Silo No. 5: Museum of Modern Art

Encouraged by the success of its initial proposal, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) is continuing to develop its plans for a Museum of Modern Art in the Old Port of Montréal.

In October 2005, Marc Mayer, Director of the MACM, introduced a major project that captured the imagination of forward-looking people: a museum of modern art that will be the only one of its kind in Canada, offering both a revolutionary agenda for the museum and a boldly innovative business plan.

The project would provide solutions to several major challenges. The MACM must increase its exhibition space in order to put one of the country’s most important collections of modern art on permanent display. The museum is also striving to increase the number of people who view its collection by reaching out to new segments of the public and developing new communication and interpretation techniques. At the same time, a number of groups are working to complete the redevelopment of Montréal's OldPort while preserving the evidence of its history as an industrial area and a port.

The Silo No. 5: Museum of Modern Art project proposes to restore buildings that are part of Canada’s industrial heritage, install a museum of modern art in them, create a spectacular tourist destination for all seasons, enable Canadians to connect with a fascinating era in their history, and make the project profitable by involving the private sector.

With the support of the general public, the media and the business community behind it, the Board of Directors of the MACM has formed the Committee for the Museum of Modern Art to administer the project. The Committee is made up of Board members, the MACM director, representatives of the business community and experts, and its primary mission is to find means of funding the project. The Committee has therefore reviewed the initial proposal with the goal of making the project more self-sustaining financially.

The new project includes a more dynamic tourist component with the potential to attract more visitors to the site and thus generate the funds required to operate the museum. The new concept for the Silo No. 5: Museum of Modern Art project is based on cultivating a large and loyal clientele. The OldPort has become a magnet for tourists and locals alike, with over six million visitors every year. By restoring the old Grain Elevator No. 5 site, the project will add a spectacular attraction to the OldPort and, in return, will receive thousands of visitors who would ordinarily go to art museums only rarely.

The project has bolstered its financial position by taking direct advantage of the tourist activity in the OldPort. This new concept involves recreational sites, including an observatory that will provide visitors with breathtaking views, all year long, of the city, the port, the river and the surrounding area from the top of the grain elevator tower. As they move around among these imposing structures, surrounded by the vestiges of the intense industrial activity that once existed there, visitors will be able to look out over the city from high atop the silos and the tower, and contemplate an urban landscape that bears comparison with the world's major tourist attractions.

Access to this observatory will be the central feature in a range of commercial activities that will ensure the Museum of Modern Art's financial independence. The new concept will give the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal a chance to expand its space and exhibit its collection of modern art without increasing its need for public funding.

The Revised Concept

 It is no exaggeration to say that Silo No. 5: Musée d'art moderne is an ambitious and thoroughly innovative concept for a Canadian cultural and educational facility. Although modelled in large part on the most successful new art museums in the world, notably London's Tate Modern, which it resembles physically, Silo No. 5: Musée d'art moderne goes an important step further. We intend to take economic advantage of the site’s assets by dramatically increasing our self-generated revenue and by attracting a far wider public than the Musée d'art contemporain currently enjoys, without compromising our high standards of quality. Moreover, by creating an institution that will give a vital boost to both established and emerging industries in Montréal and Québec, we will add lustre to the Canada brand. This industrial complex, which offers a powerful reminder of a legendary era in Canadian history, has been in search of a new lease on life for over a decade and will be an appropriate home for the vibrant activity planned for it.

Silo No. 5

The large and familiar grain elevator complex located at the foot of McGill Street and the mouth of the LachineCanal, popularly known as Silo No. 5, was built over a period of more than fifty years, starting in 1903. It is an example of the remarkable grain elevator technology used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Canada's last steel silos were built, including Elevator B, which was the city's most imposing industrial structure for many years.

Elevator B, the oldest part of the complex, was designed by John S. Metcalf for the Grand Trunk Railway at the express request of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. Laurier wished to take advantage of a booming Canadian economy by expanding and modernizing the Port of Montréal so that it could handle ever larger shipments of grain bound for the country's overseas markets. His government encouraged the GTR to invest in Montréal rather than in Portland, Maine, where the company had originally planned to build its new all-steel grain elevator, an engineering innovation designed to make grain elevators safe from methane explosions. Because federal funding was indispensable to the GTR's western expansion, the company agreed to the Montréal site. It then added a reinforced concrete silo in 1913, which it enlarged in 1922 even though it was nearly bankrupt at the time.

After its western operations failed, the GTR, heavily in debt to the Canadian government, was nationalized and absorbed into the Canadian National Railway in 1923, and its grain elevator operations in Montréal were transferred to the Harbour Commission. In 1957, the last and largest section of the complex, designed by C. D. Howe and Co., was added by the Harbour Commission, now the Port Authority of Montréal, to complete the site we see today. Renamed Elevator No. 5, the structure was linked by elevated conveyors to the port's entire grain elevator system, at the time the largest in the world.

