Architect designed maligned stadium
Roger Taillibert, the architect who designed Montreal’s 1976 Olympic Stadium and relentlessly defended it against its critics, has died at the age of 93.
The renowned French architect created hundreds of other buildings, including the Parc des Princes stadium and Deauville swimming pool in France and the Khalifa Stadium in Qatar.
But in Canada, he’s best known for the stadium that remains a defining feature of Montreal’s skyline. It remains the most visible legacy of the first Olympics on Canadian soil, but it has also been much maligned for ongoing maintenance issues and a surprise billion-dollar price tag that took the city 30 years to pay off.
Taillibert was born in France in 1926, and studied at the prestigious École du Louvre and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts.
Taillibert’s success in France in the 1960s and early 1970s and his penchant for sweeping, grand designs attracted the attention of then-montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, who asked him to design a stadium to house the 1976 Olympics and later the Montreal Expos baseball team.
Taillibert’s vision for the Olympic Stadium included a massive concrete dome with a retractable roof.
Claude Phaneuf, the city of Montreal’s main engineer for the Olympic installations, said Taillibert’s genius and his technique of using pre-stressed concrete allowed him to design buildings with dramatic curves that surpassed what anyone else could do.
Although the main stadium was built in time to host the Games, albeit barely, the tower and roof would not be completed until 1987. A later series of mishaps included a 55-tonne beam that came crashing down in 1991, a retractable roof that never worked as planned, and a 1998 roof tear that sent ice and snow crashing to the stadium floor, forcing the cancellation of two Rolling Stones concerts.
Taillibert, who once sued the city over his unpaid architect’s fees, always insisted that the stadium’s problems were due to mismanagement and cost-cutting rather than a design flaw.
Last year, at the age of 92, he was still consulting with experts to refine his original design for the roof.
Taillibert’s career as an architect spanned decades.
In recent years, Taillibert divided his time between Paris and his home in St-sauveur in Quebec’s Laurentians region.