CUJAH Volume IX

some of the most extravagant city spending.

Drapeau promised "a modest Games"— [however] After only one meeting, Roger Taillibert of France, brilliant and eccentric, was awarded the contract to design the Olympic stadium, without an open competition. It was to cost $60 million. He had never designed anything in a climate like Montreal's.19 This frivolous, machoistic squandering is a testament to the hypocrisy of Drapeau’s morals that had previously decimated the mountain’s vegetation. The decision to strip the mountain of its natural properties can be seen as a symbolic gesture that communicates the trend in “moral” measures that ironically result in harm and further corruption. As scholar David Watkin describes: “Architecture expresses social, moral, and philosophical conditions, and that if one knows enough about such conditions in a given period one can therefore predict what its architecture will be and declare what it should be.”20 Yet, Montreal undermines this theory by investing in architectural projects that are in conflict with the socio-political atmosphere of the time. Especially problematic is Montreal’s contemporary architecture that emphasizes the incongruity between the city’s ethics/ needs versus its architectural undertakings. Watkin continues, “architecture is an instrument for attainment of social policy employed to achieve supposedly ‘moral’ ends... [where as] contemporary architecture takes its start in a moral problem...”21 The issue that arises in this theory is the subjectivity in identifying “problems”. Depending on a person’s particular class, social, political or economic standpoint, a “problem” can, in another case, be a blessing. Moreover, the particular remedy that is chosen for the problem may in turn create others. Often times these problem-projects are performed in an extravagant fashion, concentrating more 165