By 1994, when Montréal ceased operating the old grain elevator complex, the other silos had already been demolished, leaving only Elevator No. 5 as the last remaining testimony to a period of exhilarating growth that transformed the Canadian economy—a period during which Montréal, thanks to visionaries in politics and industry, was the world's largest grain port and the second-largest commercial port in North America, after New York.

Citing its historical, architectural and environmental significance, the Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office (FHBRO) designated Elevator No. 5 as a recognized heritage building in 1996:

      "Elevator No. 5 is an important landmark and its presence in the western section of the OldPort, at the mouth of the LachineCanal, enhances the industrial and port character of the area. Any development project that would jeopardize its physical or visual integrity should be avoided."

We are in full agreement with the FHBRO's assessment, and our proposal aims to preserve, protect and promote this remarkable heritage site for posterity. But we must act quickly. Elevator No. 5 is in peril. With the broken windows that allow vermin infestation, and the snowdrifts that accumulate every year in its interior, the day is soon coming when the 1957 concrete silos and particularly the 1906 steel structure will be beyond saving. Furthermore, many Montrealers have been calling for the demolition of what they perceive, with some justice, to be a giant eyesore. Our proposal will not only save Elevator No. 5 but turn it into a major Canadian landmark and one of the world's finest museums of modern art: Silo No. 5: Musée d'art moderne.

Expanding our Mission for Growth

The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, one of Québec's three provincial museums, is by far the most important institution of its kind in Canada. Over the forty years of our existence, we have built a reputation for excellence that has enabled us to make our mark in the world arena. Our practice of collecting Canadian art and presenting it the context of international programming of the highest quality has helped create a lively and assured local art scene, and develop a sophisticated audience in Montréal. It is now time to grow.

Originally, when we began to study the possibility of expanding our physical plant, we felt we should concentrate strictly on our collection. The museum has 7,000 works, at least 10% of which are worthy of being on permanent public display, but the exhibition space allows, on average, only about a hundred of these works to be shown at a time, scarcely more than 1%. Clearly, the collection is not being used to its best advantage, and keeping it in storage is not in the best interest of either the public or the MACM. However, the unique opportunity offered by Silo No. 5 has made us rethink not only our present needs but also how we can serve the public.

Montréal's oft-stated ambition to attract and nurture a large and vibrant creative community is in line with the growing focus of a number of theorists in business and education (Pink, Gladwell, Florida, Robinson, and others) on creativity as a key sector in the new world economy. The Musée d'art contemporain believes that it can dramatically increase its usefulness to Canadians by expanding our mission in this direction.

If we were to include exhibitions of industrial design in our programming while gradually building a thoughtfully planned collection acquired primarily through gifts, we would not only complete Montréal's collecting infrastructure in the important area of industrial design but also increase our opportunities to attract financial support from business. Needless to say, this diversification will broaden our appeal so that we can reach a much larger audience than contemporary art currently attracts in our market. Our plan is, in fact, to devote an entire pavilion to this new area of concentration: the former Grand Trunk Railway Grain Elevator B, itself a wonder of Canadian industrial design, and the last remaining building of its kind.

Design in Montréal

In 2006, Montréal became the first North American city to be designated a UNESCO City of Design. This honour recognizes the city's concerted efforts to develop this sector of its economy, which it made a top priority after the 1986 Picard Report identified it as a key area of potential growth. The UNESCO announcement followed other similar successes. For example, in 2004, the International Design Alliance (IDA), which brings together the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA), chose Montréal over Brussels, Turin and Nagoya to be the site of its new world headquarters.

Design is currently a billion-dollar industry in Québec and is therefore in the top rank among our cultural industries, economically speaking. It has grown in both complexity and importance since the introduction of computers and is now recognized as a key sector in the new economy. An estimated 32,000 people make their living from design in Québec, the majority in Montréal. Design is also an important teaching field in Montréal's major schools. In fact, the city boasts no fewer than three universities (Université de Montréal, UQAM and Concordia) and two CEGEPs (Dawson and Vieux-Montréal) with nationally recognized design programs. These programs would certainly benefit from a museum that could provide access to leading examples of industrial design and offer the general public an interpretation of such works in a cultural context. Clearly, this is an area that deserves more institutional support than the city now provides.

