The firm behind some of the province’s biggest public projects of the ‘60s and ‘70s is the subject of a new show in Montreal.

If there’s one group of architects that best represents the Quiet Revolution that swept through 1960s Quebec, it’s PGL.

The Montreal trio of Joseph Papineau, Michel Robert Le Blanc, and Guy Gérin-Lajoie established a Quebec brand of modernism through some of the province’s most visible public projects of the decade. During the ‘60s, the province created ministries of health and education, secularizing what had previously been controlled by the Catholic Church. With those reforms came “an architectural part to which [PGL] gave form,” says Louis Martin, an art history professor at Université du Québec à Montréal.

Martin is the curator behind a new exhibit at UQAM devoted to the trio’s work between 1958 (when they first formed) and 1974. During these years, PGL reaped the benefit of an economic boom supported by national and provincial spending. In Montreal, that meant not only new university and medical buildings, but a new subway and a World’s Fair, too.

PGL designed Peel station, a concrete masterpiece that debuted in time for the system’s inauguration in 1966. They also designed the Quebec Pavilion at Expo 67. The slanted glass box drew praise from New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who called it the “sleeper of the show” and compared its significance to Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. ... Afterwards, with the exception of another Metro station (Radisson, which opened in 1976), the firm mostly focused on international projects until dissolving in 1990. Some of the firm’s buildings in their home city are still holding up quite well. Martin says their University of Montreal dorm for women looks “pristine 40 years later,” and thinks of Peel as an “amazing station” with concrete columns that can be interpreted as a “modern order.”

Today, buildings like PGL’s often symbolize overreaching urban renewal initiatives of the past and, locally, what Martin refers to as “an artificial economic miracle” of the ‘60s. But, he adds, PGL will always matter “because they were the most important French-Canadian office in Montreal and trained a lot of architects. They’re the first masters of modern architecture in Quebec.”