MONTRÉAL, CANADA.- The Canadian Centre for Architecture and Douglas & McIntyre are publishing The 60s: Montréal Thinks Big. Profusely illustrated in black and white and colour, this major catalogue edited by architect André Lortie accompanies the exhibition of the same title.

This large format (9-1/2 x 10-1/2“) 208-page soft-cover volume is on sale at the CCA Bookstore for $55. It is also being distributed throughout Canada and abroad. The 60s: Montréal Thinks Big includes essays and the transcript of a roundtable discussion, interspersed with narrative vignettes in words and images. There are 252 colour and black-and-white illustrations.

The 1960s were a period of great change, during which Québec and Montréal were swept by a powerful wind of change. In this book, the authors explore the basic concepts that were to define Montréal’s future, and they analyze the decade’s social, urban-planning, and architectural legacy. In the end, Montréal appears as an archetype for the upheaval that shook the great metropolises of the Western world.

The catalogue’s general editor is André Lortie, architect, who teaches at the École d’architecture de Rouen and in the “Ville et environnement” doctoral program at the Université de Paris-VIII. The authors and other contributors represent various disciplines. One essay is by sociologist Marcel Fournier, who teaches at the Université de Montréal. Another is by André Lortie, who also wrote the vignettes, in addition to moderating the roundtable in which two of the participants were architect Jean-Louis Cohen, a critic and historian who teaches at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and architect Michael Sorkin, a theoretician and critic who heads the Graduate Program in Urban Design, City College, New York. The book begins and ends with a photo essay by the Italian artist Olivo Barbieri that provides a striking complement to the text. The approach is a dynamic one that visually reconstitutes the ebullience and ferment of the 1960s.