ABSTRACT
This brief contribution to the Reading Architecture volume attempts to engage the relationship between literature and architecture as directly as possible, serving as an example of, or a possible inquiry into, this multifaceted relationship. The contribution is, itself, a story. It is literature as architectural and urban research and criticism. Entering the “flesh of the world”, and becoming a “truth of the word,” a fictional narrative forms and follows a subjective reading of Ville-Marie, a unique city lying at the shores of the restive river god Laurent. The subject, serving a dual role as both “apple of desire” and architectural and urban critic, is in fact a building, under whose “critical” gaze Ville-Marie lives out chapters of its turbulent (hi)story in a single, 24-hour episode. This brief mythological reading of the city of Montréal, as well as the eventually revealed identity of its constructed critic, are layered with a second narrative, a chain of historical events that anthologizes and footnotes 500 years of urban life in the Canadian metropolis. While this selected anthology of events provides necessary context to the fictional narrative, grounding it to a more traditionally historical world of architectural and urban criticism, it does not itself become further referenced. Rather, the “incomplete” scientific nature of the footnoted narrative allows for the fiction, the “literary imagination”, to assume the role of the body text that carries the primary meaning and intentions of the contribution.
