Architect Van Der Rohe

Mies's Montreal gas station gets new lease on life

And now it’s getting a beautiful new life.

Long, low and in his trademark black steel, the shuttered-since-2008 Esso station by Bauhaus master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, at boulevard de l’Île des Soeurs and rue Berlioz in Montreal’s Nuns’ Island community, currently lies stripped of a little of its beauty – huge sheets of glass and their associated mullions have been numbered and disassembled for restoration – but by autumn, the building will be buzzing with youth and seniors as a maison des générations

Underneath that long cantilevered roof, lead architect Eric Gauthier points to where the two glass pavilions will be rebuilt to their original 3,000- and 1,000-square-foot specifications – one room for young users and one for older ones – and laughs as he slaps one of the 12 massive columns: “These are not real I-beams,” says the 50-year-old principal at Les Architectes FABG, who was selected to restore Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome at Expo 67 in the 1990s. “They are made up I-beams with [steel] plates that have square edges. [Mies] was an aesthete: He thought, ‘I’ll do proper I-beams’… all the connections are welded, it’s a crazy way to do things.”

Crazy, perhaps, but the incredible strength from overengineering means many massive Montreal snowfalls have been shrugged off since 1968, the year of the station’s construction and one year before the architect’s death.

It’s made for an easy restoration, too. With such a robust structure, the team has concerned itself thus far with underground repairs and the installation of a new geothermal system. Other than the removal of glass and mullions, the only evidence of above-ground work is the sandblasting of brick walls in the garage area, now restored to their original buff yellow. On the underside of the roof, dozens of new fluorescent fixtures remain in their original configuration, and although Mr. Gauthier says with a chuckle, “I never thought that I would be duplicating and restoring fluorescent lighting,” he understands that the illuminated geometric “stripes” are just as crucial to the composition as the grid of crisscrossing roof beams. It’s a Mies thing, and it’s beautiful.

Between the two pavilions, Mr. Gauthier is retaining the square concrete island where the gas pumps were located. In place of each pump there will be boxes built to the same scale; these will house exhaust and intake vents for the geothermal unit. These replicas, he says, are “important to understand that it was a gas station.” The small cashier booth will be restored and will act as a key depot for an auto-share program.