Abstract

ABSTRACT
Facades of Jean Omer Marchand’s buildings for the Notre-Dame Congregation in Montreal: Influence and Collective Memory in Architecture
Jérémie Paré-Julien
The Beaux-Art architectural style has provided some of the most recognised buildings in the greater Montreal landscape. Architect Jean Omer Marchand designed many such buildings for the Notre-Dame Congregation at the turn of the twentieth century. Facades of Beaux-Art buildings are an eclectic collection of architectural references to the past. Buildings such as the Notre-Dame Congregation’s Mother-House, the École Normale, and the Institut Pedagogique, all three by Marchand, are prime examples of this historicism.
This thesis looks at the following questions: Why do we preserve and protect such facades, but not the interior of the buildings? What compels us to attach patrimonial values to these buildings? Can Maurice Halbwach’s concepts of Collective Memory account for this behaviour?
Furthermore, Marchand’s works deserve to be written about so as to give the architect a place in Québec’s architectural history. Due to various circumstances, Jean Omer Marchand has not been the subject of many books or research papers, and there is no official biography of the architect. My main motivation for writing this thesis is to shine some light on the work of Marchand, as well as give some information about my great grandfather, as I am the descendent of Jean Omer Marchand; my grandmother was his only child.