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Urban Art: The ‘Archigrok Environmental Displacement’ Series

The 'Archigrok Environmental Displacement' photomontage series marks a turning point in my approach to urban art, not only as an artist but also as an architect. The immediate impetus for the series was 'Corridart', a Canadian open competition in 1975 to which architects and visual artists were invited to submit proposals for the 'decoration' of Montreal's Sherbrooke Street for the period of the 1976 Olympic Games. Connecting eastern and western parts of the city, Sherbrooke Street, leading from the city's center to the main Olympic site, is historically and contextually one of the most important arteries of Montreal. Recently, however, along it many new high-rise buildings by speculative developers have destroyed the old urban scene without providing what I believe is an adequate alternative. There were 21 projects chosen by 'Corridart' for construction along the 5-mile stretch of the street. My project 'Pine Forest', is shown in Fig. 1. However, 24 hours after most of the projects had been installed, Mayor Jean Drapeau ordered the city's works crews to tear them down. Drapeau said that some members of the community had found the exhibits offensive. (For a discussion of the ensuing legal and political complications, see Refs. 1 and 2.) Along with seven photomontages (Figs. 2-4), I submitted to 'Corridart' the following manifesto: 'Man has placed himself in a totally artificial environment. The power of decision regarding the urban environment is concentrated in the hands of few. Agencies created to help urban man are concerned statistically with his physical health and his production capacity, but not his overall well-being. Controlling institutional structures make choices based on bureaucratic imperatives. The population at large apathetically acquieces. As a result, human cognitive maps are reduced to daily materialistic pursuits, with the inarticulated hope that the environment will take care of itself automatically and continue to serve those pursuits. 'The purpose of "Archigrok Environmental Displacement" is to attempt once more to symbolically awaken modern man's lost awareness and re-establish his physical connection with environmental life cycles. To accomplish this purpose, one must force a confrontation between life-giving forces and such contemporary aberrations as concrete architecture, "necessary" new office space, political partisanship, new shopping and marketing facilities, super-technically oriented solutions and so on. "'Archigrok Environmental Displacement" attempts to demonstrate that technological capabilities should be used to improve our fundamental understanding of how life-giving forces relate to us in our present situation and