Forty years ago in Paris Claude Parent and Paul Virilio presented the utopian

urbanism of l’Fonction Oblique throughout their nine self-published issues of

Architecture Principe. l’Fonction Oblique was a radical repositioning of the

relationship between the ground surface (site) and tectonic form (building).

l’Fonction Oblique called for designing in a surface gradient somewhere between

horizontal and vertical. The basic premise or initiative arose from cognitive

studies showing that inhabitation and passage across formally oblique, canted,

and slanted surfaces consciously builds awareness and physicality in architectural

experience. In the oblique one is always in descension or ascension. Either way,

the oblique surface inhabited or occupied is always present in the mind. Parent

and Virilio were confident that forms and functions imbued in obliquely oriented

surfaces would lead to a reconfigured practice that multiplies programmatic

potential in the city. In construction on an oblique they proposed a spatial

technology for cross-programming and diffusing necessary circulation programs

into the inhabitable space of the city. This call for a blurring of tectonic form and

landform denies the key historical distinction between the artifice of the building

and the nature of the surroundings- between inside and out. This leads us to an

alternate sensibility in architecture- a formal typology of obliquely oriented and

superficially configured constructions that Virilio typified as the SURRECTION - a

reconfiguration of the ground via an uplifting of the landscape subtle enough

to reshape topographical features while never introducing a new hole in the

topological surface of the site. The topology of a Surrection is a local zone of

oblique and artificial continuity in the topology of the earth, which, by nature,

is a single surfaced sphere. The artifice of the Surrection does not change the

topological nature of the situation; only the topography is modified as it folds,

ventilates, and fluffs that prime surface without puncturing the land’s native

conceptual continuity.

This is an investigation of how André and Patrick Blouin’s Place des Nations, an

events space built for Expo ’67 in Montréal, resonates with Parent and Virilio’s

Surfaces In Surrection : architecture in the grounds of Place des Nations at Expo ’67

l’Fonction Oblique and of their conceptual idea of the Surrection. The Place des Nations was the site of Expo’s opening and

closing ceremonies and hosted 72 “National Day” events that spot-lighted a participating principality’s culture and foklorica.

Expo ’67 hosted Haile Selasse, Queen Elizabeth, Lyndon Johnson, Maurice Chevalier, Count Basie, Robert Wood, Ed Sullivan

(three times), Princess Grace, Charles de Gaulle, Robert Kennedy and many other dignitaries from around the world. Of the

100+ pavilions and structures constructed for Expo ‘67 in Montréal, only the Place des Nations remains essentially intact today.

In this three year investigation I’ve consulted primarily visual material, like the aforementioned construction drawings, at the

archives of Andre Blouin in the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the archives of the Corporation for the Canadian

World Exposition (CCWE) at the National Archives in Ottawa, and in l’Archives de Montréal to develop a critical analysis of the

development and construction of the Place des Nations and a search for a resonance with the Surrections in the influential and

concurrent writings of Parent and Virilio in Architecture Principe.

At the center of Place des Nations is a 180 foot by 180 foot flat square surface that was the core event space of a cycle of daily

fetes and demonstrations in the summer of 1967. This open flat square of space is surrounded by a finely differentiated series of

inward looking and sloped risers. Surface Surrection is rooted in the artifice of this concentric zone surrounding the square. In

the Place des Nations construction drawing set the inhabitable surfaces of these oblique landforms are not labeled as planche

(floor). Each key height in the construction drawings is labeled with a distinctively geologic descriptor: butte, tribune, terrain,

place, and bassin. The main six structures in pronounced Surrection surrounding the central square are four buttes, a tribune,

and a terrain. Though formally different, they are made the same way, from the same material, with the same geometries,

and follow the same basic formal and programmatic types. Two of the butte landforms are simple superficially continuous and

oblique “uplifts” of the ground. Two others, though completely uplifted, detached, and floating correspondingly over raised

plinths set in pools of water, are cognitively and conceptually continuous with the ground. The other two buttes are ‘surrected’

into a V.I.P. Dais and a stage for ceremonial torch lighting and speechifying. Each of the six primary landforms has a single

surface connecting its summit on the periphery to the square in the center. These key surfaces are constructed of both cast-in-

place beton brut and precast concrete elements. The secondary facets that support the continuous concrete surfaces all slope

away from the square and are surfaced in soil and turf. These turf faces appear pulled away and circumstantial surfaces in the

