Montreal's Designs and Shapes

 Montreal was established in 1642 in what is now the province of Quebec, Canada. At the time of European contact the area was inhabited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, a discrete and distinct group of Iroquoian-speaking indigenous people. They spoke Laurentian. Jacques Cartier became the first European to reach the area now known as Montreal in 1535 when he entered the village of Hochelaga on the Island of Montreal while in search of a passage to Asia during the Age of Exploration. Seventy years later, Samuel de Champlain unsuccessfully tried to create a fur trading post but the Mohawk of the Iroquois defended what they had been using as their hunting grounds.

It was not until 1639 that the French created a permanent settlement on the Island of Montreal, started by tax collector Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière. Under the authority of the Roman Catholic Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, missionaries Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, Jeanne Mance and a few French colonists set up a mission named Ville Marie on May 17, 1642, as part of a project to create a colony dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In 1644, Jeanne Mance founded the Hôtel-Dieu, the first hospital in North America north of Mexico.

By 1651, Ville-Marie had been reduced to less than 50 inhabitants by repeated attacks by the Mohawk. Maisonneuve returned to France that year to recruit 100 men to bolster the failing colony. He had already decided that should he fail to recruit these settlers, he would abandon Ville-Marie and move everyone back downriver to Quebec City. These recruits arrived in November 1653 and essentially guaranteed the evolution of Ville Marie and of all New France.

Ville Marie would become a center for the fur trade and the town was fortified in 1725. The French and Iroquois Wars threatened the survival of Ville-Marie until a peace treaty was signed in Montreal in 1701. With the Great Peace, Montreal and its surroundings could develop without fear of Iroquois raids. 

Originally with the lack of stone and the plentiful number of lumber cities like Montreal were almost completely made of wooden buildings designed in the French style.These buildings relied on the use of classic French building techniques and many of the craftsmen refused to use anything other than sawn and squared lumber. This caused the natives such as the Iroquoians to view the building methods of the colonists as odd as almost all of their building were done with unfinished materials such as branches, bark and tree trunks. The buildings in the city of Montreal remained wooden until the year 1664 when Louis XIV declared the colony an officially recognized province.

This declaration led to the introduction of ‘king’s engineers’ to Montreal. This led to actual city layout planning and a shift to stone buildings as well. The Sulpicians, who became the seigneurs of Montreal in 1663, perhaps played the largest role in the early formation of the city.

Canadian-specific architecture in Montreal began to evolve after the fire ordinances in 1721, as wood was removed as much as possible from dwellings and buildings were left almost completely with stone.This also eliminated the common wooden fashionable extras and designs found in France. This caused only churches to truly to have any form of decoration on them while many of the other colonial buildings to remain plain.

This lack of artistic expression to demonstrate wealth caused many of the rich to simply build larger buildings to demonstrate their affluence.This caused a large boom in the demand for stone and an increase in the size of Montreal.

Ville-Marie remained a French settlement until 1760, when Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial surrendered it to the British army under Jeffery Amherst after a two month campaign. With Great Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War, the Treaty of Paris in 1763 marked its end, with the French being forced to cede Canada and all its dependencies to the other nation.

As a British colony, and with immigration no longer limited to members of the Roman Catholic religion, the city began to grow from British immigration.  American Revolutionists under General Richard Montgomery briefly captured the city during the 1775 invasion of Canada but left when it became obvious they could not hold Canada. Often having suffered loss of property and personal attacks during hostilities, thousands of English-speaking Loyalists migrated to Canada from the American colonies during and after the American Revolution.

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