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No n-Fiction Utopia Arvida, Cité Industrielle Made Real1

Architectural and urban historian Lucie K. > Lucie K. Morisset Morisset is a professor in the Department of urban and tourism studies at Université du Québec à Montréal. She is a member of the university's Institut du patrimoine, associate to the Canada research Chair on urban Heritage and a researcher ne cité industrielle, that milestone with Centre interuniversitaire d'études sur les Uin Western architectural and urban lettres, les arts et les traditions. Following on history, was conceived by Tony Garnier in the first decades of the 20 th cen- her work on the hermeneutics of built landscape tury. The book was first published in and urban representations, her current research 1917 and went on to enjoy a phenom- focuses on Quebec's patrimonial memory and the enal critical reception (fig. 3). Pevsner history of the province's heritage. She is currently (Pioneers in the Modern Movement), finishing up a new monograph on Arvida for Presses Banham (Theory and Design in the de l'Université du Québec. First Machine Age), Giedion (Space, Time and Architecture), and Alexander (A City is Not a Tree) have enshrined it as a classic in the evolution of urban planning: “Projet de cité idéale le plus complet depuis les Salines de Chaux” [the Saltworks of Chaux, published in L’architecture considérée sous le rap‑ port de l’art, des mœurs et de la législa‑ tion] de Ledoux, (1804)2 Cité Industrielle “practically provided a blueprint for a new type of urban centre designed around the possibilities of contempor- ary technology, new construction meth- ods and efficient transportation.”3 In the years immediately following its pub- lication and before a series of reprints later in the century, cité was noted in 1919 by Le Corbusier,4 but seems to have been most carefully considered in a 1926 article in La construction moderne, in which Pierre Bourgeix noted its phil- osophy of urban design.5 However, it is as an archetypal precursor to integrated planning,6 an approach that took hold in the wake of the Athens Charter (pub- lished in 1941), that Garnier’s influence has most readily been acknowledged. European researchers, having noted a citation of Garnier by Lewis Mumford, concluded that the Cité Industrielle must have served as a model for the development of the Hiwassee Valley by fig. 1. One of the oldest streets in Arvida, in the heart of “the city built in 135 days,” Boulevard Taschereau, now known as du Saguenay. | Photograph by guillaume St-Jean.

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the Tennessee Valley Authority between 1936 and 1940. As Mumford had collab- orated on this project, it was thought that he must have used Une cité indus‑ trielle, borrowing its “innovative” notion of regional planning (although regional planning was already part of the vocabulary at the national city plan- ning conferences in the United States, the first of which was held in 19097).

But, as we shall see, another “cité neuve,” (“new city”) to use Garnier’s vocabulary, was contemporary with the Cité Industrielle and seems to share many of the features that in Garnier have been seen as revolutionary. It was hailed both for its planning and overall design and recognized in the interwar period as “[an] example of significant advances actually executed through- out the world,” “[an] entirely new city established in the wilderness.”8 It made headlines at the time and appeared in textbooks on both sides of the Atlantic. No fewer than three university theses, two monographs, an essay, and even a novel took it as a subject, in addition to some fifty specialized architecture, engineering, economics, and sociology articles (Figs. 1, 2, 4, 5). Late in the cen- tury, the Robert II encyclopedia featured the following entry:

ARVIDA. V. industrielle du Canada (Québec) sur le Saguenay, proche de Chicoutimi. 14 500 hab. – Usine d’aluminium traitant la bauxite […], grâce à l’hydroélectricité. (Arvida: Industrial city in Quebec, Canada, on the Saguenay River near Chicoutimi. Population: 14,500. Aluminum smelter pro- cessing bauxite […] using hydroelectricity.)

Insofar as French Canadian clerical nationalist censorship in the twenties and Arvida’s critical role in the Second World War (akin to that of the Secret City—Oak Ridge, Tennessee) kept the Aluminum fig. 2. Orthographic view of present-day Arvida (now part of the City of Saguenay) as built between 1925 and 1950, centred on its aluminuum smelter. The former model city is currently the site of a major modernization initiative led by Rio Tinto Alcan, successor company to Alcan, which succeeded Alcoa as manager of the smelter. | Terra Metrics/Google. 4 JSSAC | JSÉAC 36 > No 1 > 2011 Lucie K. Morisset > analysis | analyse

fig. 3. Bird’s eye view of Cité industrielle drawn by Tony Garnier, fig. 4. The oldest street in Arvida, originally called Rue Radin, now known first published in 1917. The city stands on a rocky plateau as La Traverse, where the city’s first houses were built in 1926, next to a valley with an imposing dam. | Tony Garnier, U ne Cité industrielle, 1917. seen around 1930. | Ville de Saguenay.

fig. 5. Aerial view of Arvida from the south looking north, fig. 6. Residential district of Cité Industrielle. | Tony Garnier, U ne Cité industrielle, 1917. shortly after the Second World War. | R io Tinto Alcan (Montreal).

City off the world’s critical radar, the Arvida,11 the city created from scratch in industrial era gave new impetus to the history of its contribution to urban the Canadian backcountry in 1925 and age-old quest for living environments design has also remained incomplete. named from its founder’s names: ARthur conducive to human fulfilment. As such, With recent works like The Company VIning DAvis, president of the Aluminum Tony Garnier belongs to a long line of Towns, Company Towns in the Americas, Company of America and one of the last thinkers stretching back to Hippodamos Fordlandia and Duluth, U.S. Steel, and of the industrial utopians. of Milet and Thomas More. This is the the Forging of a Company Town9 from context in which our article intends to John S. Garner, John W. Reps, Margaret After Robert Owen’s New Lanark situate both the “cité neuve” of Arvida Crawford, and Jean-Pierre Frey10 arriving (Scotland, c. 1800), which was added and Garnier’s Cité Industrielle—mirror to enrich the critical corpus made up of to the UNESCO World Heritage List in images in the history of urban planning. such 20th century classics as The City in 2001 for having seen “the construction Indeed, the utopia given modern graphic History (1961) and The Making of Urban not only of well designed and equipped form by Cité Industrielle seems to have America (1965), it seems like a good workers’ housing but also public build- developed and taken root in a unique time to revisit the adventure in archi- ings designed to [address] their spirit- (and tangible) way in Arvida, which in tecture and urban planning that was ual as well as their physical needs,”12 the turn can only be properly understood in

