Ernest Cormier (1885–1980) dominated Canadian architecture between the two world wars. Spanning a crucial stage of modernization and urbanization for Montreal, Quebec, and Canada, his built works negotiate the local and global aspirations of a bilingual metropolis, an ethnolinguistic nation, and an interprovincial confederation.
Cormier trained as a civil engineer before studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Throughout his career, he styled himself as “architect and engineer-constructor,” a form of professional self-presentation that he derived from his idol Auguste Perret. The art deco moderne sensibility that Cormier acquired in Paris resonated with Montreal’s growing Francophone bourgeoisie. Among his most important works are the Montreal Courthouse Annex (1920–26), the Main Pavilion of the Université de Montréal (1924–43), the Supreme Court of Canada (1935–50), and the monumental doors for the United Nations General Assembly Building in New York (1947). Just as Cormier created public images for bodies of collective significance, he displayed a similar degree of self-fashioning, this time individual, in his domestic projects. Both his studio (1921–28), one of the first ateliers in Montreal specifically designed for an artist, and his house, commonly known as the Maison Cormier (1930–31), functioned as social hubs for Montreal’s artists and professionals during the interwar period.1
Since the early 1950s, Cormier has hovered below the surface of consciousness in the history of Canadian architecture. He wrote little and did not teach; according to the architect Louis Brillant, he was “a lone wolf” who did not produce disciples to continue his legacy.2 His works were soon overshadowed by the transnational modernisms of the 1950s and 1960s and the exuberance of Expo 67. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s—during which a confident state apparatus challenged the hegemony of Anglophone business elites and the Catholic Church—found architectural expression in high modernism and Brutalism, as evidenced by the mirrored glass façades of Papineau Gérin-Lajoie Le Blanc’s Quebec Pavilion at Expo 67 and Evans St-Gelais’s concrete parliamentary office building (colloquially known as “the bunker”) in Quebec City.
Now a documentary directed by filmmaker Paul Carvalho with historian Aliki Economides seeks to rectify the relative obscurity shrouding Cormier and his legacy. The film’s title, Une tour sur la montagne (A Tower on the Mountain), refers to Cormier’s most famous building: the Main Pavilion for the Université de Montréal’s campus on the northern slopes of Mount Royal, Montreal’s defining geographic feature. The signature feature of the sprawling edifice is a slender tower designed from the outside in, housing mechanical equipment and library stacks (a planned observatory was dropped). The tower’s purpose is symbolic—it reaches skyward as a beacon of Francophone Canada’s intellectual and societal ambitions.3 The use of the word tour also opens a second meaning for the film’s title as “a walk on the mountain.” The film certainly does this, visiting several of Cormier’s major projects in the vicinity of Mount Royal, including his house.
The documentary is based on Economides’s 2015 Harvard doctoral dissertation, which she is currently transforming into a book.4 Economides and Brillant are the film’s major on-screen presences; they are joined by a cast of architects, acquaintances of Cormier, and the chief justice of Canada. Filming took place inside several of Cormier’s buildings—a highlight, as many are not regularly open to the public—and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which holds Cormier’s archive. Under Carvalho’s direction, the camera reveals the impressive materiality and ornamentation of Cormier’s grandest spaces.
Given that this is a monographic documentary on the career of a single architect, it is striking that Cormier is not the most intriguing character in Une tour sur la montagne: that role instead belongs to Clorinthe Perron. The tale of Cormier’s decades-long relationship with Clorinthe and her sister Cécile animates the film, introducing a degree of sexual innuendo to its presentation of Cormier’s buildings. Both sisters were models whom Cormier (then a widower following the death of his wife, Berthe Leduc, in 1918) met at the studio of the artist brothers Henri and Adrien Hébert. Economides’s dissertation explains the presence of the Perron sisters in Cormier’s life and work in spatial and iconographic terms, but the film seems gossipy in comparison. The trade-off is clear: the titillating story of Cormier and the Perron sisters rewards members of the nonarchitectural public for their patience in closely examining the details of Cormier’s buildings and following the twists and turns of his career. Yet beyond providing this obvious sensationalizing angle, the significant role given to the Perron sisters in Une tour sur la montagne does help to explain another of Cormier’s most important works: his house, and with it, the social mores of the place and time in which it was built.
