books
$24.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Saint-Laurent boulevard, a major thoroughfare crossing the heart of Montreal from north to south, has witnessed more than three centuries of history. It has experienced spectacular transformations and reversals, incarnating in turn every facet of Montreal's character, from rural to urban and from the early days of industrialization to the latest in multimedia. A gateway(...)
Saint-Laurent : Montreal's Main
Actions:
Price:
$24.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Saint-Laurent boulevard, a major thoroughfare crossing the heart of Montreal from north to south, has witnessed more than three centuries of history. It has experienced spectacular transformations and reversals, incarnating in turn every facet of Montreal's character, from rural to urban and from the early days of industrialization to the latest in multimedia. A gateway for immigrants and a window on the world, a haven for marginal Montrealers of every stripe, the "Main" has long served as the melting pot for peoples and cultures in Quebec. Through the vast and far-reaching metamorphoses that have shaped the "Main" since its very beginning, we see Montreal and Quebec as a whole emerge into the modern age. For the busy sidewalks and chaotic intersections of the "Main" gave birth to many of the social movements that have marked our world, from women's liberation to unionization and the fight for human dignity. The "Main" has also attracted an impressive pool of artistic talent and been an testing ground for new forms of expression, including film, Yiddish theater, French song, and Quebec burlesque.
books
May 2002, Sillery
Architecture de Montréal
$45.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Of the fifty religious buildings discussed in this book, only a precious few remain standing despite the fact that Montreal boasts one of the largest and most eclectic groupings of Georgian and Victorian structures of any city in North America. Following the British conquest of New France in 1759 a remarkable series of transformations took place in the small,(...)
Montréal, city of spires: church architecture during the British colonial period 1760-1860
Actions:
Price:
$45.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Of the fifty religious buildings discussed in this book, only a precious few remain standing despite the fact that Montreal boasts one of the largest and most eclectic groupings of Georgian and Victorian structures of any city in North America. Following the British conquest of New France in 1759 a remarkable series of transformations took place in the small, Catholic trading town of Montreal. Given the diversity of settlers forced to live side by side, the new church buildings that were to rise became strategic public spaces, meeting places as well as power bases. It was no wonder that by the time Mark Twain toured Canada’s first metropolis in the 1880s, he found that one could not throw a brick in the place without breaking a church window. By addressing the social, religious and architectural issues surrounding these colonial-era structures, it will become apparent that Montreal was at once a shining jewel in England’s imperial crown, a chief outpost of Catholicism in the New World, as well as the British North American headquarters for more than a dozen independent congregations.
Architecture de Montréal
$38.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the(...)
Beautiful data: a history of vision and reason since 1945
Actions:
Price:
$38.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption.
Architectural Theory
$22.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In response to the contentious process surrounding the selection of a design for the World Trade Center site, the use of spectacular buildings to brand cities and institutions, and the dizzying transformations of the skylines of Shanghai and Dubai, public awareness of architecture and design has perhaps never been higher. At the same time, architecture itself is(...)
The new architectural pragmatism
Actions:
Price:
$22.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In response to the contentious process surrounding the selection of a design for the World Trade Center site, the use of spectacular buildings to brand cities and institutions, and the dizzying transformations of the skylines of Shanghai and Dubai, public awareness of architecture and design has perhaps never been higher. At the same time, architecture itself is undergoing an identity crisis as it confronts fundamental issues: the effect of digital technology on design, the pervasive impact of global capitalism, and whether to embrace or resist popular media and taste. The New Architectural Pragmatism collects the most provocative, penetrating, and influential attempts by leading theorists and practitioners in the field to define what architectural practice should be at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Written in the aftermath of modernism’s utopian impulse and postmodernism’s detached playfulness, the essays gathered here express and critique a new spirit of cultural and political engagement with contemporary society. Interrogating the architect’s social responsibility, the contributors deliberate about how much we should ask of architecture and suggest that in the coming century, architecture must be at once flexible and robust, responsive and self-directed.
Architectural Theory
$100.00
(available in store)
Summary:
This exhibition catalogue highlights Girard’s deep engagement with the urban landscape, beginning with his early work in Vancouver, where he documented the city’s streets, neighbourhoods, and shifting social fabric in the 1970s and 1980s. His images from this period, collected in ''Under Vancouver'', 1972–1982 (2017), reveal a city in flux and a photographer attuned to(...)
Greg Girard Photographs 1972-2026
Actions:
Price:
$100.00
(available in store)
Summary:
This exhibition catalogue highlights Girard’s deep engagement with the urban landscape, beginning with his early work in Vancouver, where he documented the city’s streets, neighbourhoods, and shifting social fabric in the 1970s and 1980s. His images from this period, collected in ''Under Vancouver'', 1972–1982 (2017), reveal a city in flux and a photographer attuned to both human presence and architectural change, offering an intimate yet expansive portrait of Vancouver’s history and culture. An early interest in Asia resulted in his living for decades in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai where he captured these cities extraordinary and often tumultuous transformations at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. His record of life in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City in ''City of Darkness'' (1993, first edition; 1999, reprint) and in ''City of Darkness Revisited'' (2014, first edition; 2021, reprint) co-authored with Ian Lambot, have formed the basis for countless reimaginings of a dystopian/romantic, Asia-influenced, urbanized near future in film and video games. These images, along with the work in ''Phantom Shanghai'' (2007), illustrate the tension between memory and progress, the built environment and human experience, and have earned international acclaim.