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fig. 7. “Aerial plan of the Cité Industrielle project as presented at the exhibitions fig. 8. Promotional picture and map of Pullman, Illinois. | Private collection. in Rome and Paris in 1901 and 1904.” | Tony Garnier, Une Cité industrielle, 1917.

fig. 9. Yorkship Village (Camden), New Jersey, was named using fig. 10. Ford’s project at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as published in Scientific American an anagram of the name of New York Shipbuilding in 1922. Corporation. | Electus Darwin Lichtfield, architect and town planner, 1914-1917.

light of the history of ideas and ideals like those Garnier himself imagined with a resulting tendency to focus on that inspired Garnier. The comparison for his hydro-powered metallurgical certain relatively peripheral aspects. exercise we propose here aims to bet- city, that brought Arvida into being. Concrete buildings conjured links ter measure a contribution to a history For the first and undoubtedly the last between Garnier and Perret, and the of city planning that the literature has time in the history of cities, a particu- open block design used by reconstruc- heretofore attributed more exclusively lar conjunction of idealism, expertise, tion designers were traced back to the to Garnier’s Cité Industrielle, while at and exceptional geography allowed Lyonnais architect’s urban ideas to the same time placing both model cit- what remained only a dream in Europe produce a particular analytic frame- ies in a broader context. It also seeks to come to fruition in Arvida, the town work (fig. 6). As we have mentioned, to define the conditions of possibility where reality went beyond fiction. Garnier was also associated, following that other industrial cities lacked and Bourdeix, with the origin of modern Arvida possessed. After the experiences Utopias with History city planning principles according to of Badin, North Carolina, and Alcoa, which “strict segregation into separ- Tennessee, that put the Aluminum As I noted, Garnier’s impact has gen- ate zones for industry, residential and Company of American at the forefront erally been assessed according to the civic functions provided the formula for of developments in urban planning, it episteme of those who saw his work towns that would be both humane and was particular industrial preconditions, as a reflection of their own thinking, economically productive” (fig. 7).

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The European, and especially French, planning. More specifically, as the Pullman City, Illinois, where, in 1880, framework in which Cité industrielle above examples show, the relation- George Pullman commissioned architect has habitually been placed has it that ships between Cité industrielle and Solon S. Beman and landscape architect its contribution to the history of urban town planning in its familiar Frontier Nathan F. Barrett to produce an overall planning lies in its use of public space to Town America form—where we know plan for the town where his workers— promote residents’ wellbeing. In addi- Garnier for a time considered mov- his “children” as he apparently called tion, Cité industrielle is noted for the ing16—have scarcely been considered. In them—would build rail cars (fig. 8). fact that its urban and architectural plan the United States and Canada, ubiqui- Their work attracted attention as far is entirely diagrammed out, an aspect tous post-World War I housing problems away as Garnier’s Europe: discovered the 19th century utopias lack, even the engendered a lively field of research by the crowds during the 1893 Chicago renowned Garden City of Ebenezer and practice—that of the town plan- Columbian Exhibition nearby, Pullman Howard (1898). Urban historiography ner, precursor to the urban designer and City, which contained businesses, parks, has further seen Cité Industrielle’s heir to the Beaux-Arts architects who and a church, as well as row housing for intersection with 20th century modern- created the City Beautiful. At the same the prosperous industrialist’s “children,” ity as personified in the conjunction of time as Garnier was publishing his Une was dubbed “The World’s Most Perfect metallurgy and hydroelectricity that cité industrielle, the guiding principles Town” at an 1896 exhibition in Prague. calls it into being. Scholars pondered of what was then called comprehensive the astonishing realism of the project city planning—“from street pattern up” It is important to recall that—its his- before eventually tagging it as an “ideal as the expression went—were being laid toric cities aside—most North American realism” more typical of utopianism than out in textbooks such as City Planning: towns and cities were founded in the late urban design,13 at least in its predomin- The Essential Elements of a City Plan, 19th century and especially in the early ant 1930s and 40s forms, and situating Industrial Housing and Rural Planning decades of the 20th, and that, in order it in the lineage of Fourier’s phalanster- and Development, in the pages of to play the role they did in opening up ian theories.14 After extensive research, Landscape Architecture, Architectural new Canadian and American territory, fuelled by the project’s very realism, Record, American Institute of Architects they needed to be planned carefully and failed to turn up the intended site of Journal, Journal of the Town Planning holistically. They are called “planned the Cité Industrielle, many concluded Institute of Canada, Town Planning industrial towns,” “company towns,” that Garnier had meant only to pro- Review, Construction, and Architectural and sometimes “resource towns,” since pose an archetype rather than provide a Forum, and in the works of urban they were generally built around the specific solution—to illustrate the philo- designers such as Thomas Adams, Morris natural resources being exploited by sophical or architectural productions of Knowles, and John Nolen. companies penetrating ever deeper its time. At best, this would make Cité into the hinterland—hence the need for Industrielle one of the last of the great Although we find relatively few contem- worker housing. “Most new towns built dreams: “Tony Garnier,” it was said, “was porary European examples of compre- from now on,” wrote Garnier, “will focus the initiator of an entirely independent hensive and detailed city plans—with on industry.”17 The prediction certainly science of town planning and architec- buildings, functions, and institutions held true for North America, where ture, which ended with him as well.”15 all laid out and everything from the examples proliferate to negate any claim general plan to the shape of dwell- Garnier might have had to inventing, Thus apart from finding traces of the ings included—what in Garnier was say, segregated urban functions: after Lyonnais architect’s ideas in his succes- an innovation was already relatively Pullman City, the plans for Vandergrift, sors or in functionalist urban design, or common in North American by the Pennsylvania (Frederick Law Olmsted seeking the “real” Cité industrielle in 1910s. While specialized periodicals and J.C. Olmsted, 1895), and Yorkship, the southeastern France where Garnier of the time maintained, at least until New Jersey (Electus D. Lichtfield, 1914), exegetes following his own indications, the war, a certain number of more fic- to name but two, both segregate indus- went looking for it, scholars have paid tional than objective theoretical prop- trial, residential, and civic functions little attention to the relationship ositions, hands-on examples of real rationally within the urban setting, between this utopia and its materializa- North American know-how were multi- with circulation meticulously mapped tion in the real context of contemporary plying. One pioneering experiment was out between them (fig. 9).

