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To speculate potential futures of Montreal's archipelago, home to Expo '67 nearly 50 years ago.
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To rethink the archipelago as the core of the city.
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To question new forms of community and the 'local'.
brief
w/ Julie An & Kristine Kim
Type_Inter-University Competition
Host_Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)
Year_2015
In-Evitable Inevitable City
2067:
Montreal, like other elemental cities had become a dark, desolate, crime-ridden state. The citizens became disconnected through connectivity. Technology, devices, and the immediacy of information drove the population to a tipping point.
Citizens continued to survive but the collective desire to remain began to linger.
I see humans, but not humanity
The group of rebel visionaries sought to build a foretold city, a utopia to escape the impersonal streets of the old, acquisitive city.
The abandoned archipelago, the islands of Notre Dame and St. Helen were seen as an ideal place for humanity’s escape. The transit bridges - long since dismantled, divided the islands from the city. They built new one-way bridges, ones which accept voluntary citizens into the newly founded city. Hanging over the St. Lawrence River, in the purgatory between the old and new worlds, people are guided through a series of trial segments - each consecutive stage stripping away a layer of their materialistic disconnected lives.
Confinement here will set you free.
Citizens continued to arrive, bare of all technology and ties which bound them with a previous life. They took to the unturned soils - Farming. Building. Living.
Together, a new city was formed, one which was rooted in the lust of a better life. Free from the covetous ideology that the old city had chained them within.
50 years, 2117:
The new city had slowly become contaminated. Somehow, the culture of consumption had seeped beyond the once utopian shores, tainting the collectiveness of the foretold city.
The visionaries reversed the bridges, re-entering the vacant metropolis to start a new city.
However, the veterans of the city try their voices at the eager youth, warning them of the imminent cycle. The blinded spirit of the youth perpetuate the half-century rhythmical loop… the desire of what the world could be - but cannot.
The citizens enter the metropolis - the labyrinth, unknowing of its manifestation as a maze. In the evitable they build, the inevitable city of their futures.
