Mondo_Grosso

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Un bel article pour tous ceux qui déteste le préfab! Growing Up in a Concrete Masterpiece By BLAKE GOPNIKMAY 1, 2017 Habitat’s boxlike apartments of cast concrete, shown in 2006. The complex was designed for Expo 67, the Montreal world’s fair. CreditYannick Grandmont for The New York Times Anyone whose childhood included a move up to a new, better home remembers it as grander than it was. When I was 5, I saw our new home as extending endlessly in every direction. It soared above a vast, churning river on one side and a hectic port on the other. It was exactly the building my kindergarten self would have built, stacking blocks to the verge of collapse. Its pleasures left me breathless the first day I woke up there and most mornings after. In my case, this memory of relocation is not overblown. My parents moved us from Philadelphia to Montreal in 1968, into a housing complex called Habitat, which had been completed the previous summer as the experimental housing pavilion for Expo 67, the Montreal world’s fair. Built on a spit of land separating the rapids of the great St. Lawrence River from the working waters of Montreal’s port, Habitat’s 158 apartments fill 365 cast-concrete boxes, piled 11 stories high in a madcap mess of cantilevers and bridges and perilous open spaces — like (guess what) a stack of children’s blocks. For sheer sensory excitement, Habitat could not and cannot be matched. Every minute in the building felt unlike the next, as space, light, air and sound danced around you. My parents built a jungle-gym on one of our terraces, but the building was the best climbing frame of all. Habitat turns 50 this spring, and its excellence is being celebrated well beyond my family. Canada’s post office has just announced a Habitat stamp, the first in a series for the nation’s 150th birthday. In June a major exhibition on the structure, now declared a historic monument, opens at the Centre de design de l’UQAM in Montreal. The show will include public tours of a Habitat apartment restored to its original space-age state, with fiberglass bathrooms cast in one piece and futuristic push-button light switches — one white dot for “on” and a black one for “off.” (By some weird coincidence, the apartment being toured this summer is the same one I grew up in.) Habitat is a prime example of our postwar love of raw concrete architecture. For a little while, from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, concrete seemed to be the civic, public alternative to the steel and glass buildings that represented the corporate world, Mad Men-slick and meant to sell us on the polished ease of the capitalist way, reflected back and forth across the hall of mirrors of New York’s Park Avenue. Poured concrete, in contrast, was honest and audacious in avowing its bulk, primeval and pretense-free for an age that still doubted the perfection of the new corporate model and sometimes pushed back against it. It became the preferred material for libraries, universities and courts, in a style that has now come to be known as Brutalism. But after flourishing for those few years, these concrete buildings began to be described as simply brutal, and in recent years many have been demolished. The American Press Institute’s building in Reston, Va., designed by the great Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, who was also responsible for the former Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue in New York, was destroyed last year. The Art and Architecture Building at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. CreditAndrew Henderson for The New York Times The Third Church of Christ, Scientist, one of the few notable buildings near the White House, was torn down in 2014, even though it had once been described by the architectural historian Richard Longstreth as “an enduring monument to the human faith in God and the extraordinary power with which that faith can be expressed.” But the church’s parishioners didn’t share his faith in Brutalism and started describing their home as a “bunker”— the standard insult that just about every cast-concrete building has suffered at one time or another. (“How do you live with all that cement,” my schoolmates would ask. “With delight” was the only answer. They understood once they visited.) If only those Brutalist structures could have held on just a bit longer. The style’s charms are being rediscovered. If it is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Habitat’s concrete should be blushing. “In the schools, you see that the students are into it again,” said Moshe Safdie, Habitat’s designer, speaking by phone from his firm’s offices near Boston. “Several of my peers are doing buildings influenced by it.” Mr. Safdie is now one of the world’s leading architects, but he conceived of his Expo project while still a student at McGill University. He was all of 28 when it opened. He said that after a 50-year career spent designing institutions (the Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas is a recent standout), contracts for housing are pouring in for the first time, “and it’s completely linked to people’s interest in Habitat.” His student project, he said, feels “as though it was built yesterday.” Its current imitators seem to agree. A vast new complex planned for downtown Toronto, with a haphazard-looking stack of blocky modules, is utterly indebted to the Safdie building. Its cutting-edge architect, Bjarke Ingels of Denmark, has referred to it as “Habitat 2.0” and he ended a recent speech with an admission of influence that is rare in his profession: “Canada started something 50 years ago. Now we are picking up where Moshe Safdie left off.” In just the last few years, books on vintage poured-concrete buildings have started to appear faster than they can be read. Walking tours of Brutalist masterpieces, in cities around the world, are now competing with ones that point out Victorian terra cotta and Art Deco metalwork. Last fall, a British publishing house called Blue Crow Media added a “Brutalist Washington” map to a series that includes maps of Brutalism in London, Paris and Sydney, Australia. The one on Washington, D.C., was the brainchild of a local writer named Deane Madsen, a fan of postwar concrete who was also aware of the abuse it still suffers. “I’d seen so many lists of the least popular and ugliest buildings in D.C., and almost all were Brutalist,” said Mr. Madsen in a recent phone call. His map applauds concrete buildings like the cylindrical Hirshhorn Museum, once reviled but now widely admired, and the block-spanning F.B.I. headquarters, still so disliked that its demolition seems almost certain. We’ve lived to regret such destruction before, the standard cautionary tale being New York’s Pennsylvania Station. It fell in 1963 when it was seen as an outdated 50-year-old. (“Not, architecturally, a monument,” was the judgment of the real estate developer Irving M. Felt, whose Madison Square Garden replaced the station. The New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp agreed, writing in 2006 that pulling in there was like “arriving in Philadelphia two hours before you had to.”) Penn Station fell at precisely the moment when its out-of-date architecture was beginning to find some new love — it was mourned almost at once — just as Brutalist buildings are doing on their 50th birthdays. The Third Church of Christ, Scientist, near the White House, was torn down in 2014.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times Mr. Madsen, the Washington writer, has a theory about why vintage concrete is making a comeback at this particular moment: For all the challenges Brutalism can pose to some users, he said, its bold forms and highly textured surfaces make it utterly camera-friendly, perfect fare for our Instagram age. What was once a highly theorized Architecture of Truth, with profound social goals and implications, has come to be loved as a pure aesthetic. Passing time has made it trade complexity and depth for a wider surface appeal. That means Brutalism is suffering (or enjoying) the same fate as most modern movements. The Impressionism of Claude Monet, once derided as incomprehensibly ugly and abstruse, now counts as evidently and simply attractive; the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, originally seen as utterly conceptual and counteraesthetic, now decorates strollers. With our new love of cast concrete, it looks as if we’ve learned to see the beauty in what once counted as bleak. A few weeks ago, the United States Commission of Fine Arts, a body normally busy with our capital’s neo-Classical-style monuments, chastised Washington’s transportation authority for painting the concrete in one of its 1970s Metro stations. The commission complained that the paint threatened “the architectural character of this exemplary transit system” (exemplary, it so happens, for its Brutalism). My Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in New York is known for its ornate Victorian tenements, now beloved for the very curlicues that once won them abuse. A new kind of ornament is joining them: On a prime lot at Ninth Avenue and 42nd Street, near Times Square, a generic skyscraper that would once have been faced in clichéd glass or metal has instead been surfaced in raw concrete — which now, but only now, counts as a suitably decorative finish for a building that will house a trendy Pod hotel. Just up the street on 10th Avenue, ground has been cleared for a condo building that takes its Brutalist roots more to heart. It will be faced in precast concrete panels designed to have some of the same visual texture and complexity as its most photogenic postwar ancestors, including Habitat. That’s because the new building’s architect, Jonathan J. Marvel, has been a fan of Moshe Safdie’s for far longer than most of his peers. In another of this article’s peculiar coincidences, Mr. Marvel actually visited Habitat the year it was born, when he was all of 7. (He had been brought to Expo for the debut of a second great building there: the American Pavilion’s giant geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller, Mr. Marvel’s great-uncle.) “I grew up with cast concrete on my brain,” Mr. Marvel said. It was a favorite material of his father’s, one of Puerto Rico’s leading architects. He also has memories of a hillside in San Juan scattered with unused concrete boxes from a second Habitat that Mr. Safdie never got the chance to complete. “I’ve been thinking about Habitat for a long, long time,” Mr. Marvel said. But until now, he had encountered resistance to echoing it, among clients for whom Brutalism still evoked ideas of the brutal. (The style’s name in fact comes from béton brut, the neutral French term for “raw concrete.”) Mr. Marvel counts it a privilege to be working at a moment when it’s finally possible to pay homage to one of the great buildings of our recent past. “Habitat is absolutely fantastic, and daring, and cool,” he said. Anyone who has lived there would agree.