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fig. 11. Riverside Avenue in Fordlandia. The Henry Ford Museum, published fig. 12. Eugene Haberer, bird’s eye view based on the proposed Shawinigan in Greg Grandin, Fordlandia…, p. 274. townsite plan, 1901. | Cité de l’énergie, Shawinigan.

fuelling dreams of all kinds. From Robert that, above and beyond the focus on Owen, who after New Lanark went on to detailed planning, also reflects Garnier’s found New Harmony in Indiana, to Frank Cité Industrielle in the idea of the indus- Lloyd Wright with his mythic Broadacre trial town as an integrated organism that, City, the geographic potential of the ter- rather than ignoring or fleeing industry, ritory excited the imaginations of those uses it, as well as its modern corollaries who credited agrarian settings (“nature”) (transportation, habitat, and economy) as with hygienic and even character-building a lever for individual development and virtues. We thus see not only the sudden fulfilment. Town planning and industrial appearance of agrarian utopias, but also philanthropy join forces. of urban creations, which, despite charges of paternalism levelled at them by cer- This idea of a new, modern industrial tain historians, still shared many of the Arcadia did not survive the fragmentation social aims of Garnier’s Cité Industrielle. of urban design and the Athens Charter’s To take two less familiar examples: Baie- functionalism, but did find expression Comeau, Quebec, was first conceived in a certain number of communities in the 1920s by industrialist Robert R. founded before the end of the Great McCormick and built in the 1930s as a War: Kistler, Pennsylvania (1918), Morgan pulp and paper town of some 2,000 resi- Park, Minnesota (1917), Kohler, Wisconsin dents, while Hershey Town, Pennsylvania (1913), and Fairfield, Alabama (1910) are (1924) was the chocolate-producing town some of the best known U.S. examples of fig. 13. One of the Eclipse Park (Beloit, Wisconsin) created by industrialist Milton Hershey. It company towns that inherited, through house models as published in 1918 by became a popular tourist attraction and urban planning, this combination of Lawrence Veiller in a series of articles 19 in The Architectural Record, entitled billed as “the sweetest place on earth […], industry and a supportive environment. “Industrial Housing Developments in where the streets are lined with Hershey’s That this idea should inspire the great America.” Kisses-shaped street lights,” as well as a industrialists of the period is hardly sur- “model town [built] for employees and prising. We find Henry Ford promoting his With industrial development, the concept their families so they have an attractive “seventy-five-mile-long-city” at Muscle of model city became, in North America, place to live, work, and play.”18 Starting Shoals, Alabama, next to a hydroelectric an instrument of territorial conquest, at the beginning of the century, there is a development, that would free up “one with vast expanses of undeveloped land concrete paradigm shift in North America million workers” from local trusts, make

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fig. 14. Street in Arvida today. | Photograph by lucie K. Morisset. fig. 15. Street in Arvida today. | Photograph by Guillaume St-Jean.

them rich, and in Ford’s words, provide leaving the landscape littered with, as Jersey, (1917) where industrialist and phil- an opportunity “to eliminate war from one commentator harshly put it, “centres anthropist William Lyall promised an ideal the world.”20 Frank Lloyd Wright himself without cities” and “cities without cen- city in which both unskilled and skilled would say in 1922 of the seventy-five- tres.” Beyond the urban utopias that had workers would have access to homes, mile-long city that it was “one of the best marked the preceding centuries and left parks, and community services designed things”21 he had ever heard of (fig. 10). historical if not material traces, the first by the most prominent town planners years of the American 20th century seem of the period (notably John Nolen, Ford’s Alabama project would founder on to have been characterized by a phenom- Morris Knowles, William Somerville, and Congress’s refusal to concede Tennessee enon of such proportions that a name had George B. Post), was thus famously aban- River exploitation and development to be created for it: the “paper city.” This doned after the construction of only a few rights to the company.22 His next utopian was the work of an illustrator or town houses, funds having been exhausted.24 project, Fordlandia, was actually built on planner commissioned by a company or Similarly, plans for Eclipse Park in Beloit, a two million hectare parcel of land that group of industrialists to produce a plan, announced in 1917 by the Fairbanks Ford acquired in Brazil. The would-be not so much to provide workers with bet- Morse Company as a new city of 40,000, rubber-producing megalopolis also illus- ter conditions or found a town, but simply styled as the “Typically American Garden trates a few gaps in Ford’s grasp of the to entice investors with an impressive lay- Village” and noted by critic Lawrence reality of urban design, as well as perhaps out. Shawinigan, Quebec, home of com- Veiller for its forty different models of a certain as yet unresolved discrepancy panies such as the Pittsburgh Reduction luxurious houses (fig. 13), was reduced between theory and practice. Historians Company (later Aluminum Company of before construction began to a neigh- tend to attribute Ford’s failure in the for- America), Shawinigan Water and Power bourhood of about 300 houses reserved ests of the Amazon to the geographic, Company, and Belgo Canadian Pulp for white employees only. Only 80 were social, and cultural disconnect between Company, remained for the most part just eventually built.25 Ford’s American world view and the such a paper city: the plans ordered by the tropical wilderness environment, where Shawinigan Water and Power Company The situation of Cité Industrielle, which his “typically American-as-apple-pie” and magnificently represented in a bird’s- Garnier himself qualified as “imagination wooden houses produced, it is said, a eye view to impress the electricity-using sans réalité” (“not real”), is thus hardly most singular impression (fig. 11).23 industry never to that extent saw the light unique, at least in its status as paper city— of day (fig. 12). Other comparable projects insofar as the term can even be applied. Although their numbers multiplied in ran up against changed material circum- By expanding the frame of reference North America, many of these town stances with the rising prices of the First beyond the heritage of European archi- plans had only a marginal real-life impact, World War: the plans for Allwood, New tectural design through which Garnier’s

