Land+Living: SYN- City

Architecture, Landscape, Urban — August 16, 2005 Posted by Deborah

Montréal Cité Souterraine / Montreal's Underground City - SYN- Urban Exploration Workshop

Need a reason to visit Montreal this winter? Montreal's underground city is a good enough one in my books. With its inception in 1966 the plan for the underground coincided with the opening of Montreal's Metro, and has since grown to include 1,500 offices and 1,600 boutiques. It also has numerous art installations, a skating rink, and leads you through historic and newly constructed buildings. For instance, you can go from IM Pei's Place Ville Marie to Claude Cormier's Lipstick Forest in the redesigned Palais des Congress in Old Montreal without ever surfacing.

SYN-, a collective that includes Luc Lévesque, Jean-Maxime Dufresne, Louis-Charles Lasnier and Jean-Francois Prost, have put together a unique study of the underground as part of an Urban Exploration Workshop. It highlights the underground as a viable and exciting intermodal experience. Their Web site includes maps and images.

Link: amarrages prospectus

4 comments

Comments (4)

Venitha — August 16, 2005
the trend toward underground

Lipstick forest? I'm frightened. This trend for building underground malls like this is interesting in its appeal in both cold climates and hot. , Singapore's city link mall being a good hot weather example. One wonders how much longer humans will bother life above ground. Quite convenient, I guess, as we destroy our environment.

Luc Lévesque — September 26, 2005
erratum

Thanks Deborah for the description of our Montreal Indoor City exploration project... Just a word to correct an error that appears in the description: I'm teaching in the department of Landscape Architecture of the Université de Montréal BUT this project HAS NOT any link with the University. The PROSPECTUS project has been produced by an urban workshop or collective named SYN-; I'm a member of that collective with Jean-Maxime Dufresne, Louis-Charles Lasnier et Jean-Francois Prost regards Luc Lévesque for SYN-

Deborah Kenley — September 27, 2005
Merci

Thank you Luc for the correction. I have amended the entry. Best, Deborah

Luc Lévesque — October 23, 2005
micro-erratum + News

Thanks Deborah for the correction. Just a final detail, the name SYN- comes with the hyphen (even when used alone) Thanks again regards Luc Last News: The most recent issue of CV magazine (Ciel Variable, no 69 (Beholding the City) Montreal, october 2005) presents 8 pages on the PROSPECTUS project, including 66 images of Montreal's Indoor City - that we propose to think as a Hyperbuilding - and an essay by Johanne Sloan (Art History professor, Concordia University)entitled "Appropriating the Megastructure" links: www.cielvariable.ca