Montréal has several important collections that can be considered "design": the Stewart Collection of Modern Decorative Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; one of the world's largest and finest architectural collections at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and Canada's second-largest costume collection at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. However, the city does not have an industrial design collection, and it lacks a showcase for works in that category: vehicles in all their diversity; outstanding examples of machinery; tools, utensils and other such items; feats of engineering; commercial art; games and other products based on new technologies——all of which play an important role in our regional economy. Nor does the public have an opportunity to see examples of industrial design innovations or demonstrations of new technologies. Silo No. 5: Musée d'art moderne would address all of these urgent needs.

Modern Art

New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a successful model that we have studied closely. For MoMA, the term "modern art" encompasses not only "modernist" art since 1895 but also the "contemporary art" of the present, the entire history of cinema, and design in all its forms, from architecture to automobiles and from advertising to photojournalism. We share this expansive view of modern art, which brings together the finest examples of modern creativity in a single category that includes the full panoply of material culture.

Unfortunately for MoMA, despite its recent $800-million expansion, its location in the heart of Manhattan does not allow it to present more than a small sample of design, even though that is one of MoMA's most popular collections. Despite being the most important museum of modern art in the world, MoMA is singularly limited in its ability to exhibit larger examples of industrial design such as vehicles, an area in which the museum has been active since its founding. At present, MoMA can display only a single car and one small helicopter. Silo No. 5 offers much greater and more flexible exhibition potential. For example, we could actually display locomotives on the ground floor of Elevator B, which was designed to accommodate internal access by rail.

We at the Musée d'art contemporain concur with MoMA's definition of modern art and believe that it is the appropriate designation for a facility for exhibiting collections that will in future include industrial design. The term "contemporary art" refers to the most recent modern art, the art of the present day. But the Musée d'art contemporain was established forty years ago, and its collections go back to 1939 and the founding of Montréal's Contemporary Arts Society, which we consider our direct ancestor. By giving the name "Musée d'art moderne" to our new site, we will be clarifying the museum's two principal spheres of activity: exhibitions (Musée d'art contemporain) and collections (Musée d'art moderne). Moreover, Montréal will thus be able to enjoy a major new cultural institution without having to found a new organization.

Modern Art in Montréal 

The story of modernist art in Montréal is worth retelling. The great philosophical rivalry between the Contemporary Arts Society in Montréal and the Group of Seven in Toronto determined the course of modern art in Canada. This was a rivalry that, like those in the hockey world, has survived to this day. In fact, it has gradually grown to involve the entire country in a debate as complex as it is fascinating.

The Toronto scene initially influenced the earliest Canadian modernism. However, it was in Montréal, inspired by Paul-Émile Borduas, that a viable abstract-art culture took shape and flourished for several decades. Thirty years of remarkable painting ensued, during which developments in abstract art in Montréal equalled those in Paris and New York. Many artists of talent and intellectual rigour followed in Borduas's footsteps, producing a significant and powerful corpus that forms a solid historical and intellectual basis for the contemporary art scene in Montréal.

The MACM possesses the largest and most complete collection of these works. One whole floor of the concrete grain elevators will be devoted to properly displaying some of the most important works of artists such as Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean McEwen, Guido Molinari, Yves Gaucher, Claude Tousignant, Jacques Hurtubise, Fernand Leduc and Charles Gagnon, among others. This exhibition will represent one of the world’s most impressive and coherent collections of abstract paintings, in a unique environment that also offers a superb aerial view of the city that gave them birth.

Not a New Museum, but an Expanded Museum

With this project, Montréal will acquire a major new museum and Canada will gain its first museum of modern art without actually having to create one. To a large extent, the Musée d'art contemporain already has the administrative infrastructure to support such an expansion. Its current facility, with its specialized storage areas, conservation laboratories and offices, can meet the challenge of an expansion of its public spaces on such a scale. In short, with Silo No. 5 as our annex, we are simply adding large amounts of exhibition and commercial space to an existing institution.

New Technology as a Tool for Educating the Public

Communications technologies are revolutionizing our world, and Canada is playing an important role in that revolution. Rather than impose the burden of traditional didactic displays on our extraordinary artifacts and on what promises to be a uniquely beautiful facility, we plan to exploit these new communications technologies to the fullest, in ways that will allow visitors to customize their visit and enjoy their experience directly, unencumbered by a plethora of outmoded information panels.

Montréal has no shortage of expertise in the related fields. Our project will provide businesses and schools with an opportunity to explore new uses and techniques for communications technologies. Audioguides using cell phones, other complex hand-held devices and podcasting are among the means we are investigating. We are also working with McGillUniversity's Department of Art History and Communications Studies to develop alternative ways to approach the educational function of the collections and the facility.