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fig. 16. Street in Alcoa, Tennessee, circa 1920. | Blount County Genealogical and Historical Society.

fig. 18. Drawing by John Richard Rowe of the Shipshaw Power Station, now known as Chute-à-Caron, published in the magazine Pencil Points fig. 17. Layout for Arvida factories as built in 1929. The first four potrooms in August 1929. It was the first power plant built by the Aluminum brought on stream can be seen beside the electrode factory to the Company of Canada. The plans were by the Pittsburgh architects Benno south. The slag ore plant is at the lower right. Within 15 years, the Janssen and William York Cocken. It was inaugurated in 1931. smelter, conscripted for the war effort, expanded to occupy all the space set aside for it here. The slag ore (dry process) plant had by then been converted to a Bayer refinery. It was designed according to plans by architect James Curzey Meadowcroft and equipped with Söderbergh potrooms, the most modern type of their time. | R io Tinto Alcan (Montreal).

vision has traditionally been interpreted, this “not real” city was nothing of the in announcing its creation, expressed in we see it clearly as a creature of its time: a sort. It took form as what the French the Journal of the Town Planning Institute one-off encounter between social utopia, urban design historian Pierre Lavedan of Canada as “an opportunity to create a urban planning, and modern industry. It is would describe in 1956 as “the aluminum town which will meet the ideal of perfec- true that as late as 1918, one of the “fath- city,” a full-fledged example of a “factory tion which all town planners cherish,” was ers” of industrial urban design, Thomas city,” with the layout “of the freest pos- for once kept. Adams, known from the national city sible design.”27 This is the Canadian city planning conferences where he served of Arvida, long recognized in the United Thus even as Ford was abandoning his as the first secretary of the Garden City States as the “most outstanding social seventy-five-mile-long-city for wont of Association before emigrating from achievement”28 of one of the richest and hydroelectricity to power his industrial Great Britain to found the Town Planning most active industrialists in 20th century utopia, Davis was acquiring “1,340,000 Institute of Canada, wrote that “We have America: Arthur Vining Davis, president of horsepower [100 000 kW] of probably not failed to build wholesome industrial the Aluminum Company of America from the cheapest hydro-electric power on the communities; we have not tried to build 1910 to 1957, who also provided the ana- North American continent”30 on Quebec’s them.”26 Was this an implicit response to gram for its name out of the first two let- Saguenay River. Fresh from his experience Garnier’s proposal? An indirect acknow- ters of his three names. This “Washington in Alcoa, Tennessee, where the Aluminum ledgment that Cité Industrielle was yet of the North” and “Jewel of the North Company of America had, beginning in to come? Let us continue our explora- Canada Steppe” was already a model city 1919, built 700 houses in three years tions on either side of the Atlantic and from its beginnings and quickly became and, as earlier in Badin, North Carolina, outside the admittedly dated modernist “famous as an example of community where he caused a sensation by includ- historiography. Only a few years later, housing”29 (figs. 14-15). The promise made ing housing for black workers (fig. 16),

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fig. 19. Isle-Maligne power plant as seen in 1938. Plans by engineer W.S. Lee. fig. 20. Birdseye view of the “qu artier des Anglais” in Kénogami, It was the Aluminum Company of America’s first in the Saguenay–Lac- around 1920. | Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Saint-Jean area. | Library and Archives Canada.

Davis wanted to break new ground, tak- hardly surprising: around the integrated designed to house workers for an indus- ing to new and even greater heights the smelter, where incidentally he aimed not trial operation. In the immediate region, company he had built into an enormous only to reduce aluminum in some forty Arvida is a successor to Val-Jalbert (1899), multinational and world’s largest produ- potrooms, but also to employ a new Kénogami (1912), Port-Alfred (1915), cer of aluminum. Arvida was to be the and experimental process to extract and Riverbend (1923), and Dolbeau (1927) company’s first aluminum plant in vir- refine local bauxite (fig. 17), he had laid (fig. 20). But just as Cité Industrielle stands gin territory,31 a “longed-for opportun- out a “new city” without precedent on apart from the utopias that preceded it, ity to begin at the beginning,”32 as the North American soil, where everything, Arvida’s resemblance to ordinary company planning journal described it. As such, it from streetlights to worker housing, had towns ends there. It differs in its planning was provided with an unusual array of been planned out and elegantly dia- and resulting urban forms as well as in its services: together with the school system grammed to the last detail (fig. 18). The layout and landscaping and in the way it and cultural, social, and sports activities scale of this industrial utopia invariably came into being as a construction project extensively cited by commentators, it evokes another: Garnier’s, and not merely unprecedented in method and scale to employed from the beginning a convin- in their shared hydroelectric plant, trans- produce a genuine model city providing cing reformist discourse and an egali- oceanic port, and metallurgical produc- workers with an incomparable habitat— tarian vision that disavowed the social tion facility to refine local ore. one of the high points of architectural and racial segregation typical of com- history. The town also stands out for its pany towns. The Aluminum Company of “ A city built in 135 days, without marvellous state of preservation. It was America president’s attachment to Arvida ever having known the slums and meticulously protected by its parent com- has been well documented by historians ugliness of haphazard growth, pany, the Aluminum Company of America and is attested by a number of con- and where the construction and its subsidiary the Aluminum Company temporary sources: Edwin S. Fickes, the required no tearing down”34 of Canada, later Alcan, well beyond the company’s chief engineer, sent to the – Harold Wake, Arvida construction 1940s and 50s, when Arvida, world alum- Saguenay to oversee the city’s construc- superintendent inum capital, would join the pantheon tion, recalled Davis’s unflinching desire of industrial cities, just as it became one to “make it a desirable place in which Located just upstream from the hydro- of the most closely guarded secrets of to live at reasonable cost. Mr. Davis […] electric station that prefigured its cre- the British Commonwealth and one of properly insisted that no pains should be ation, the most powerful in the world Canada’s best protected sites, producing spared to this end.”33 Davis also said he at the time (fig. 19), and nestled around the very “flying vehicles” imagined by wanted to build a tower from which he its smelter, Arvida was typical of North Garner and crucial to the outcome of the could look out over his model city. This is America company towns in that it was Second World War.

