The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 96

J4 THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL, OCTOBER 10, 1992 Who's the kinq of the castles? Drawing from Brookfield Development (left) shows its new 1000 de la Gauchetiere Building (below) as the city's tallest. Sometimes, factors such as antennas or how a building is measured cause competing claims. Height measures a building from the ground to the top, while elevation measures how far above sea level the top of a building is. This accounts for the apparent similarity in height between the IBM-Marathon and 1000 de ia Gauchetiere. The latter is downhill from the former.

ilftrtn 7 i Mount Royal 232,56 (763ft) 232 nr. (762 ft) 232 ro (782 f-V 22s (737 ft) Jfc 2fS (707 H) yV 1 fj gQ6m76ft) 184 (602 ft) EteVn. fifc fjffe 'pw-. aasBL1 rfm -i I II, taller, tallest does it mattes? clients like to boast who 's biggest '1135 i 4i i 5 I. -ft GAZETTE, GORDON BECK Metro and a modem station for South Shore buses.

So, all in all, the 1000 is a distinctive but not revolutionary piece of architecture. It's grand but somewhat clunky, taking elements from its architectural surroundings and refashioning and polishing them into the dramatic, cleanshaven geometries loved by the postmodernists. With its peaked summit and corner towers, the message of 1000 de la Gauchetiere seems to be my home is my castle. It should be added, however, that, with only 34-per-cent occupancy, this building is far from being a full house. Whether such high-rises will continue to be viable remains to be seen.

The IBM-Marathon and 1000 de la Gauchetiere, built in NATALYA NESTEROVA IMPORTANT PAINTINGS OCTOBER 3 -22, 1992 Waddington Gorce Inc. 2155 rue Mackay Street Montreal, Quebec H3G 2J2 (514) 847-1112 Fax: (514) 847-1113 PIEOMQiVT TO P0HT-AU-PERS1L VERNISSAGE Wednesday; October 14th at 7:00 p.m. GALERIE D'ART 234 Saint-Paul West, Old Montreal 844-2133 i MING MA recent watercclours Until October 25 Chinese Pavilion of the Montreal Botanical Garden 4101 Sherbrooke, East. Metro Pie IX. 872-1400 9:00 a.m.

6:00 p.m. Sat-Suri. 9:00 a.m. 7 p.m. on the block spite of the recession, probably mark at least a temporary halt of the corporate climb toward the sky.

And, unless Montreal becomes even more lax than usual toward developers, caps on height, such as the rule that a building can't go higher than Mount Royal, may keep future developers from erecting structures taller than the 1000. But then, why such bigness in the first place, if not for reasons of corporate ego? Prabably, one day we will look on such buildings, as people came to look on the neoclassical temples erected in the name of modernism for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, as white elephants. Henry Lehmann is a Montreal art and architecture critic. Madeleine Lemire oils -TO' Clement Lemieux 3 SCULPTURES Sl Exhibition Oct. 17-Nov.

1-92 Opening Saturday, Oct. 1 at 1 p.m. Artists will be present Galerie Westmount 484-1488 of Decorative Arts 2575 Developers and HENRY IEHMANN SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE ur building is the tallest in Montreal," the devel oper ot the new IBM-Marathon Building told me weeks ago. "No. Our building is the tallest," the developer of the new 1O0O de 'la Gauchetiere Building told me the other day.

-So -who's telling the truth? 'Which of the two rival skyscrapers 'actually reaches higher? You can never be too careful when dealing with a touchy issue like height. A flashy brochure handed out by IBM-Marathon says their building is 850 feet tall, but it seems that this calculation includes the mast on the top. As Craig Shannon, marketing executive for Brookfield Development the developer of 1000 de la Gauchetiere, explained to me, "Including the rod on the roof -of the building is like including your hat when you tell people how tall you are." Pompadour hairdos and platform shoes shouldn't count. Probably the truest way to figure heights is to go from the street to the top-most technically integral part of a building. And that makes the Brookfield building the tallest with a height of 675 feet as opposed to the IBM-Marathon with 643 feet.

But so what? To the naked eye, viewing the two buildings rising above most of the Montreal skyline, there is no obvious difference between their statures. (Until the completion of these two buildings, the Montreal Stock Exchange at 626 feet was the tallest local building. The tallest office building in the world is Chicago's Sears Tower at 1,454 feet. The Empire State Building is 1,250 feet.) Measurement seems the most logical of procedures. Yet, questions of height tend to elicit irrational attitudes and to release atavistic feelings in all of us.

We are reminded that we aren't all that different from so-called lower animals that we have more than we'd like to admit in common with two lizards in mating season, each one puffing and trying to stand taller than his opponent. Ironically, tall buildings combine sophisticated, state-of-the-art technology with a modern version of primitivism. Yet, perhaps this paradox is an accurate reflection of modern I ll Seems as if 1000 de la Gauchetiere appeared almost Tiight. The speed of construction was a result of building technology known as the "jurrfp-form" technique, an approach using one mold for most the floors, allowing the concrete cpre to rise at the rate of one floor every two of three days. Ghostly reflection of church Located directly south of Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, this skyscraper, with its eye-catching peaked roof and its various cylindrical volumes, strongly echoes the majestic architecture of the church.

In fact, as in a vision, the ghostly reflection of the church drifts across the huge panes of glass of the main facade of the 1000 de la Gauchtiere. The four short rotundas, each on a corner of the building, quote both Windsor Station with its turrets and the round transepts of the cathedral. Unlike IBM-Marathon, which seems to unfold before our eyes, 1000 de la Gauchetiere sits still, holding its ground with all the weighty might of a Sumo wrestler. There, is an almost relentless symmetry emphasized by a central vertical line, a "zipper" running from near the base of" the building to the top. The over-all sense of balance solidity and wholeness is reinforced by the repeated use of configurations of four, as in the square patterns high up on the facades.

