“Beaver Lake Stories and the Paradoxical Syntagma of Modern Heritage.” Architecture & Ideas: Experimental Modernism (2009): 50-69.

This essay was the first publication to arise from my research for the FQRSC (Fonds de recherché sur la société et la culture) Emerging Scholar Programme. This research, titled “Public Modernisms: The History and Future of Modern  Architecture in Montreal,” examines the specificity of architectural Modernism in the context of a newly secular and nationalist Quebec in the post-WWII, pre-Expo 67 era (1945-1965). Beaver Lake Pavilion (Guy Desbarats and Hazen Sise, 1954) was the first publicly-funded work of modern architecture in the city of Montreal. Situated on the slopes of Mount Royal Park, the pavilion has had a long history of public use, by a variety of cultural groups. It also has been the first modernist building in the city to receive public funds for its restoration as collective cultural heritage. This bracketing of the building through these two moments of public funding allowed me to explore what both “modern” and “heritage” mean and have meant in a city that tends to privilege pre-modernist architecture for preservation dollars, and where modernism was briefly linked to the province’s separatist agenda.