The home creator

After spending much of his career designing homes in Montreal, David Reich, an 88-year- old retired architect, nearly had to leave his own after the rising threat of Quebec separation pulled the plug on the housing market. “When I graduated architecture at McGill, there was a huge demand because the war had just finished and for six years nothing had been built. They were putting up houses like laying eggs all over the place.

“It was that type of a market and you got builders who would come to an architect like myself and they would pay me to design a house, or three or four similar models, which they would then build 100 of them. We were paid $ 10 to design a house in those days. When we started, Côte- Saint- Luc ( today a city of 31,000 people) was a farm. When you went out there to look at the land you had to make sure the bull wasn’t out in the field.

“When the independence movement started it was an immediate crisis and then René Lévesque came in and they had a referendum about independence, which was a very real threat. As soon as he was elected, construction stopped — I mean stopped dead. People dropped their hammers, and stopped digging the holes that were being excavated.

“They loaded up the trucks with money from the banks and took them to Toronto. Montreal was a dead city. This was a big crisis for us, needless to say. We sent two of my partners to Toronto to get work, which we would produce in Montreal. Later they said “Now that we are doing well in Toronto we want you to come too and head things up,” because I was a senior partner.

“I thought about it very seriously, but I didn’t want to leave Quebec. I had gone through a lot of trouble to work in French and I had a lot of roots here, so I said no and we separated ( professionally) — they stayed in Toronto and we stayed here.”

MONTREAL WAS A DEAD CITY

David Reich