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meeting records; a number of theses and historical research papers; a var- iety of contemporaneous reports; and a relatively abundant correspondence, all housed in a dozen or more archival col- lections in Canada and the United States. It is these records, along with the city as it exists today, that have served as our guides through this epic of urban planning, of which this article maps out some of the high points. In addition to a lithographed and published overall plan in black and white and in colour (fig. 21), there is a model illustrating the scale of the project. It depicts a city harnessing the river torrents and spread- ing out across the benchlands above the river, not far from the older settlements fig. 21. Attributed to Hjalmar E. Skougor, colour lithograph of the Arvida plan, 1925-1926. | Ville de Saguenay. of Jonquière and Kénogami (fig. 22). Arvida, again like Cité Industrielle, would be connected to these settlements as well as to raw material production and distribution networks by a railway run- ning along the plain, linking the gigantic smelter to transoceanic port and lavish city, running like clockwork and lovely as a work of art.

Is there any connection other than mere providence linking Cité industrielle to Arvida? What did Arvida’s creators know fig. 22. Scale model of Arvida, 1925-1926: this model is like a three-dimensional transposition of Cité of their imaginary predecessor’s author? Industrielle, with its residential area, downtown, smelter, hydroelectric facilities, and river. The “old town” (the industrial town of Kénogami) is seen to the left near the outflow of a small industrial building probably representing a pulp mill. | Société historique du Saguenay, photograph by Paul Laliberté. The French Connection

Arvida was essentially built in three dedicated to the efficient operation of a While Lyon in the 1910s was a hub for city broad phases: 1925 to 1935, 1936 to 1942, prosperous metallurgical industry fuelled planning ideas,35 the flow and exchange and the period up to 1950. Carved out by massive hydroelectric development. of information between North America, of the natural surroundings it absorbed, Europe, and France was increasing in the it shares more than a few similarities Like Garnier’s “not real” creation, days of Cité Industrielle and Arvida, par- with Garnier’s Cité Industrielle: the two Arvida’s legacy includes an outstanding ticularly in the specialized and relatively projects are both “total cities,” from documentary record preserving not just circumscribed field of town and city the street layout and functional zon- the plans for, but also the construction planning. One of the first to publish the ing all the way down to the design of of the city. Arvida’s records are in fact lithographed plan for Arvida was in fact a each house. Garnier and the Aluminum far more extensive. They include some German city planner, Werner Hegemann, Company of America both conjured 2,000 sheets of plans; high-quality draw- who immigrated to New York City in 1933 an urban centre glittering with lavish ing; hundreds of films, photographs, bro- and whose transatlantic travels were the buildings and imposing avenues, yet chures, newspaper and journal article; subject of an important essay. 36 Also

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fig. 25. Reduced plan for Eclipse Park (Beloit, WI), George B. Post and Sons, as fig. 23. Aerial view of Badin, North Carolina, post-1920, on the site previously published in 1918 by Lawrence Veiller in the magazine Architectural identified by the French company and its subsidiary, the Southern Record.c The ontour street system, which was beginning to spread at the Aluminum Company, for an aluminum smelter of unprecedented size. time, was used here. The part of the plan to the left of the monumental See the “quadraplexes”, as they are named there, designed for the central axis was never built: a shopping centre and parking lot ended French company, possibly by New York’s engineers Pierson and Goodrich. up occupying that area. They became typical locally despite being more characteristic of the semidetached housing of European industrial towns. The Aluminum Company of America described them as “not good as houses, nor the type that the Company wished to provide for its employees.” | Alcoa Archives, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania Archives, Library and Archives Division, Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh (PA).

fig. 24. Orthographic view of the Maria Elena mine and town, built in Chile by fig. 26. “Airport-Docks for New York,” Harry B. Brainerd, architect: a proposal for the Guggenheim Brothers according to plans by Harry B. Brainerd and an intermodal port next to the city to facilitate access to intercity trans- Hjalmar E. Skougor, 1926. | Digital Globe/Google. portation, particularly the new airplanes. | Science and Mechanics, November 1931. notable was the path followed by Thomas returning to Great Britain to found the northeastern United States from 1910 Adams37—the manager of Letchworth, Institute of Landscape Architects (1937). on.38 He was a ubiquitous vector of con- the “first” Garden City—who, in addi- The travels of French architect Jacques tamination, turning his observations into tion to founding the Town Planning Gréber are similarly familiar: known a monumental work, published in 1920 Institute of Canada (1914) and managing mainly in his own country as the master under the title “Architecture in the United the New York Regional plan (1923-1930), architect of the 1937 Paris International States, with the curious subtitle “Evidence also designed several new towns before Exhibition, Gréber crisscrossed the of the expansion capability of the French

