There exists a bias that places the museum and the department store at the opposite ends of a cultural spectrum that shifts from high to low. There has been much discussion of how our contemporary market driven economy has begun to render these distinctions obsolete. One need only think of the global complex that is the Guggenheim to realize that at issue is more than solely the display of art. Still, within the culture of architecture in the contexts of academia and practice, there exists a polarization that sets commercial projects at the low end of cultural production.

However, if one traces the nineteenth century development of what Tony Bennett calls ‘the exhibitionary complex’, it is apparent that the art museum and department store share a common lineage. According to Bennett, what was at stake was the ordering of society.

The similarities between the museum and the department store have often been noted. Both were formally open spaces allowing entry to the general public, and both were intended to function as spaces of emulation, places for mimetic practices whereby improving tastes, values and norms of conduct were to be more broadly diffused through society. (Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Policy, London: Routledge 1995, p.30)

This common development thus provides a historical opening for the critical displacement of art gallery into the department store, restating the relationship of ‘gift shop in art gallery’ as ‘art gallery in gift shop’. In most general terms, I propose to explore what might be gained from stating such a relationship.

The threshold that constitutes the window display defines a physical and conceptual point of entry into the department store. As such, the window display defines the hinge that my architectural intervention will rest upon, reordering the domains of public-private and exterior-interior that lie on either side of this threshold, in the spirit of such a project as Steven Holl’s Storefront for Art and Architecture

It is worth mentioning the precedent of such an intervention in the window displays of London department store Selfridges, by the video artist Clare Gerard and architect Mark Hewitt, whose intentions can be summed up as follows:

The leitmotif that informed the project was that just as the work was colonising the real, architectural spaces that lie behind each of the enormous windows, so it was simultaneously inhabiting the conceptual space which lies between the store and the shopper – the pavement and the window – and that by manipulating this territory, new connections could be engaged between culture, commodity and the spectator. By a process of what Hewitt and Gerard describe as ‘animating’ this zone, the aim was to pull the passer-by into the space of the store, and simultaneously project the space of Selfridges out into the city beyond. (Kerr, Joe. ‘The Window and The Pavement: Architecture, Consumption, and the Spaces In-Between’ in Architectural Design Profile No. 131: Consuming Architecture, London: John Wiley & Sons 1998, p.17)

Since my proposal is conceived as an intervention, it must take into account the existing structure, both historical and physical, that it depends upon.

The Bay department store on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal will be the site under question. Formerly Henry Morgan & Company, it was Canada’s first true department store. Established in 1845 on McGill Street, its rapid growth caused a series of moves and expansions finally securing itself on its current site facing Phillips Square in 1891. This red sandstone building marked the first mercantile invasion into what was then a purely residential neighborhood. As Morgan’s business developed rapidly, other merchants set up shop on St. Catherine Street. Within seventy years, St. Catherine became the Montreal’s principal commercial artery. In the years between 1900 and the mid 1970’s, Morgan’s was to undergo a series of transformations. A total of three annexes were built, expanding the building to occupy the totality of its current site.

My intervention will thus take into account the transformations that took place in order to open up a historical discourse. Although the primary intervention will be that of an art gallery in the peripheral space of the window display, any subsequent interventions at the level of program must engage the building’s history. A detailed analysis of the building will thus direct any further dialectical interventions.

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