseph is one of the oldest catholic churches in Montreal with a heritage value close to that of the Oratoire St-Joseph. Having visited the church, the awe factor makes anyone who has seen the interior eager to preserve it. Voland then began a search for ways to preserve the Église St-Joseph. After learning about the purchase of the church in the QI, Isabelle Péan, Project Director of QI at McGill, met with Voland to present the vision of the Laboratory of Urban Culture. Soon after, a collboration was established between QI and Quo Vadis to host the Laboratory of Urban Culture within the Église St-Joseph, now called the Salon 1861. The name “Salon 1861”, comes from old French, meaning a periodic gathering for social or intellectual distinction through discussions, exchanges and ideas of all sorts. The Salon 1861 will be a socially responsible project put together by the synergy of diverse partners. The historically significant heritage building of l’Église St-Joseph will be maintained and transformed into a modern representation still carrying out its intended purpose, a place for civic community, culture and collaboration. In the coming months a McGil Arts doctorate student will finalize programming of workshops, lectures and concerts in the Laboratory. The Laboratory of Urban Culture will be an important aspect of the creative ecosystem, which will be established in the Salon 1861. Other elements of this ecosystem include an art gallery, event spaces and a co-working space in the church’s basement targeted at social economy and arts entrepreneurship. Students will have a variety of opportunities to get involved with the Laboratory and the Salon 1861. Currently, Mark Ramsey, a graduate student in architecture from McGill University, is working with Quo Vadis on the legacy and patrimonial work of the church before reconstruction begins. More internships and projects for students are currently being established within this framework. Essentially, the Salon 1861 will become an ecosystem where different components will mutually complement and benefit the community. Natalie Voland has said “The concept of the Salon 1861 has really been inspired by the QI’s vision. The Salon 1861 will be at the heart of the community and will be a real destination for cultural and social innovation in the District”. To stay connected with the developments of QI, including the progress of the Laboratory of Urban Culture, follow them on Facebook or Twitter! WRITTEN BY ZOEY TUNG IMAGE BY SAM GREGORY

Publié le 22 septembre 2014 à 10h26 | Mis à jour le 22 septembre 2014 à 10h26 Une résidence étudiante qui détonne Marie-Eve Morasse La Presse L'idée que l'on se fait des résidences étudiantes est peu reluisante. On les imagine ternes, défraîchies et meublées sans éclat. À deux pas de l'Université McGill, une nouvelle résidence universitaire vient renverser les idées préconçues. Ce sont les architectes de l'agence Kanva qui ont imaginé cette résidence de 30 chambres qui détonne. Le terrain, à un jet de pierre de l'entrée de l'université, a dicté le projet. «C'était un terrain vacant en face du campus, directement rue University. La résidence étudiante est venue naturellement. Si on avait été un kilomètre plus loin, ça aurait probablement été autre chose», dit Tudor Radulescu, cofondateur de Kanva. Là où se trouvait un stationnement s'élève aujourd'hui la Résidence Edison. En ébauchant leurs plans, les architectes ont d'abord tenu compte de leur clientèle. Comme bien des jeunes y éliront domicile au cours des prochaines années, il fallait un bâtiment durable. «C'est un bâtiment entièrement en béton. Il faut vraiment se lever tôt pour y faire des dommages! Ce n'est pas une prison, mais la construction est en fonction des besoins de solidité, des besoins acoustiques, des besoins d'intimité», explique Tudor Radulescu. Les chambres, privées ou doubles, sont petites mais on ne s'y sent pas coincé. «On arrive à donner un certain confort, un certain volume. Les plafonds sont hauts, la fenestration est généreuse. On veut offrir une qualité qui ne se limite pas à dire «j'ai une chambre de 150 pi2».» Pour l'instant, la majorité des étudiants qui y ont établi domicile ne sont pas de la province. Ils auront l'occasion de fraterniser dans les espaces publics pensés par les architectes. «Les lieux communs sont essentiels, c'est une place de choix, dit Tudor Radulescu. Nous voulions quelques chose de convivial, qui encourage les échanges.» Un clin d'oeil architectural au passé La référence à Thomas Edison dans le nom de la résidence n'est pas fortuite. Pour souligner qu'elle a été construite là où un bâtiment a brûlé dans les années 60, on a eu recours à des images tirées du film Montreal Fire Department on Runners, tourné à Montréal par Thomas Edison en 1901. Grâce à une technique appelée photogravure, les images ont été insérées sur les panneaux de béton et peuvent être vues en façade et dans la porte cochère. «Il n'y a pas de couleurs ni de différences de ton dans le béton. Ce sont des coupures de profondeur et de largeur différentes qui créent des ombrages avec la lumière et c'est ce qui crée des images. C'est subtil. Selon l'angle, il est possible qu'on ne voie rien de spécial, mais tout d'un coup, on arrive dans un autre angle et les ombrages prennent vie», explique Tudor Radulescu. Dans son très court film, Thomas Edison a immortalisé les pompiers de Montréal tandis qu'ils défilaient avec leurs nouveaux équipements pourvus de la plus récente technologie. Le choix du film n'est pas un hasard pour un bâtiment situé tout près de l'Université McGill. «C'est également pour le côté développement de nouvelles technologies qui va avec des études universitaires», explique l'architecte. Trois types de chambres sont proposées. Les prix spéciaux, au départ offerts pour des réservations pendant le mois d'août, étaient toujours en cours au moment d'écrire ces lignes (de 595$ à 895$ par mois par étudiant). edisonresidence.com SOURCES : http://www.lapresse.ca/maison/architecture/201409/22/01-4802417-une-residence-etudiante-qui-detonne.php http://www.edisonresidence.com http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/interiors/index.php?fuseaction=project.projectview&ctid=25&prid=24643 http://www.e-architect.co.uk/montreal/edison-residence-in-montreal http://www.archello.com/en/project/edison-residence# http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/08/montreals-newest-concrete-slab-building-is-brightened-with-film-stills-by-thomas-edison/375996/ http://www.dezeen.com/2014/08/11/edison-residence-by-kanva-concrete-panel/ Photography is by Marc Cramer.

Nouveau projet annoncé sur le site de McGill Immobilier. http://n2condos.ca/ Quelqu'un a de l'info? Courriel reçu: Thank you for your interest in N2, new vibrant condo living on the Canal. We have a big surprise for you! All will be revealed in our next email, which you should receive by or around April 21st. In the meantime, please save the date of April 30th. It's going to be a grand unveiling! Very sincerely, The N2 Team