The new installations will be original and complex. In addition, the exhibitions of art and design will be housed high up in an industrial building that overlooks and dominates the city's most historically rich neighbourhood. We have everything we need to become a world leader in the field of electronic museum didactics, and we possess innovative means to enhance our visitors' experience. We recently entered into a strategic partnership with Université Laval’s LAMIC, a brand-new state-of-the-art laboratory for museology and cultural engineering which is unique in the world. With its first satellite office already set up at the Musée d'art contemporain, LAMIC will help make us one of the most technologically advanced museums in the world.

Thanks to its historical significance, its location and the new function we hope to give it, Silo No. 5 will be a valuable example of urban development and a vibrant centre for learning. It is here that the history of Canadian industrialization was written, from the boom in grain exports that encouraged westward immigration, to the complex transportation infrastructure that stitched the Confederation together. Moreover, we will be able to offer thousands of people every year an understanding of Canada's unique and important contribution to modern and contemporary art. We are particularly committed to our educational mission; this, like security, is one of the few areas in which we are planning to recruit additional staff.

A Major Attraction and a Visionary Museum

The two most compelling advantages of Silo No. 5 as the site of a museum of modern art are its location and its form. The structure is already a landmark in the city and, over and above the uniqueness of the museum collections and the innovative nature of our cultural and educational programs, it is, by its very nature, very attractive to the public. Located in a historically rich neighbourhood in which we can take pride, it offers spectacular views of the city and the greater Montréal area. We intend to use the site's advantages to the fullest by developing commercial activities that will compensate for the limited potential for such growth at the Place des Arts location, which will remain our operational headquarters.

Montréal has few public buildings as extraordinary as Silo No. 5, and none as centrally situated. Its location——in the Old Port, on the edge of Old Montréal, in one of the most visited and admired neighbourhoods in Canada——gives it an exceptional advantage. And the uniqueness of the grain elevators as a public amenity is indisputable. Tourists will likely be visiting a giant steel structure from the turn of the last century for the first time in their lives; the extreme rarity of such buildings means there are no others to visit.

Once the museum is established in the OldPort and can offer visitors a wide variety of attractions, we will become an ideal strategic partner for all of the city's major museums and a number of its smaller ones. Our historic site and our extensive collections will complement those of such institutions as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the McCord Museum of Canadian History, the Montréal Science Centre, the Pointe-à-Callières Museum of Archaeology, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Darling Foundry and Exporail, as well as our own museum, which will continue to offer the country’s most ambitious program of exhibitions in the ever growing field of contemporary art.

We wish to add another landmark to Montréal's impressive museum infrastructure: not only a major addition to the city's tourist attractions but also a point of departure for a broader cultural experience from which Montrealers, too, will benefit.

With close-up views of so many of the city's famous tourist sites——the Old Port, the Lachine Canal, Old Montréal, the modern downtown core, Mount Royal, the St. Lawrence River, Habitat 67, the former Expo 67 pavilions, and the Victoria and Jacques-Cartier bridges in the background——visitors to Silo No. 5 will be able to admire Montréal from its most flattering angle.

From the outside, Silo No. 5 is already a monument of the urban landscape. Akin to a cathedral——a cathedral of industry——the grain elevator complex can be seen looming on the horizon, like an immense hydroelectric dam, from the newly revitalized McGill Street, which has regained its original elegance with new fixtures, plantings and widened sidewalks. Much like the GuggenheimMuseum in Bilbao, Silo No. 5 is visible from many streets in the city, in Old Montréal and beyond, even from the site of the George-Étienne Cartier monument on Park Avenue, several kilometres away. It is an interesting sidebar here that Cartier, one of the Fathers of Confederation, came from a family of grain exporters and at one time served as legal advisor to the Grand Trunk Railway. It seems clear that Montréal will never have another chance to build new museum facilities that provide the convenience, physical presence and symbolic weight of Silo No. 5.

Reaffirming the Canada Brand

Art museums are a growth industry worldwide and a strategic resource for the new economy. They are also an eloquent means of presenting a national brand image. Compared with our neighbours and trading partners, Canada has not fully exploited this powerful tool. We believe we are offering our country the opportunity to stand out from the pack at modest cost. Our intention is to make the most of the commercial advantages of this unique facility so as to ensure that government contributions to its funding are minimal, in an approach that will also reinforce the Canada brand.

Canada is a latecomer to this global trend of converting industrial monuments into art museums. The Silo No. 5 project gives our country a chance not only to catch up in an intelligent and cost-effective way but to make a distinctive name for ourselves as well. This unique undertaking, bold as it may seem, will be achieved at a fraction of the cost of similar projects like the Tate Modern in London, the GuggenheimMuseum in Bilbao and the addition to New York's Museum of Modern Art. Silo No. 5: Musée d'art moderne will provide an attractive showcase for the best Canadian art and design, in a world-class setting, and will be a testimony to the quality of Canadian innovations and achievements.