The new Bibliothèque Nationale recently opened its doors in downtown Montréal. Check out some of the renderings of the building and its live webcam.
This long-awaited building is directly across the street from the brutal, brown-brick fortress that is UQAM’s Pavilion Judith-Jasmin. Flâneur-at-large Shawn Micallef had a great quotable on this visual pairing at the corner of Berri and de Maisonneuve, commenting that the light-filled new library looks like “a piece of Kleenex that UQAM threw away.”
This caused me to firstly, laugh, and secondly, think about other examples of architectural incongruity that I’ve seen, either in adjacent buildings or in adventurous extensions and additions to existing buildings. Rather than tear down staid old concrete bunkers, why not float a checkered slab on what looks like multicolored toothpicks over top of the existing building, like they did at the Ontario College of Art and Design? If the Bibliothèque Nationale looks like a flimsy Kleenex that UQAM honked in and discarded, is the OCAD extension a spider from Alice in Wonderland poised to devour the hapless grey bug beneath it?
On a smaller scale, gentification brings us these glorious clashes, as well. On a nearby stretch of Ontario Street, I often stroll past an upscale-looking restaurant complete with cloth napkins that has as its neighbours a needle exchange, a trashy dépanneur, and a pawn shop. Though my tone might be slightly derisive, I appreciate these strange urban groupings because it makes street life more interesting to observe, and also it seems analogous, when I reduce the scale even further, to the kinds of quirks that we each play host to. For example, I sometimes struggle to reconcile my ambition with my altruism, or apply a $30 lipstick and then put on a ratty hoodie. To quote another pal, my dear friend Slavica (though the hand gesture she does with this phrase really makes it and that’s unfortunately impossible to emulate here), I suppose it’s just fine to “mix it up”.