Photography monographs
$22.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias--phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and(...)
Topologies: the urban utopia in France, 1960-1970
Actions:
Price:
$22.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias--phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine. In this new urban world, technology and automation were positive forces, providing for material needs as well as time and space for leisure. In this first study of the French avant-garde tendency known as spatial urbanism, Larry Busbea analyzes projects by artists and architects (including the most famous spatial practitioner, Yona Friedman) and explores texts (many of which have never before been translated from the French) by Michel Ragon, the influential founder of the Groupe International d'Architecture Prospective (GIAP), Victor Vasarely, and others. Even at its most fanciful, Busbea argues, the French urban utopia provided an image for social transformations that were only beginning to be described by cultural theorists and sociologists.
Architectural Theory
books
Description:
139 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), portraits ; 31 cm
Hornu : Musée des Arts Contemporains, ©2018.
Musées pour cible / Yto Barrada [and twelve others] ; éditeur responsable, Claude Durieux.
Actions:
Holdings:
Description:
139 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), portraits ; 31 cm
books
Hornu : Musée des Arts Contemporains, ©2018.
$56.00
(available in store)
Summary:
''Collective Intelligence'' is an innovative monograph that documents the last ten years of Polish-born conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant’s interdisciplinary practice. It includes newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers in science, philosophy, art, technology, anthropology, and economics. Kurant’s experimental work investigates collective and nonhuman(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
December 2025
Agnieszka Kurant: Collective intelligence
Actions:
Price:
$56.00
(available in store)
Summary:
''Collective Intelligence'' is an innovative monograph that documents the last ten years of Polish-born conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant’s interdisciplinary practice. It includes newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers in science, philosophy, art, technology, anthropology, and economics. Kurant’s experimental work investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences and their impact on transformations of the human, the future of labor and creativity, and the exploitations within digital capitalism. Questioning the ideology of individualism, Kurant proposes that we rethink human and more-than-human worlds from a perspective of plural subjectivity, and, through this fundamental shift in perspective, posits the possibility of alternative political imaginaries. Her work probes the replacement of individual authorship with collective intelligence—a phenomenon observed in slime molds, termite colonies, social movements, cities, the internet, and inside our brains. In her collaborative practice, the artist investigates artificial intelligence, emergence, cybernetics, automation, artificial life, mining industries, and energy circuits to explore our collective evolution and the shifting status of objects in relation to agency, value, circulation, and redistribution. Through crowdsourcing the production of her artworks to thousands of humans and nonhumans, Kurant creates unstable, hybrid forms that constantly evolve. Her works, oscillating between biological, digital, and geological, embody the crumbling distinctions between what is natural and artificial, real and synthetic, and life and nonlife.
Contemporary Art Monographs
$47.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Le présent ouvrage retrace l'évolution de l'architecture et de l'environnement urbain montréalais, des premières visites du Sieur de Champlain, de ce qui est devenu un peu plus tard la place Royale, jusqu'à la métropole postmoderne d'aujourd'hui. Il dresse le portrait du développement de cet organisme économique, social et culturel qu'est Montréal, par l'entremise de ses(...)
Montréal en évolution : quatre siècles d'architecture et d'aménagement
Actions:
Price:
$47.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Le présent ouvrage retrace l'évolution de l'architecture et de l'environnement urbain montréalais, des premières visites du Sieur de Champlain, de ce qui est devenu un peu plus tard la place Royale, jusqu'à la métropole postmoderne d'aujourd'hui. Il dresse le portrait du développement de cet organisme économique, social et culturel qu'est Montréal, par l'entremise de ses manifestations matérielles, visibles et tangibles: ses structures, ses rues, ses parcs, ses édifices publics, ses habitations, ses lieux de travail et de culte. Cette fresque historique unique, accompagnée de plus de 200 photographies en couleur et en noir et blanc, couvre quatre siècles. Jean-Claude Marsan ne se contente pas de décrire l'évolution du domaine bâti, de témoigner des traits caractéristiques de l'environnement urbain et de l'architecture selon les périodes; il essaie également de cerner et d'analyser les forces, les facteurs et les influences qui sont à l'origine des mutations et des transformations dans les formes de l'agglomération et dans les expressions architecturales. Il s'agit donc ici d'une histoire générale de l'architecture et de l'environnement bâti qui s'intéresse moins aux dates ou aux détails d'ordre esthétique qu'au milieu physique et aux hommes qui ont agi individuellement et collectivement dans et sur le milieu, selon leurs besoins, leurs technologies et leurs idéologies.
Architecture de Montréal
books
Description:
ix, 276 pages : illustrations, cartes, graphiques ; 24 cm
Montréal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2026]
La ville énergivore : une histoire des transitions énergétiques à Montréal au 20e siècle / Clarence Hatton-Proulx.
Actions:
Holdings:
Description:
ix, 276 pages : illustrations, cartes, graphiques ; 24 cm
books
Montréal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2026]