The Maison Cormier reifies the class expectations and gender norms that structured Cormier’s relationship with the Perron sisters. More important than the house’s prestigious location in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile (the neighborhood where Canada’s Anglophone business elites resided) was its topography, sloping steeply downward from the entrance on L’Avenue des Pins. The main entrance and Cormier’s atelier on the upper floor also provided space for large, public receptions. More intimate guests might be invited to descend a level to the library. The Perron sisters lived further downstairs, where Cormier could dine privately with them. They entered the house like servants through a side door. As the son of a pediatrician, Cormier was a member of the bourgeoisie, but the Perron sisters came from a lower social class, and their profession as models made them even more unwelcome at the gatherings upstairs. Cormier’s career required him to remain in the good graces of Quebec’s ecclesiastic and political elite, and flaunting his extramarital romance with a nude model would have created controversy.
If Clorinthe Perron’s physical presence was hidden in the house’s lower reaches, she was prominently displayed above the main entrance in the form of a nude bas-relief, bearing a tower surely intended to symbolize Cormier’s pavilion for the Université de Montréal, just across the mountain. As Economides relates in her dissertation, this sculpture “speaks rather explicitly to the erotic dynamics that played out in the private depths of the house.”5
Things changed after World War II. As Cormier’s career flagged (in part because he was not favored by the conservative government of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis), so did his social life. While the Duplessis government staked out reactionary positions, especially on social mores, the Perron sisters now appeared upstairs to animate a diminished social scene. Having multiplied their savings gambling at the Montreal racetrack while Cormier’s work dried up, the sisters now gained the upper hand. Clorinthe Perron and Ernest Cormier finally married in 1976, and Cormier died four years later.
The history of architecture has moved beyond hagiographic accounts of the lives of great men, and this shift raises the question: What is to be gained from a monographic history structured around a single career, albeit a largely underappreciated one? For Economides, the answer is both external (What does Cormier’s career tell us about interwar Montreal?) and internal (How do creators fashion identities for themselves and others through the making of objects?). Une tour sur la montagne has allowed Economides to reach a wider public with her research on Ernest Cormier. Her presence in the film brings academic rigor and new archival discoveries to the endeavor.
Although the film is addressed primarily to Canadian audiences, aspects of it, such as Economides’s scholarship on Cormier and its discussion of issues like interwar modernity and the architectural fashioning of identities, will interest many architectural historians elsewhere. Although this film’s sensationalist tone occasionally risks distracting from Cormier’s built oeuvre, it is clear that documentary filmmaking offers an ideal medium to broaden awareness of Cormier’s legacy. As Montreal, Quebec, and Canada all seek to redefine their identities in the twenty-first century, it is helpful for their citizens to reflect on the role played by architects and architecture in constructing their collective self-images.
Une tour sur la montagne is available for viewing online free of charge on Radio-Canada’s Doc Humanité platform, at the URL included at the top of this review. Carvalho and Economides are currently seeking funding to add English subtitles to the French-language film.
Notes
In 1980, six years after Cormier sold the Maison Cormier, the house was purchased by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then prime minister of Canada. On Trudeau’s inhabitation of the Maison Cormier with his children (including his son Justin, the current Canadian prime minister), see Annmarie Adams and Cameron Macdonell, “Making Himself at Home: Cormier, Trudeau, and the Architecture of Domestic Masculinity,” Winterthur Portfolio 50, nos. 2–3 (2016), 151–89.
Brillant makes this remark in the documentary that is the subject of this review.
The Quiet Revolution also brought about a change in terminology. Where the terms Canadien and French Canadian had previously defined an ethnolinguistic nation spanning all regions of Canada, a new focus on Quebecois identity announced a shift to a territorial nationalism and the rise of a movement for an independent Quebec.
Aliki Economides, “Modern Savoir-faire: Ernest Cormier, ‘Architect and Engineer-Constructor,’ and Architecture’s Representational Constructions” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2015).
Economides, 224.
University of California Press