Sense of the city.

The coupling of architecture and the city in the twentieth century was at its best a sad fumbling; at times it was brutal and heartless. Is it too late for these two tired partners to produce an alternative of equal optimism to the Beaux Arts tradition? What responsibilities do architects have to the city in which they build? Why do the form and texture of the city remain so hostile to any new building? Must the designer, like a figure from mythology, forever fail to represent in built form the shifting and unrepresentable complexity of the modern polis?

These very large questions are addressed with very quiet rhetoric in the current exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, which runs until 10 September. Its elegant premise is that we have come to rely too much on our eyes as a tool for understanding the urban environment; the exhibition advances the marginal players as the best witnesses of our collective experience--the deaf, the blind, the people who only go out at night. And it even wryly suggests we might do well to let the animals design the cities they share with us, privileged as they are with different and sharper sensory apparatus.

Surprising and complex histories of noise, smell and light emerge, together with a perception that pollution is always redefined by time and place. The 'Big Noise' of mechanisation changed human experience forever, making silence--in Le Bretton's wonderful phrase--'a remnant waiting to be used, like a vacant lot in the heart of the city ...' Street lighting begins as a demonstration of power, bartering personal freedom for the promise of security. Asphalt was a luxury offered to the boulevardiers of Paris and Berlin, appearing as a pavement surface long before it was adapted to the wheeled traffic of the streets themselves. Smells seem only ever to have been bad, the link with disease and overcrowding unbreakable, at least until Western cities all smelt the same.

In that instant a Strand paved in horseshit, or the abattoirs of Chicago, become the subject of the richly contrived regret for urban fremissement that so animated the Situationist International; its shade can be felt everywhere in the exhibition. Against it, and at much the same moment in history, are arrayed all those strange projects that sought to isolate the city dweller from season, weather, place, even nightfall. Bucky's glass bubble never did address the question of who might actually want to live at the North Pole.

So also with the disparate polemics of urbanism that have characterised the discourse for the last thirty years; the A to Z of urban mantras--quoted by Mirko Zardini, the exhibition's curator--from Anxious City to Zwischenstadt, that speak mostly of alienation and indirection. Here, the counterpoint lies in a vein of projects by a few architects that propose radical change achieved by every means short of actually building. These explore the sensory 'turn' in our understanding of urbanity, and powerfully demonstrate the eloquence of research as a tool of design.

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The exhibition is one of a sequence originated by the CCA, developed over long periods in the relative isolation of Montreal, that have demanded deep curatorial knowledge of the material, and subtlety in its orchestration. Taken together, they provide a critique of the present culture of monographic or thematic architectural exhibitions that are the necessary preserve of institutions less rigorous or international, with missions that compel them to demonstrate, not to enquire.

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The CCA, long a valuable interpreter of the architectural past, is assuming a voice as moderator of the contemporary discourse, and a possible role for itself in the future.

Sense of the City; an alternate approach to urbanism, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, until 10 September. The exhibition is accompanied by a 350 page catalogue, edited by Mirko Zardini, illustrated with over 400 colour and black and white images.