Melvin Charney, the distinguished Montreal architect, artist, teacher and critic died on Monday September 17 in Montreal. He is survived by his wife Ann, and their daughter Dara.

Charney was one of the few Canadian architects who succeeded in combining interests in architecture, art and the city in his artistic works and in his writings. He was the respected teacher of a number of generations of architecture students at the Universite de Montreal – until he decided to end his teaching career to concentrate on his art production – and he went on to become the creator of a whole series of monuments in Montreal, Ottawa, and elsewhere.

Among his most important works was the controversial installation “Corridart”, commissioned by the City of Montreal for the 1976 Olympics in that city, an installation that has become legendary not only for its provocative character, but also for the fact that it was destroyed during the night by the Mayor of the city that had commissioned it in the first place. Later in his career, Charney designed the garden that sits across Boulevard Rene Levesque from the historic façade of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. This is a work that I consider a summa of his ideas about architecture, art, the city and memory. 

His death regrettably occurred only months before the publication of his collected writings, a volume edited by Professor Louis Martin of UQAM, and published by McGill Queens, to which it was my personal privilege to contribute.

George Baird