Trois-Rivieres and Montreal — Joe's Slideshow Archive

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Trois-Rivieres, Quebec

Captured a taxi despite all the rain, we drove in silence across Pont Champlain

The wonderfully small provincial city (or possibly large provincial town) of Trois-Rivieres (located about halfway between Montreal and Quebec City) has a great little old town that could easily pass for a smaller and less architecturally or historically significant city in France. There are patches of great little buildings, a lot of cafes, some fairly pretty gardens, a great Saint Lawrence Riverfront and a picturesque cathedral complete with statues out front of worried settlers protected by a priest wearing a top hat. What more could anyone possibly want?

On a rainy day on the edge of spring in the great northern city of Montreal, the inclined observation tower of the Olympic Stadium looks like an alien monster ready to attack the calm splendor of the Botanical Garden's Chinese Garden. In reality the inclined observation tower of the Olympic Stadium isn't really an alien monster ready to attack the calm splendor of the Botanical Garden's Chinese Garden, it just looks that way.

The inclined observation tower of the Olympic Stadium is easily reachable from downtown (by two separate Metro stops) and easily ascendable (I don’t think ascendable is a word by the way) by an admission ticket and an elevator that is really more like a one way funicular. Once on top you have sweeping view of the west side of the city, with the towers of downtown and Mont Royal easily visible, especially during an all too welcome break in the otherwise unending rain. And even though that far off view may be the most famous, the far more dramatic view is the view straight down on to the retractable roof, the one that for years protected the Montreal Expos from the elements and today protects, well, pretty much just a bunch of empty seats and maybe a CFL team, if the CFL is even a real thing and not just some sort of made up phony scam or something.

Even on a rainy day and on a rainy weekend, the sky was sunny at former Louis Kahn intern Moshe Safdie's landmark Habitat 67. The building (a private housing complex where I wasn't even allowed in the parking lot) was based on Safdie's graduate thesis and built for the big Expo 67 in Montreal, something that seems to explain both the "67" part of Habitat 67 and the "Expo" part of the long dead Montreal Expos baseball franchise. And if the building seems familiar it may not be from all of those architecture books you only glanced through or all of those architecture classes you now only barely remember but instead because it was used as the location for the World Winter Sport Games dorms in the damn funny (to me at least) movie "Blades of Glory."

Back in 1967, Moshe Safdie wasn't the only one having all of the (architectural) fun. Not to be outdone was the United States Pavilion designed by Buckminster Fuller, a giant and unmistakable geodesic dome that survives today, over 40 years after Expo 67 and long since the United States Pavilion closed up shop. The building (or maybe I should say structure) has been repurposed into the Montreal Biosphere, an environmental museum, although the only reason I went was to see the massive see through dome and its still incredibly light structure holding it all in place.