process of “uplifting”. They hold the real topographic breaks. Radiating out from the square and between the six key heights

are slots of ground surface that lead out of the Place des Nations either visually out into the surroundings, or to simply channel

expected crowds of 7,000 daily event spectators. Spanning these radiating slots of space, set between each of the six landforms,

and running along the project’s perimeter is an ring of elevated laminated timber bridges that were designed, like the rest of the

active layers in the project, for both passage and sitting/watching. The visual

effect of these suspended structures is an elevated datum circumscribing the limits

of the place in plan while finer scaled active and oblique surfaces start at the

square and carefully drop and carve space under the bridges before feathering

themselves out and beyond in the surrounding landscape. Broad slots of space

under the bridges frame vistas from the central square out across the fairgrounds

to the Canadian Pavilion, upriver to the historical Pont Victoria, and across the

old harbor to the city’s skyline.

The design is the first project completed by the father and son team of André

and Patrick Blouin. André was a French born and Ecole des Beaux Arts trained

architect who worked for Auguste Perret on the dismantling of the Nazi’s Atlantic

coast defense positions and in building reconstructions at Le Havre for Perret

before emigrating in 1952 to Montréal to take charge of the thesis year at the

Université de Montréal and start an influential practice in the city, Blouin et

Associe. André Blouin was a rare architect in Montréal who balanced academic

and professional careers. As a frequent contributor to l’Architecture d’Aujourd

‘hui and as the curator for the influential 1959 Rétrospective Le Corbusier in

Montréal, he was a significant voice of Montréal architecture, urbanism, and

theory in France and vice versa. André remained active in practice until 1995.

Patrick graduated from McGill University in 1965, was made partner in his

father’s firm in 1966 (Blouin et Blouin), completed a series of projects with the

firm, was elected the national president of the Royal Architecture Institute of

Canada (RAIC) in 1983, and died of suicide in 1984. The title block of the front

sheet in the construction drawings says that the project was designed by Patrick

Blouin and checked by André Blouin.

Nothing before or after in the Blouin oeuvre works the way that the Place des

Nations does. There’s no sign of a practice in “surrection” in any of their other

projects. Its prominent location on the “prow” of land splitting the St-Lawrence

River down the middle is fixed in the fair’s master plan as early as the spring of 1963. Designed over a three-year period of 1963

to 1966, Place des Nations has extensive documentation in over 50 preliminary notes and sketches in André Blouin’s archives at

the CCA. Parent and Virilio announced the Groupe Architecture Principe in 1963 and published nine issues of manifestos and

projects in 1965-66. The Place des Nations is an anomaly in so many ways from the rest of the Blouin practice. Maybe there

was an external influence or guiding hand?

The earliest sketches we have for the project are dated December ‘63. They explore orienting the structure so that it takes

advantage of the city views across the harbor. In very general terms it resembles a concentric bowl; incomplete and open on the

city side to frame the view as a backdrop to a central stage. So, from the start the designers were cognizant of the importance of

framing views of the surrounding fairgrounds and cityscape. Late in an ensuing set of drawings documenting a struggle with the

form of this amphitheater we find the first sketches of the project in section and immediately a new problem becomes evident- it

isn’t as easy as it looks in plan to make this structure separate of the grounds it sits on. The Isle Ste-Héléne surface surrounding

and grounding the Place des Nations is only about 6 months older than the Place des Nations. The ground plane being depicted

in the sketches from 1964 isn’t out in the St-Lawrence yet- it’s a changeable abstraction and the designers are finding the seeds

of continuity between Place and site in the thumbnail sections here. About this time Parent and Virilio’s church of Ste-Bernadette

du Banly in Nevers is constructed.

Gradually, as more and more sectional studies are completed, we find the initial bowl, the audience seating element of the

theater, begin to breakdown into various configurations of smaller riser components and a design note of “elements plus fort

autour”. In these drawings the theater stage transforms into a clearly demarcated flat neutral grounds at the center of the

project. In these design sketches we find notes like: “Conception: Theatre Total” as it’s discovered that there was no need for

a separation between stage and seating; they note “Fonction: rendez-vous et repos” when we see the project excise circulation

space and begin to double program the oblique surfaces as both seating and promenade, and a key sectional note is distinctly

reminiscent of Parent and Virilio’s oblique with: “partir en gradient”. Soon in the process we find sheets of sketches exploring the

formal dynamics of truncated pyramids and section drawings still with no delineation between a structure and it’s surroundings.

