Text by Mark Kingwell
Photography by Lillian Seymour
Canadian political and cultural philosopher Mark Kingwell reminisces about a national extravaganza that he never got to visit and in retrospect finds it to have been a chimera of cheerful optimism.
Here is my key memory of the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair: while my parents planned a visit to this global spectacle of an event commemorating Canada’s centenary, a watershed moment when my chronically insecure country was without doubt the coolest place on Earth, I was parked at my grandmother’s bungalow in the dull eastern reaches of suburban Toronto. It’s true I was only four years old, and thus likely incapable of appreciating the wonders erected on the island city in the Saint Lawrence River; nevertheless, I still resent a little bit that my parents went to Expo and all I got was a lousy key chain.
I kept the key chain for years, however, and grew progressively more fascinated with the signature forms of that Fair, to me as instantly signifying as the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 New York World's Fair, that celebration of “the world of tomorrow”. In Montreal, Moshe Safdie’s beautifully modular Habitat housing scheme, the glass inverted-pyramid Katimavik building, and Buckminster Fuller’s signature geodesic-dome pavilion for the United States all realised, via architectural imagination, the space-era togetherness of the New Age. The vision was straight out of the toy box of urban construction sets like Super City, the sort of toy I would myself enjoy in a few years, with their future-is-now geometric silhouettes and clean, soaring curtain-wall towers.
Expo ’67 was the shiny side of the coin for that troubled decade, a vision of city harmony and smooth technological progress that ventured to cash in the “democracity” promissory notes of 1939. The 1967 fair’s official theme, “Man and His World”, was taken from a text by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the visionary aviator, children’s literature author, and closet fascist, but it smacked likewise of Marshall McLuhan – by way, somehow, of Teilhard de Chardin. The universal brotherhood of mediated, techno-happy existence! Canada, and the Future, had never been so awesome: die Stadt von Morgen, but here today.
Never mind, then, that many American cities were suffering waves of white flight, eviscerating the downtowns of Detroit, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cleveland, and a host of lesser cities. Two years later a human being would walk on the moon, but the very next year would witness the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
Closer to home, even as the bright strains of Bobby Gimby’s hit song “Ca-na-da” sprang from transistor radios across the nation the Front de libération du Québec threatened to disrupt the fair. Over the next three years, spurred in part by French President Charles de Gaulle’s notorious shout from the balcony of the Old City Hall in July of 1967, “Vive le Québec libre”, the FLQ would bomb, kidnap and kill in the name of Québec separatism. By the time Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the draconian War Measures Act in October 1970, and tanks rolled onto the streets of Montreal, the cheerful optimism of the Expo summer had evaporated entirely.
The site of the fair, meanwhile, has suffered the usual depredations of time and civic neglect. Even though Expo ’67 managed to avoid the typical cost overruns and corruption-drive Montreal boondoggles that cripple municipal projects in Canada’s showcase city (the 1976 Olympics are a case in point, with stadium debts still on the books decades later), the modest financial success of the Fair did not translate into lasting cityscape. In part this failure is rooted in the original Ile Notre Dame location, which is neither easily accessible nor part of the city’s core urban fabric. Safdie’s Habitat development was sold to private investors and made into a fashionable, if remote, condominium community in 1985. Fuller’s dome was partially destroyed by fire in 1976, and began to resemble a dystopian science-fiction film set and so prompted, as is so often is the case with the forward-looking design, a feeling of inverted nostalgia, the future in ruins.
Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine in New York. He is the author or co-author of seventeen books of political, cultural and aesthetic theory, including the bestsellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), Concrete Reveries (2008), and Glenn Gould (2009). In addition to many scholarly articles, his writing has appeared in more than 40 mainstream publications, including Harper’s, the New York Times, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Utne Reader, BookForum, the Toronto Star and Queen’s Quarterly; he is also a former columnist for Adbusters, the National Post, and the Globe and Mail. Professor Kingwell's most recent book is a collection of essays on politics, Unruly Voices (2012); a new collection of his essays, Measure Yourself Against the Earth, will appear in September 2015.
Lillian Seymour is the assumed author of the photographs that appear alongside Mark Kingwell’s essay. The images were discovered within a scrapbook lying in the street in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2006. As well as a trip to the Montreal Expo in 1967, the album reveals that Lillian had also visited New York’s 1964 Expo. They were scanned and uploaded to Flickr under a Creative Commons license by Austin Hall.
The actual global megacities of the coming millennium would bear some aesthetic kinship to the Expo vision. In Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Taipei and Dubai, among others, whole neighbourhoods of impossibly tall buildings now stand, erected with such speed that they feel like the result of a city-building computer programme on overheated download. But the universal togetherness of the Expo vision, the optimistic notion that such architectural wonders would house and serve a new, forward-thinking humanity –“man and his world” indeed! – has been repeatedly demolished by wealth inequality, racism, terrorism and economic collapse. Sitting atop one of these new-world-order urban towers, admiring the polluted views and maybe sipping a drink, the lucky and privileged, and probably male, citoyens du monde among us can indulge the dreams of man and his world. I confess I have done it myself. But any return to the base of the tower involves a rude awakening. As the writer William Gibson has put it, the future is here; it’s just unevenly distributed. So what else is new? I
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