Like its otherwise stylistically "CI different competitor, the IBM-Marathon, this is essentially a tripartite-building, with massing indicating a base, a shaft and a capitol. The main rectangular part of the building, the shaft, is clad in business-like gray-brown granite. A sense of upward thrust was achieved by organizing the granite in long, wedge-shaped strips running up the building. But the ascent is gradual, almost ponderous, as a result of the over all thick proportions. And the facades have a curiously two-dimensional, applique quality.

Like a giant armoire, this frontally composed building, is meant to be seen one side at a time. Looming in the distance, the building also has a phallic quality. If the granite, an extremely hard rock, expresses strength, the glass above expresses ease and serenity. Visually announced by the transition in the upper floors to glass and smoothness is that once we get this high, we enter a rarified world of refinement and delicacy. "An exciting thing about this building," explained Shannon, the developer, "is we've made a point of not going outside Quebec.

The granite is from the Beauce, and the main designers, Dimakopoulos et Associes and Lemay et Associes, are from here." No mistaking the doors Most of the materials may be from here and the top of the building may suggest old-style French roofs, but the grandiosity goes back to Renaissance Italy and Greek antiquity. There's no mistaking the front doors, crowned by a pediment and protected by a massive portico. After the main doors, we come to the Winter Garden, a large skylit lobby with formal rows of trees and an elegantly checkered floor worthy of Piero della Francesca, but devoid of public seating. On the other side of this Platonic Eden, we encounter the grand stairs, consisting of three conjoined flights leading up to the mezzanine and reminiscent of the Chateau de Fontainebleau. And at the back of the main-floor interior of the building, we come to another large space, a dramatic, glass-roofed area designated as the Ice-Amphitheatre.

Here, in an area open to the public, gracefully moving skaters serve as lovely kinetic sculptures. To implant such a Leviathan as the 1000 Building into the urban tissue takes a whole range of specialists, from the major designers to the architectural cosmeticians and dressers. The idea is to make something huge seem cuddly and caring when seen from up close. Easing 1000 de la Gauchetiere into its setting involved a number of maneuvers. The lower floors of the building are pulled forward to create the impression of a shorter, more human-scale building.

Green copper is used to tie the building visually to the green dome of the cathedral. And, laudably, the building has several entrances, spreading street life around. Four of the entrances are through the corner rotundas, where natural light streams through the round apertures in the domed ceilings, making for a pleasant effect. However, the over-all layout tends to overlook the fact that the building straddles a site midway between upper and lower Montreal. And the north-south streets, Mansfield and de la Cathedrale, have become gray slots lined with service entrances.

If in other parts of the building the designers have used long expanses of beautiful granite and cement to advantage, along the side streets the featureless walls seem grim. And an especially bizarre street-level feature is the dead-end pockets of space where the south rotundas intersect the building. It should be noted, though, that the dominance of service entrances partly results from the fact that the building is conveniently perched over the MONTREAL EUROPEAN MODERNISM sculptures 10-31 October Armitage Arp CJ 'i Ernst Ipousteguy tt i fm urn tnr r. ii i irnn iidiinmii' i MIGRATIONS II MUSEE DU QUEBEC, QUEBEC LE SOLEILs Marie de la Crave, September 19th, 1992 moving piece of wik becomes the metaphor of our multi-ethnic society where the individual is dissolved in the mass but where each constituent remains nevertheless LE DEVOIR: Jean Dumortt, August 20th, 1992 brings back to memory the great pilyimages of the Middle Ages. Who amongst us, believer or not, has never dreamt of Conipostelle and the path of stars? Initiatory LA PRESSE: Joceline lepise, jePiemoer a 'Derouin is a man who feels he belongs to the whole of the American continent" MIGRATIONS II exhibition ends: November 20th, 1992 ARCHEOLOGIE DU TERRITOIRE exhibition ends: October 25th, 1992 PLACE PUBLIQUE exhibition ends: October 24th, 1 992 NORD INC.

Tel. and Fax: (819) 322-7167 available. Ftank Gehry: New Bentwood Furniture Designs This exhibition is organized by the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts and funded in part by The Knoll Group. English Silver: Masterpieces by Omar Ramsden from the Campbell Collection mmm MIGRATION I RUFINO TAMAO MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MEXICO NOVEDADES: Ms Culos Emerich, Jine 1991 untversalityof the human diama (in Misratois) proposes the individual as unit of visual impact and the formal intention place their author amongst the best contemporary sculptors, as well as one of the richest and most meticulous conceptors of the vrk, allows for a srand scale of iiterpretation possibilities." JORNADA: Aojefca Abeltyn, June 12th, 199! seeks to represent through the black ceramic of Oaxaca and Quebec his owi migration aid the cultural values he assimilates from other EXCELSIOR: Ana Maria Lonsi, June 13th, 1992 contemplates the world and the territory mm arar, as tne eyes or a Dira az uoon me horizon and discover the magnificence of NACIONAL: Merry MacMssters, June 13th, 1992 arrival of the migration of the Year 2000..." MUSEE DU QUEBEC, QUEBEC MUSEE DE JOLIETTE, JOLIETTE CENTRE D'EXPOSITION CIRCA, MONTREAL 372 Ste. Catherine suite 444 For information: LES EDITIONS DU VERSANT Catalogues are I Vf This exhibition is circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES).

September 1 1 November 15 Wednesday through Sunday Montreal Museum Pie IX and Sherbrooke Information: (514) 259.