![\"A](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/garden-front-1-of-1.jpg\")
A grassy meadow abutting a busy Montreal street offers a place to relax and enjoy a sunny day.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Charney’s garden in the city pays tribute to the past and, simultaneously, comments on the present. It is a masterpiece, too little known and too rarely acknowledged as such.<\/p>\n
It’s a tough garden to get a handle on, not at all like the easy urban green espoused by Frederick Law Olmstead. It is not a flowery retreat set in \u201cthe greatest possible contrast to the restraining\u201d city around it. Far from it. It\u00a0is a garden that celebrates the city, as it is and as it was.<\/p>\n
The garden fronts on one of Montreal\u2019s busiest boulevards, directly across from the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The CCA is both a museum and a research centre. Architecturally the building brings together the old and the new — a contemporary section, designed by Peter Rose with Phyllis Lambert as consulting architect, is beautifully wrapped around\u00a0an historically important 19th century mansion.<\/p>\n
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![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Centre_Canadien_Architecture_Montreal.jpg\")
Photo courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Portions of the contemporary building can be seen on either side of the historic house. The contemporary \u00a0museum continues around the back of the house, leaving only its fa\u00e7ade open to view.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Urban as well are the circumstances that led to the creation of the garden. The mansion, known as Shaughnessy House, was in danger of being destroyed by urban development; it was saved by CCA founder and Director Emeritus Phyllis Lambert and by her commitment both to historic preservation and to architectural innovation.<\/p>\n
This Janus-sighted commitment underlies every aspect of Charney’s garden, making it the perfect complement to the CCA itself.<\/p>\n
A\u00a0prominent feature of the garden, the one most people driving past will notice first, is an imposing stone construction\u00a0positioned on a grassy lawn. It is a portion\u00a0of the front wall of a house, one that might once have been as imposing as the mansion across the street.<\/p>\n
At first glance, a passer-by might wonder what happened. Did lightning strike, setting the house on fire? Was a wrecking crew stopped when their job was only half done? A more careful inspection reveals the real story: the fa\u00e7ade is Charney’s construction, the first element in the story this garden tells.<\/p>\n
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![\"Charney's](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/facade-1-of-1.jpg\")
Seen in the foreground is one of several stone walls that emerge from the sloping ground. You can think of them as dividing sections of property — first farm fields, then city houses.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Perhaps more rightly the story should be titled\u00a0a play. Because this is a theatrical garden, composed of scenes designed to be seen. The site itself is tipped up like a raked stage, rising from Ren\u00e9 L\u00e9vesque Boulevard to a wide platform that overlooks the Ville Marie Expressway. The partial fa\u00e7ade that faces the Boulevard is like a false front on a western movie set.<\/p>\n
It is, in fact, a mirror image of the mansion it faces, the first of many doubled or reflected images in the garden. The real Shaughnessy House is mirrored by the incomplete\u00a0house, and this incomplete house is, in turn, re-presented in a different form, a house perched atop a column.<\/p>\n
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![\"A](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/house-on-platform-1-of-1.jpg\")
To the left of the model house is a stripped-down version of a house placed on top of a dancing Domino. Those familiar with Le Corbusier will recognize the reference to his early 20th c Dom-ino House, a hyphenated name that combines domus with innovation.<\/p><\/div>\n
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These Allegorical Columns are the stars of Charney’s garden play. They recall the herms that marked boundaries and land divisions in Greek and Roman times or the allegorical statues\u00a0that lined garden walks. And like statues in Renaissance gardens, they relate\u00a0a story to those in the know, or to those who make the effort to understand.<\/p>\n
Charney’s columns do more, though, than reflect his erudition. Continuing the mirroring that began with the mirrored fa\u00e7ade, they bring reflections\u00a0of\u00a0the urban landscape that lies beyond the garden walls into the garden itself. The many chimney stacks in the city, the twin spires of a church, grain elevators — the Allegorical Columns present these as architectural forms, objects\u00a0that might be studied in the museum that the garden completes.<\/p>\n
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![\"Grain](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/grain-elevators-1-of-1.jpg\")
Grain elevators, chimney stacks or the \u00a0columns of a modern-day temple? Whichever you choose, they stand atop\u00a0the tall tenement buildings below.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Most powerful to me are the domestic references\u00a0that appear on these columns. A house\u00a0with the prominent staircase characteristic\u00a0of Montreal abuts the outline of a typical maison Qu\u00e9becoise, <\/em>the type of\u00a0house it replaced,<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A close-up of the model house seen in a previous photo shows a\u00a0staircase descending to emptiness. Reverse the direction and you can see it as a stairway to a domestic heaven. I prefer the latter explanation.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n A featureless house perches high in the sky, atop one of the columns that reflect the twin spires of Sainte Con\u00e9gonde church in the distance.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Shapes like wings protrude from the back of the arms that rise up to hold a\u00a0tiny house.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n A temple-like structure, house to the gods, stands nearby.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n La Maison Carr\u00e9e? The model certainly makes me think of\u00a0that ancient building in Nimes, one of the Roman Empire’s best preserved temples. It served as Thomas Jefferson’s model for the Virginia State Capital and I grew up knowing its familiar face.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n So what makes this creation a garden? It contains plants, carefully chosen to reflect what was once found on the site. Shrubs and flowers grow along the walls that Charney built to reflect the divisions between farm fields — prickly raspberry bushes, wild roses and sumac. The landscape of rural fields is seen in the meadow that fronts the street. And there are trees\u00a0— indigenous maples and apples like the ones that once grew in an orchard on the site. They aren’t arranged in clumps \u00e0 la Olmstead or Capability Brown but in rows appropriate to the history of an agricultural-turned-urban\u00a0site.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the 1850s there were many orchards in this part of Montreal. Apple orchards still are found off the island in the Eastern Townships. And orange construction cones are found everywhere.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n But neither plants nor statuary alone can make any place\u00a0a garden. So does\u00a0using that familiar label do a disservice Charney’s creation? Or, on the contrary, does it do a disservice to the idea of ‘garden’ that most people accept?<\/p>\n For me, the answer to both questions is no. This is, unmistakably and unquestionably, a garden. It does everything I want a garden to\u00a0do — everything a garden should\u00a0do. It is place for contemplation and introspection, a place of refuge, a gathering spot for passersby. It is a designed space that\u00a0— echoing Pope’s familiar phrase — \u00a0respects the genius of the place. It is a layered landscape, as complex as the city that surrounds it. It’s a marvel, a living, growing creation that enriches the\u00a0life of all who see\u00a0it and take part in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Melvin Charney\u2019s garden made for the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal is firmly and unequivocally a city garden. It is surrounded by traffic on all sides, rising up from a piece of land lost between the entry and exit ramps of a busy expressway. It is composed of\u00a0elements found in many gardens — plants,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,20,22],"tags":[651,321,652,653,654],"class_list":["post-4696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design","category-people","category-reviews","tag-canadian-centre-of-architecture","tag-contemporary-gardens","tag-melvin-charney","tag-montreal-museums","tag-urban-gardens","category-24","category-20","category-22","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/model-house-1-of-1.jpg\")
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![\"La](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Temple-1-of-1.jpg\")
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