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in North Carolina built from 1911 under the stewardship of Adrien Badin, direc- tor of Compagnie des produits chimiques d’Alais et de la Camargue (later known as Pechiney). Badin had also been mayor of the first aluminum-producing town of Salindres, where Pechiney was estab- lished, some 250 kilometres downstream from Lyon, at the same time that Garnier’s patron, Édouard Herriot, was mayor there, and also headed Aluminium Français, the cartel he had launched to bring together France’s five aluminum companies, and its subsidiary Southern Aluminum Company, established in the United Stated in 1912.46 The North Carolina town was named Badinville or Badin, and its similarities to Garnier’s Cité Industrielle are strik- fig. 27. Attributed to Harry Beardslee Brainerd, “Perspective of Business District, Town of Arvida Province ing, including, considering the change of Quebec, Canada, 1926.” As in Garnier’s Cité Industrielle, the “most important street originates at the project underwent,47 the location of the train station” and “the neighbourhood around the train station is reserved primarily for […] hotels, department stores, etc., so that the rest of the town can be free of tall buildings.” | Rio Tinto its dam, hydroelectric station, aluminum Alcan (Saguenay). smelter, and residential district (fig. 23). genius.”39 Although we find scarcely any Law Olmsted and inaugural chair of the Noteworthy aspects include the town- signs of French urban design projects Arvida Planning Committee, with which site’s location on a plateau, its position migrating to American soil, the chapter he completed a number of landscape above the smelter, its relationship to the “Community Housing: Garden Cities, architecture projects in the 1940s, had, if nearby older settlement of Palmerville Worker Cities”40 discusses the “methodical not necessarily become fast friends, cer- echoing Cité industrielle’s “ville ancienne” organization”41 of planning with respect tainly met around the drafting table at (“old town”) represented by Garnier to certain aspects that, as we shall see, Canada’s Federal District Commission,45 and the granite mines acquired by the are particularly significant to our story: where they worked together planning Southern Aluminum Company near the 48 the City of Ottawa. townsite. (“There are also mines in the 49 Thanks to powerful means of produc- region,” Garnier had written). A number tion in the service of flawless methods of Could the idea found in Une cité indus‑ of particularities still found in Badin also organization, Americans have, in recent trielle, either prior or subsequent to belong more to Cité Industrielle and its years, made enormous strides in the con- Garnier’s publication, have followed such European context than to town planning struction of economical housing for large channels? in the United States: amongst them, the groups. They have mass-produced not the quadraplexes built by the French company 50 houses themselves, but the materials for In the relatively globalized sphere of to house its employees, usual in Europe, constructing them, making it possible to resource industries, and especially alum- but very uncommon in America, and standardize rationally without monotony.42 inum—that “magic metal of the 20th cen- pathways through lots, between houses, tury” whose lightness and conductivity or, as Garnier wrote: We note incidentally that Gréber, held such immense promise if only the Adams, and Edward Bennett, coauthor tremendous amounts of energy required […] the built area must always be less of the 1909 Plan of Chicago (in which for reducing the metal through elec- than half the total surface area, the rest many have pointed out French influ- trolysis could be secured—American of the lot becoming a public garden for ped- ences43), Noulan Cauchon, who would and French interests had crossed paths estrians; that is, each building must leave give a notable talk in Arvida itself,44 and more than once. In 1915, the Aluminum on the unbuilt part of its lot an unimpeded Frederick G. Todd, student of Frederick Company of America took over facilities passage from the street to the building

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situated at the back. This arrangement French foundations, likewise have had allows circulation through town in any dir- contact with Cité Industrielle? ections independent of the streets which one no longer needs follow; the land of the In addition to being built under the town as a whole is like a large park, with no supervision of engineering superintend- enclosing walls to limit the ground.51 ent Harold R. Wake, who until then had been managed the company’s real estate Was Garnier familiar with the Aluminium services in Badin, Victor J. Hultquist, who Français undertaking together with had performed with distinction during France’s leading industrial companies, the construction of Alcoa, Tennessee,55 which promised, specifically through this and Edwin Stanton Fickes, who is cred- Yadkin River settlement, to make France ited of a contribution to the town plan the world’s leading aluminum produ- of Alcoa and who from 1901 did about cer,52 and has been described as “prob- everything for the company, from build- fig. 28. “Arvida – Business District”: plan by Harry ably the largest, and most ambitious, ing plants to rethinking the aluminum Beardslee Brainerd establishing the French Investment in pre-World War I production process, Arvida was in 1925- downtown area between two ravines and setting out building dimensions and the 53 America” ? Given that the Aluminum 1926 the work of two main planners. arrangement of roadways, including the Company of America itself undertook One, Harry Beardslee Brainerd (1887- “viaduct to cathedral.” | University of Oregon Library, collection Richard Haviland Smythe. to build in Badin a model city remark- 1977), was a New York-based architect, able in many regards, and that Arthur theorist, and town planner, known at Vining Davis and Adrien Badin com- the time for having drafted the plans municated with each other,54 is it pos- for the Chilean industrial town of María sible to conjecture that the ideals of Elena (fig. 24), and noted for his work Cité Industrielle circulated on the North developing and testing theories of the American frontier—and made their way nascent discipline of city planning in a from Aluminium Français to Arvida? number of thoroughfares plans, reports, In addition to the likely intersection and other zoning primers and city plans, of the spheres of influence of Adrien notably for Cleveland, Ohio.56 During his Badin, with his plans to relaunch the town planning apprenticeship with the aluminum industry through a spectacu- firm of Murphy and Dana, he probably lar undertaking, and Paul Héroult, the took part in the residential develop- well-known French inventor of the elec- ment of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he trolytic reduction process, who went to became a consulting architect with the stay in Whitney to supervise the building City Planning Commission in 1927. While of Badinville, and Garnier, who imagined at the New York firm of George B. Post the renewal of the planned city under and Sons, he undoubtedly helped design the aegis of metallurgical industry and the paper city of Eclipse Park (Beloit, hydroelectricity, the similarities, scale, Wisconsin) with its forty model dwellings fig. 29. Plan of Chicago, Proposed Boulevard. Jules Guérin for Daniel Hudson Burnham et al., and contemporaneity of Cité Industrielle and its urban layout combining a vast, Commercial Club of Chicago, 1909. and its North Carolina cousin constitute solemn mall in the City Beautiful style convincing circumstantial evidence. and picturesque residential streets grace- Garnier’s Une cité industrielle, first edi- fully winding along the topographic con- tion, to which he would have had access. It is likewise unlikely that Garnier was tours (fig. 25), and was noted in 1931 for He studied at Columbia under Harvey unaware of North American resource proposing an ingenious system of airport Wiley Corbett (1873-1954), who had towns in general. Could the creators docks for New York City (fig. 26). He had graduated from École des beaux-arts de of Arvida, following as they did in the completed his architectural education at Paris in 1900 and was thus a former col- footsteps of the Aluminum Company of New York’s Columbia University where league of Garnier, who had received the America’s settlement built on Badin’s the library catalogue shows a copy of Prix de Rome there in 1901.