They were on last night, big and blue.

http://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/josh-freed-the-main-2-0-is-a-street-of-dreams The Main 2.0 is 'a street of dreams' JOSH FREED, SPECIAL TO MONTREAL GAZETTE More from Josh Freed, Special to Montreal Gazette Published on: April 29, 2017 | Last Updated: April 29, 2017 7:01 AM EDT The line outside Schwartz's on St-Laurent Blvd. GIOVANNI CAPRIOTTI / MONTREAL GAZETTE FILES SHAREADJUSTCOMMENTPRINT A decade ago the city attempted to murder The Main, in a three-year-long Festival of Construction that left the street on life support. For years after, the most popular chain on St-Laurent Blvd. was named “A Louer.” But this spring, at last, the Main has finally recovered and embraced a new life – like many times in its long, ever-changing history. Welcome to The Main 2.0. Two years ago I counted 30 “For Rent” signs on the street between Prince-Arthur and Duluth Sts. alone. But on a walk last week I saw only four — a trend that’s sweeping the Main right up to Mont-Royal Ave. Everywhere you turn there are new cafés, galleries, clothing shops, yoga studios and skateboard fashion boutiques — sometimes splitting the same shop. You’ve heard of ride-sharing, house-sharing and job-sharing. Well, now there’s a shop-sharing economy. Take Art Gang, a designer clothing boutique that just opened on the Main, sharing its large bright room with Caffelini, a terrific espresso café that’s plunked amidst the fashionable clothing racks — and owned by a different person. The 27-year-old café-owner Jordan Myall knew 30-year-old clothing shop-owner Tiago Curado from Mile End. When he heard Tiago was opening a shop on the Main he had a brainstorm: “Why not share the space, the rent and the customers? “Now, people come in for a jacket and buy a latte, or sit round having an espresso, and notice some clothing they like,” says Jordan. “It’s a different experience. “How else do you fight Amazon or the big coffee chains?,” he says pointing directly across the street where a big Starbucks looms. “You offer something unusual.” Further up the Main at Ballet Hop, owner Camille Rouleau, 26, recently opened a dance studio that co-habits with a boutique selling dance clothing, and local handicrafts. They owners also share a restaurant/café in the same space. “We wanted to create an experience where people come shopping, then get interested in dance lessons … then have lunch, meet people and interact. And it’s happening –we’re a real community.” There’s also a new yoga studio/vegan restaurant and a Japanese resto/Vietnamese sandwich place. What’s the next hybrid on the street: a martial arts dépanneur? A Hardware and Hookah shop? Noodles and Poodles? The Main 2.0 generation is drawn here because they know its legendary reputation, even if they were too young to experience it “I knew it was a famous street that fell on hard times,” says Tiago. “But in the last two years I could see it was coming back … and I wanted to be part of it.” “In five years this street is going to be huge,” says Jordan, “I want to be part of that vibe. I’m a dreamer and this is a street of dreams” My long time optometrist Michael Toulch is a surviving veteran of the street, like Schwartz’s, Moishe’s, Vieille Europe and other stalwarts. But he feels the vibe too. An abandoned building on the corner of St-Laurent Blvd. and Pins Ave. in 2010. The building has since been restored and turned into an optometrist. BRYANNA BRADLEY / MONTREAL GAZETTE FILES He just moved down the street to a bigger new location, corner Pins Ave. The building had been abandoned for a decade, the Main’s worst graffiti-covered, boarded-up window eyesore. But all the eyesore needed was glasses — lots of them. Toulch stripped the crumbling floor and walls and uncovered a gorgeous space that’s attracted crowds of new customers. “For a long time, stores were empty but rents were still crazy high. Now they’re finally falling and a new generation can afford to move in. “There’s definitely something happening here.” The street has reached a “tipping point” according to Tasha Morizio, head of the St-Laurent storeowners’ association, which mid-wived the Main’s re-birth. Last year the shop-owner group jointly hired their own full-time street concierge to sweep the sidewalks, shovel snow, polish lampposts, install flower boxes and clean off graffiti faster than the City was doing. “The better the street looks, the better people treat it and the less they vandalize it,” she says. This summer St-Laurent Blvd. will host block parties, mural festivals, barbecue competitions and two massive street festivals. “The days of complaining the Main is dead are over,” says Tasha. “Our street is back.” Main 2.0 isn’t the Main of old. The characters who once filled the street are largely gone: yakky Mrs. Levy who ran Warsaw’s, gruff Simcha the fruit-seller, Mr. Berson the rock behind Berson gravestone monuments and others who grew up before service-with-a-smile was invented. In their place is this young generation of optimistic how-can-I-help-you dreamers. Can Main 2.0 continue to grow to symbolize the city like the original Main Classic did? Can it fight off online buying that’s decimating streets and malls everywhere? The Main has been reinvented a dozen times since the dawn of the 20th century – sinking then swimming on new waves of Chinese, Jews, Hungarians, Portuguese, hippies, Gen-Xers and others who streamed in. I’m betting on the street again. I believe in the Miracle of the Main.

