OPENING THE GATES OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MONTREAL
(1992; Curators Phyllis Lambert and Alan Stewart)

Montréal was founded in the seventeenth century and had its formative period as a fortified town in the eighteenth century. The 1992 exhibition, based on a fifteen-year study of manuscript sources from Europe and North America, focussed on the interrelationships of three key elements of eighteenth-century Montréal's urban form: its fortifications; the ownership, distribution and use of property within the walled town; and the nature of the buildings.

Montréal's very location ensured that it would play a vital role as an urban centre in the history of New France and Canada. Advantageously situated at the first major obstacle to navigation in the St Lawrence River, and at the confluence of rivers that penetrated to the interior of the continent, Montréal also lay at the heart of the richest farmland of the colony. Together, these circumstances allowed the town to serve as an economic, military, and administrative centre for an expanding region.

Fortifications
The first section of the exhibition traced Montréal's development as one of the most important military centres of the French colonial network arching west from Louisbourg to the Great Lakes, and south down the Lake Champlain and Ohio corridors. It also traced the related development of the town's fortifications from a cedar-post palisade in the seventeenth century to a stone-faced wall in the eighteenth century, built by the engineer Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry according to the principles of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban.

Town
The second section examined how Montréal's economic activities influenced the use of land and buildings within the walls. While the fur trade persisted as Montréal's dominant commercial enterprise, the town also assumed a role as a regional centre of exchange and production, supplying an ever-larger and more densely populated territory. Over the course of the century the redistribution of population and economic activities between town and suburb led to more intensive use of land within the walled town.

Buildings
In the last section of the exhibition, the principal building type of the town, the urban house, was studied within its social and material environments, which included the morphology of the landholding structure; the distribution of institutional buildings; and the framework of laws and building practices. During the eighteenth century the change of overwhelming importance was the replacement of wood by stone in the construction of the urban house.

EXPLORING THREE SQUARES

Focussing on the landholdings immediately surrounding the Place du Marché, the Place d'Armes, and the Place du Nouveau Marché, this interactive computer display provides insights into the changing organization and use of space within fortified Montréal over the course of the 18th century. Originally conceived as part of the exhibition "Opening the Gates of Eighteenth-Century Montréal" (1992-93), this exploration of three squares uses pre-scripted choices to integrate the presentation of historical documents, reconstituted lot plans, and real-time modelling.

Dissimilar in location, formal function, and date of creation, the three squares provide windows on different aspects of urban development. Organized as a market site in the 17th century, the Place du Marché in the lower town was the centre of the city's commercial activities and much of its wealth until the 1770s. Although proprietors employed stone as a `noble' building material from the earliest years of settlement, their use of it increased visibly following the fires of 1721 and 1765. In the upper town, the Place d'Armes first served as a small public space adjacent to Notre-Dame church before being enlarged as a parade ground in the 1720s. Throughout the 18th century, this quarter provided fashionable residences for military officers, merchants, and professionals. The Place du Nouveau Marché was the last public square erected within the town, after having been acquired by the magistrates in 1803 and established as a market in 1807. This site is of particular interest, not only for its comparatively rich iconography, but for how British authorities took advantage of the burned over Jesuit and Collège de Montréal properties to erect new institutions and cultural symbols.

Although the three squares reveal different aspects of Montréal's development, the method of presentation shares common features: reconstituted plans, digitized images, and real-time modelling. For each series of reconstituted plans, changes in the general occupational structure and ethnicity of ownership are alternately revealed with a toggle switch, while selection of an individual lot brings up precise information on the owner's name, occupation, and ethnicity. In addition, inscriptions on survey plans or details on historical images can be studied by means of a zoom window. But most exciting of all, each square features at least one dynamic model. Using simple navigation tools, the viewer can take a self-directed walk through the site, discarding the fixed vantage point of contemporary images to gain new perspectives of a built environment that has all but disappeared.

THE FORTIFICATIONS OF MONTREAL

"The Fortifications of Montréal". Video produced by the Montréal Research Group in collaboration with the Centre for Landscape Research, University of Toronto, and the Department of Education, Concordia University, 1992. 3 minutes 12 seconds.

CHANGING LAND USE

"Changing Land Use". Video produced by the Montréal Research Group in collaboration with the Centre for Landscape Research, University of Toronto, and the Department of Education, Concordia University, 1992. 3 minutes 31 seconds.

CICERONE.

The design of the CICERONE interface has been guided by two related considerations concerning the presentation and use of historical information. Firstly, that reconstituted plans or models provide essential tools for organizing, presenting, and querying large quantities of textual data across space and time. And secondly, that the user should be able to select the functions and information best suited to a particular line of research.

Free movement along a timeline enables CICERONE to map and model Montréal's built form for any date within the current study period, from the founding of the town in 1642 until 1704. Exploration of the plan or model for a selected date is achieved by control buttons that permit zooming, and rotation around all axes. Within models, this flexibility of movement allows for self-directed tours at street level.

The historical information underlying the visualization is organized according to three inter-related groupings: people, lots, and buildings. Access to this data is obtained by one of two methods. The user may select a lot or building on the visualization to obtain the desired information for that entity. Or, the user may use pull-down menus to select one or more attributes to form a more complex query whose answer will appear as a subset of the lots and buildings on the plan or model.

Complementing the information on property holdings are two smaller bodies of data. A chronology encompassing urban planning, institutional building, population growth and settlement, administration, and military operations provides a broader context for understanding some of the changes occurring at the local level. Also, the nominal censuses for 1666, 1667, and 1681 make it possible to link detailed family and household information to owners and tenants for those years.

CICERONE provides an unparallelled opportunity to bring 17th-century Montréal to life. By choosing different information and presentation options, the user has the latitude to customize a flexible and powerful tool to explore, analyze, and visualize many facets of Montréal's built environment during this formative period.