exhibition - Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism

Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism | Canadian Centre for Architecture | Montreal | Through September 10 For the exhibition Sense of the City, Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) wants us to close our eyes. Visitors enter through a tunnel, which is darkened to heighten senses other than sight. Inside, curator Marko Zardini has manipulated five themed sections—nocturnal city, seasonal city, sound of the city, surface of the city, and air of the city—filled with audio (recordings of street noise on headphones), smell (bottled synthetic scents), and touch (gooey asphalt), as well as photographs, videotapes, and models, to present a "sensorial" approach to urbanism.

Zardini wants to reconnect this international museum and research center with everyday people, an audience often intimidated, and even bored, by the complexity of architectural drawings and the intellectualism of the CCA's renowned historical scholarship. So far, so good. But the alternative proposed here—giant, child-friendly silhouettes of animals stenciled on the walls, for instance—verges on the jejune. And the show bypasses the CCA's great strength: its unrivaled archives and library. It's a provocatively antiarchitectural debut for Zardini, who is also the CCA's new director.

Ironically, the exhibition is eye-catching, thanks to up-to-date graphics and layout by Montreal-based Orange Tango and Atelier in Situ. Still, the show pales compared to what it's supposed to evoke: the smelly, messy, noisy, urban grind. The sense of the city is much richer outside the CCA's door than it is inside its pristine exhibition rooms. David Theodore