A towering figure
MELVIN CHARNEy leaves a legacy of public art and architecture in Montreal
Next time you see a fanciful chair or temple dangling in mid-air over René Lévesque Blvd., take a moment to think about Melvin Charney.
The sculpture garden across from the Canadian Centre for Architecture is perhaps the most recognizable example of work by Charney, who died Monday. But friends, colleagues and former students say even Charney’s boldest public art pieces, such as the world’s first human rights monument in Ottawa or the 1992 sculpture titled Skyscraper, Waterfall, Brooks — A Construction, which dominates Place Émilie-Gamelin, offer only a glimpse of this Montreal-based artist, architect and teacher who tangled with Mayor Jean Drapeau and spoke out about everything from misguided demolition to architectural snobbery.
“Melvin was a towering figure,” said Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal, who credits Charney with inspiring him and generations of fellow students at Université de Montréal to a greater understanding of the city’s bones, heart and soul.
“He succeeded in putting a new eye on the way we look at Montreal, its architecture and development,” said Bumbaru, who hailed Charney for championing the importance of neighbourhoods, humble greystone triplexes and livable streets in an era that preferred bulldozing older dwellings to make way for highrises and mega-projects.
“Melvin was such a marvellous, thoughtful, creative person,” said Phyllis Lambert, a longtime heritage advocate and the founder of the CCA.
“I used to love going to his office and seeing the books he was reading. I loved talking with him about the city and architecture. He was just amazing.”
“The breadth of Charney’s accomplishments is extraordinary: architecture, landscapes, art, photography, writing and teaching,” said Annmarie Adams, director of the School of Architecture at McGill University.
Born in 1935, Charney studied architecture at McGill and Yale, then worked in Paris and New York before returning to Montreal in 1964, where he opened his architecture practice and took a teaching position at U de M.
As a boy, Charney had wanted to be an artist and even studied at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts under Arthur Lismer, one of the Group of Seven painters. But his father, a builder who was also a painter, discouraged him from trying to make a profession of it. “Given Montreal in the ’50s and ’60s, it wasn’t exactly evident how one could make a career as an artist,” Charney explained in a 1996 interview marking the centenary of McGill’s architecture school.
Yet it wasn’t long before Charney’s artistic flair pushed him away from conventional notions of architecture. His design for the Canadian pavilion at the 1970 world’s fair in Osaka — fashioned from construction cranes and scaffolding — did not win the competition but signalled his shift toward public art projects.
In 1976, Charney was asked to put together a group art exhibition as a companion to the Summer Olympics. Infuriated by Charney’s large-scale depiction of historic buildings that had been torn down to make way for Expo and Olympic venues, Drapeau ordered Corrid’art demolished on the eve of the Games, triggering lawsuits and international ridicule, and issuing a wake-up call for Montrealers.
Lambert, who met Charney when they were both students at Yale in the late 1950s, credits her old friend with being a key figure in developing the architecture school and urban planning program at U de M, encouraging students to look “at what you have in the city and how you make that part of the future of the city.”
Adams said Charney’s many articles “showcase his embrace of everyday architecture, his compelling positions on place and displacement, his implicit criticism of the profession’s elitism, his progressive politics and his wideranging interests in psychology and history.”
When Charney wasn’t writing or teaching, he was making his own art: exploring the “modernism” of totalitarianism with drawings and installations arising from the bleak horrors of the death camps of Nazi Germany; showing his work at the Venice Biennale and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; building that garden in the air at the CCA.
“He is not an architect of buildings, but an architect of city and urban architecture,” Bumbaru said, recalling Charney’s work in development of the Faubourg Saint-Laurent district.
“Today, with the great demolition we see on The Main, beside the Monument-National on SaintLaurent, we seem to be going backward rather than forward,” Bumbaru said. “We hope that the light Melvin brought, through Corrid’art in the 1970s but also afterwards, that light can still guide Montreal toward a better future and a better city to live in.”
Charney leaves his wife, the acclaimed writer Ann Charney, his daughter Dara, son-in-law Cameron McKenzie, grandchildren Rachel and Samuel McKenzie, and brothers Morris and Israel.