Crossed Histories / Histoires croisées

The “Monumentals” exhibition at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris focuses on the impact of women on the postmodern city. To do so, it focuses on the personal and professional trajectories of three protagonists who, each in their own way, shaped the intellectual and physical environment of their city: journalist and architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, and American, Canadian and Italiann architects Phyllis Lambert and Gae Aulenti. All three share an ambivalent relationship with the concrete- and-steel architecture of the post-World War II modern movement, which was widely criticized in the 1960s for being alienating, standardized and anhistorical.