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Nothing in all this militates against a possible connection between Arvida and Cité Industrielle. Indeed, Garnier’s think- ing is all over the Arvida project, with its classical notions of beauty and its utili- tarian concern for traffic flows, hygiene, and economy. The lithographed Arvida plan of course in no way neglects urban functionality, yet, curiously, it is oriented with the south at the top rather than on the bottom, favouring pictorial compos- ition over conventional usage. The colour design thus circumscribes and apportions residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial functions, finely divides the

fig. 30. “Perspectives: Townsite houses,” C2 and C3, Aluminum Company of Canada, 1927. | Ville de Saguenay. plan of lots, and creates a hierarchy of transportation corridors cut into the lush natural landscape in a highly characteris- tic style confirmed in its quasi-Vetruvian The other, Hjalmar Ejnar Skougor, in Rome.60 Other possible participants windrose design, legend, and title block. Brainerd’s partner, is credited with the in the Arvida plan, according to recently If this beaux-arts aesthetic seems in 1925 lithographed plan of Arvida as well as the uncovered documents,61 are civil engineer somewhat dated, it at least explains the original design for most of the houses. D.L. Turner,62 and most importantly archi- drawings’ expressive quality and refine- He seems to have been known for his tect James Gamble Rogers II (1901-1990), ment, also incidentally shared with the expertise in house design.57 Skougor had who designed the elevations of 24 Arvida plates of Une cité industrielle: alongside previously attracted attention from his house models. He was the son of archi- the meticulous drawing seen in the alum- compatriots by proposing moving side- tect John Arthur Rogers (1870-1934) and inum city’s lithographed plan and the walks for New York City, inspired, he said, worked with his father in the 1920s in perspectives of its seventeen house types by the examples seen at the 1900 Paris Daytona, Florida, going on to design the (fig. 30), we find the plan views favoured International Exhibition.58 residential architecture of Winter Park, a by Garnier echoed in the spectacular per- Florida resort for industrialists on the east spectives used to trace out Arvida’s busi- Two other architects can be added to coast of the United States, where he set ness district (figs. 27-28). the list of Arvida’s inventors: New Yorker up an office in 1928, and where Arthur Richard Haviland Smythe (1899-1965), Vining Davis may have met him. Although This evocation of Versailles, as well as known for having designed a number of there are no other documents attesting the monumental flourishes common to real estate development projects,59 had to Rogers’ contribution to Arvida, at both the Arvida plan’s diagonal layout collaborated with Brainerd and Skougor least one of the house types there bears and the depictions of Cité Industrielle, previously, and the collection of his work a strong resemblance to a Winter Park can also be seen in, to take the best- at University of Oregon has plans for building, of which we have a signed plan. known examples, Walter Burleigh “workmen’s houses” of what was called At the very least, it attests to a certain Griffin’s plan for Canberra, Australia the “Sycamore type,” identical to the similarity between his style and that of (1912-1918) and above all in the plan of staff houses built in Arvida for city and Arvida’s designers.63 Rogers does not seem Chicago (1909) drafted by Jules Guérin smelter construction workers, as well as to have any significant French, Parisian, or for Burnam and Bennett (fig. 29). Garnier a plan for the Arvida business district Lyonnais connections, with the exception could scarcely have been unaware of signed by Brainerd in the latter’s own of his uncle, the architect James Gamble these two projects. In this same City hand. Smythe had also graduated from Rogers (1867-1946), who was also a con- Beautiful lineage elaborated at Chicago’s Columbia and subsequently completed temporary of Tony Garnier at École des Columbian Exhibition, both Arvida a fellowship at the American Academy beaux-arts de Paris, graduating in 1898. and Cité Industrielle have ties to a still

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more celebrated project begun in 1901, the reworking of the original French plans for Washington, D.C. (1791). The authorities at Aluminum Company of America specifically referred to Major Pierre‑Charles L’Enfant’s “paper city” in outlining the relationship between Arvida and “Washington, today one of the world’s most beautiful cities, tomor- row the most beautiful.”64