Before coming to rest on the constructed forms the designers explored techniques for dealing with this “formlessness” by laying

out a scheme of highly regularized and vertical elements and a scheme involving numerous small buttes of different sizes only

loosely arranged around the central square. These seem to be one last consideration for making this a building. About this time

the first issue of Architecture Principe, with the text “l’Fonction Oblique” is published by Parent and Virilio

By 1966 all of the elements and qualities of the constructed place had been explored and noted, except one- the laminated wood

bridge system. In a handful of simple and decisive sketches we see the gradient of the buttes fall from pyramidal to oblique, a

note of “Corridor ou autre Moyen d’allez!” lead to a flurry of bridge speculations, and from the square, out under the bridges,

and through the frames of space the Blouins note as, “les espaces humains, la vie grouillante,” they find new consideration for

those city views that were the first observations in the project. These are the last sketches and notes that are anything less than

a formal presentation perspective or construction drawing of the constructed Place des Nations.

The time lines of the Place des Nations in the Blouin office in Montréal and the publishing of the nine issues of Architecture

Principe by Parent and Virilio in Paris are particularly intertwined. There were similar influences in the air from others in the art

and design world of the mid-60’s. Constant was designing “nomadic” places for a people free to move across the ground by

designing a city in the air (New Babylon). The Metabolists were plugging buildings into their surroundings and suggesting a sort

of interchangeability between building and reasonably similar “sockets” of site.

Hans Hollein was juxtaposing the “infrastructural” super-ground of an aircraft

carrier into a pastoral European landscape. Robert Smithson was developing

the notion of “non-site” and making his earthworks. None of these resonate in

making sense of the topograhic and topological grounds of the Place des Nations

the way the project of l’Fonction Oblique and the notion of Surrection do.

Whether or not Patrick and André were aware of and working through the

evocations of Claude and Paul is truly academic- though circumstantial degrees

of separation makes the direct tie an interesting possibility. Claude Parent and

André Blouin were schoolmates at the Ecole des Beaux Arts at the end of World

War Two. Both Paul Virilio and André Blouin had worked on the Nazi’s Atlantic

fortifications after the war . Up through the 70’s both Claude Parent and André

Blouin had written for and were active in the culture around l’Architecture

d’Aujourd ‘hui and the periodical’s influential publisher André Bloc. Regardless,

I would argue that the Place des Nations, free from the baggage of Virilio’s

Bunker Archaeology and the need for sanctuary in the program of the oblique,

is more succinct an example in “Surrection” than Parent and Virilio’s church at

Nevers.

Place des Nations design sketches and notes that correspond to the time of a

particular issue of Architecture Principe confirm the potential for a critical reading

of the manifestos and texts of the Parisians in the practice of the Montréalers.

What ultimately comes of this study is simply a chance for further articulation

and conceptualization of the sort of formless spatial distinction between site and

building to which both projects conceptually ascribe- in Surrection.

_______________________________________________________1 Paul Virilio, in Architecture Principe no.6 (Paris-Nanterres: Parent and Virilio, August 1966) (n.b.- The French word surrection is typically used in

geological descriptions to mean an uplift in the

These surfaces remain continuous with the ground in the same way that the parts of a bikini or Hawaii are continuous.2 Andre Lortie (ed.) The 60s : Montreal Thinks Big (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2005) p.543 These show a distinctive and very mature drawing hand in the sketches and drawings that are marked in graphite and black “Flair” felt tipped pen.

It is always accompanied by André’s signature and date. The drawings also show another distinctive but less confident drawing hand utilizing bright design

markers and single word notes and comments. These are never signed and are often overwritten by definitive strokes of graphite from the other “hand”. On

close inspection of the trace of documents and events of the time it appears as if the project is a sort of sounding block through which André and Patrick calibrated

their shared resources and influences via different educations, tastes, and experiences. That’s another story.4 An urban myth in the Montreal architecture community says the reason that Place des Nations looks the way it does is that the Blouin’s were strongly

influenced by the Aztec ruins at Teotihuacan and other archaeological sites they visited on a Mexican vacation in the summer of 1965, returning just in time to

strike the final design while heavily influenced by their tourism. André had also studied and toured these places in Mexico on a travel grant in 1952.5 See: Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology (New York Princeton Architectural Press, 1994)