Je crois qu'ils installent les projecteurs sur le tois de la centre de science pour le spectacle multimédia.

The windows are being installed:

Des travaux devant le metro aujourd'hui:

4/14/2017

You're not going to get the same sound proofing in a curtain wall system with openings (windows, balcony door) as you would in a building with concrete walls. I don't know if you were misinformed or made unrealistic expectations, but no matter what you will hear loud noises from outside. If this is your first time living in a tall building, you will see that the sound echos much differently high above as opposed to on ground level. It's the same effect as being in a canyon.

http://www.impactmontreal.com/fr/post/2017/04/10/dimportantes-améliorations-pour-lexpérience-au-stade-saputo D'importantes améliorations pour l'expérience au Stade Saputo 3M$ d’investissements privés injectés dans le stade MONTRÉAL – À quelques jours de son match d’ouverture au Stade Saputo, ce samedi 15 avril à 13h contre Atlanta United FC, l’Impact de Montréal a dévoilé lundi tous les détails d’importantes améliorations au Stade Saputo. Près de 3M$ d’investissements privés, provenant du club et du nouveau concessionnaire alimentaire Spectrum Canada, ont été injectés dans le stade en vue de la saison 2017. L’aménagement des concessions alimentaires, des boutiques et des espaces d’activation des partenaires du club a été entièrement revu tout autour des coursives du stade afin de permettre une meilleure circulation et un parcours des supporters plus naturel. « Dès cette saison, nous allons commencer à réaliser un objectif important de notre plan de cinq ans : améliorer l’expérience client au stade. Nous allons présenter un stade plus fonctionnel, avec plus d’espace, plus de services, plus de choix et plus d’innovations que jamais, a déclaré le vice-président exécutif de l’Impact de Montréal, Richard Legendre. Avec tous les projets de nouveaux stades à travers la ligue, il est crucial de demeurer concurrentiel et attrayant. Il s’agit donc d’une première étape aujourd’hui. » Les espaces dédiés aux différents points de services alimentaires passeront de 5 700 pieds carrés à plus de 14 500 pieds carrés, alors que le nombre de points de vente augmentera de 38 à 150. Les espaces des boutiques passeront pour leur part de 1 750 pieds carrés à plus de 3 000 pieds carrés. Ce sont donc plus de 10 000 pieds carrés d’espaces publics qui seront ajoutés. En ce qui a trait à l’offre alimentaire, l’Impact proposera des choix encore plus montréalais, dont un nouveau sandwich à la viande fumée, un hot-dog géant et du bœuf certifié Québec. Des produits sans gluten seront désormais offerts dans quatre concessions, de même qu’un menu végétarien dans les loges et mezzanines. Labatt offrira maintenant une gamme de bières de microbrasserie et importées à un emplacement amélioré. De plus, afin d’enrichir l’expérience client, toutes les méthodes de paiement habituelles seront dorénavant acceptées (PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, débit, crédit – dont la carte BMO MasterCard– et comptant). Pas moins de 44 écrans de 55 pouces, 57 écrans de menu et deux grands écrans de 7 pieds sur 12 pieds seront installés dans le stade pour que les supporters ne ratent rien du match. On retrouvera aussi davantage d’animation pour que le Stade Saputo soit encore plus festif, principalement avant le match, tout en demeurant aussi accessible et agréable pour les familles. Enfin, au chapitre de l’offre de billets, de nouveaux produits Prestige seront offerts. Il sera désormais possible d’acheter des sièges niveau terrain du côté sud, le Club de la tour Umberto Cesari sera agrandi, tandis que la loge du Club du président sera améliorée. D’excellents billets pour le match d’ouverture, de même que les billets de saison et les forfaits mini-saison, sont toujours offerts sur impactmontreal.com.

Taken from mtl_crane on Instagram:

Windows on the front.

I believe the reasoning behind painting them after is that it will assure you that they will all be the same colour. Having it prefabricated can lead to different shades of black, like on Tour Des Candiens:

J'ai hâte de voir la finition de la couronne

Fun fact, there used to be two identical Ford Hotels in both Toronto and Buffalo. Only the Montreal location remains. Montreal: Toronto: Buffalo:

3/20/2017

From Facebook:

Le 405 Rue de la Concorde:

3/9/2017 Environ un étage par semaine:

3/9/2017 There were a lot of trucks removing earth from the site today:

3/9/2017 En tout cas, aucun travail n'a repris en janvier.

3/9/2017

3/9/2017

Ils démolissaient le mur de brique une brique à la fois aujourd'hui: