Recycled Centuries – Montreal Walls – Thirteen

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Montreal is a port city founded over 375 years ago and the building materials were readily gathered from the land of the island, as well as the iron rich, sturdy slate, and granite core of this dormant volcano we live on. In the older parts of the city, the foundations were all build of these stone materials which contain such beautiful and natural colours. When building modernized and started using concrete foundations with wooden upper structures, some builders must have had the good sense to reuse the beautifully weathered stones for resurfacing the buildings. We see it a lot in rural areas where field stones of every colour are used for outer walls and stone fences. In the city, we are often seeing it when the buildings are being renovated and the manmade surfacing is removed to reveal glorious stones. Here we see the side of a building that could possibly have taken stones from their own inner foundation and walls… the pointing work seems to be well maintained and the colours you see are real… let the sun play across them and you will find various blues in the grey slate stones; mica glittering in the granite; quartz in the red-iron rocks… altogether beautiful to my eyes.

More to come…