Other contemporaneous written descrip- tions of Arvida refer instead to Ebenezer Howard, promising “The First Garden City of Canada.” This is hardly surpris- ing, given the influence Thomas Adams fig. 31. The Aluminum Company of America’s Pittsburgh archives preserve numerous winter and summer had at the time over the Journal of the images from photo essays on Arvida showing the city, houses, the smelter and refinery buildings inside and out, as well as a few street scenes like this one. | Alcoa Archives, Historical Society of Western Town Planning Institute of Canada where Pennsylvania Archives, Library and Archives Division, Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh (PA). this pledge appeared. Still more specif- ically, the Garden City model is echoed construction and probably the most cred- intended, thus bringing Arvida more in the very act that constitutes Arvida’s ible source, writes in the November 1926 in line both with Howard’s ideal and birth: the acquisition by the Aluminum issue of the Engineering Journal of a city Garnier’s model, which was more con- Company of America in August 1925 of between 30,000 and 40,000 residents. temporary and realistic, at least in its of specifically 6,000 acres (2,400 ha) urban design aspects. In any case, this of land—precisely what Howard had What conclusions can we draw from drive for publicity and concern for quan- prescribed for his Garden Cities of these convergences and divergences? tification demonstrates the necessity for To‑Morrow (1902). Although Letchworth First, it is undeniable that, without spe- Arvida to differentiate itself from com- (the first Garden City built on Howard’s cifically referring to each other, Arvida peting capital projects of the day, and principles) was designed for 32,000 resi- and Garnier’s Cité Industrielle share the a fortiori from the paper cities that had dents (the similarity to Garnier’s city for same ambitions and certain frames of disappointed so many investors. It was “35,000 inhabitants” has been noted), reference. Second, and this is confirmed no accident that the New York Times Arvida was initially intended for 50,000, by the flurry of superlatives deployed went so far as to announce, in 1926, closer to Welwyn Garden City, founded throughout North America in announ- an inspection of the Aluminum Town more recently. This population figure, cing the creation of this “world centre by “American and Canadian corpora- however, taken from an article entitled of aluminum production,”65 the city tion presidents and financial and indus- “Our capital aids Canadian industry” in planned by the Aluminum Company of trial executives” to attest to the town’s the New York Times of September 27, America in the Canadian hinterland is growth, or that the Aluminum Company 1926, is not agreed upon by everyone. an object of representation first and of America produced a series of photo Amidst ads for share, bond, and sink- foremost. It is therefore more likely essays providing further evidence to the ing fund issues, the editor of Canadian that the proposal for 50,000 residents, work’s truly being underway (fig. 31). Machinery and Manufacturing News, at a time when most of the world’s cities returning from a visit to the Arvida site numbered closer to half that, was meant It is this background of capitalist fer- in August 1926, speaks of a city of 25,000 to associate the power bonds issued by ment which probably explains the mul- to 30,000 residents; the Ottawa Citizen Davis’s company with the success of Gary, tiple virtues attributed to Arvida: Wake mentions 40,000 in the summer of 1925; Indiana, with its population of 50,000, noted Davis’s obsession with advertis- and the July 1928 Financial Post gives a than to reflect Arvida’s actual aims. The ing on a number of occasions. We note figure between 30,000 et 50,000. Harold average of 35,000, an oft-cited figure, is that although Arvida’s developers rarely Wake, the engineer superintendent of likely closer to what the planners really pass up the opportunity to buttress their

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project with an impressive reference, calling cards too: in Badin, as we have “In our case, the determining their failure to mention Garnier’s Cité seen, the company set forth a storm of factor is a rushing stream that Industrielle is not necessarily signifi- commentary with its unorthodox egali- supplies energy”70 cant. None of the American or Canadian tarian attitude, as we have seen, toward – Tony Garnier, Une cité industrielle articles we have examined do so either, “coloured people.” which not only tends to corroborate the What then would draw the Aluminum views of Garnier exegetes regarding the This is the company that in 1925 Company of America to a place “450 miles tepid critical response to Garnier’s pro- announced plans to build on the North of Boston”? There is of course the ject in the first years after its publica- Saguenay River the third largest city in industry’s hunger for hydroelectricity— tion, but renders the presence of a first Quebec—behind Montreal (618,506 resi- the “low cost power at tide water” whose edition copy of Garnier’s book in the dents in 1921) and Quebec City (95,193) abundance lifted the reason in what Columbia University library all the more but far ahead of Sherbrooke (23,515) and the period called the “power towns.” significant. Although the developments Trois-Rivières (22,267).68 It is hardly sur- Not long before Aluminum Company and connections between Garnier’s Cité prising that the project made headlines: of America, the American industrialist Industrielle and its forebears and succes- while the premier of the province was James Buchanan Duke—tobacco magnate sors clearly remain to be explored in the announcing that the company would and pioneer of hydroelectricity in North North American context, the economic be paying “$15,000 in wages per day Carolina (in 1904 he started operating situation in which we find no references to its employees” and establishing “the a power station on the Catawba River to that project in the discourse around world’s biggest aluminum plant,”69 local some fifty kilometres from Badin)—had Arvida do not disprove a link between and national newspapers were trum- found and spectacularly developed these these two “industrial cities.” In fact, the peting the investment of $75 million. hydroelectric resources at Isle-Maligne, economic circumstances explain why where the enormous reservoir of Lac- Arvida does not equal, but rather mani- An ideal site, unprecedented energy Saint-Jean drains into the river. Henry fests Cité Industrielle to which the North potential, a new and prosperous indus- Ford was probably another industrial- American project gave reality. “Imitation try, and 35,000 residents: on this the ist drawn to the hydroelectric potential of a model,” wrote researcher André industrial city was founded. Still it was Duke had developed. Even as he was Corboz, “occurs selectively.”66 necessary, “450 miles north of Boston” attempting to obtain exploitation rights as the Aluminum Company of America to the Tennessee River and take control It is time to consider the “organisation directors put it, to attract workers and of aluminum production for his cars, he systématique” noted by Gréber, in search staff—and to retain them once part of could have been manoeuvring through a of conditions of fulfilment that Garnier’s the local labour pool with other com- vague partnership with Baush Machine “not real” city leaves unmet. pany towns already springing up. It Tool Company, which in 1924 had con- was not enough to charm investors, tracted for Isle-Maligne electricity.71 Arvida, Cité Industrielle workers needed charming too. So the What would Ford’s industrial utopias have company wasted no time getting to become on Canadian soil, one wonders. If the American paper cities—and the work on this “real” city, as attested by But it was Arthur Vining Davis and the various social and urban utopias that the exceptional measures of the March Aluminum Company of America that got marked earlier centuries—were largely 1926 Arvida charter, adopted to make the exploitation and development rights, left on the drawing table, it may be sure the company controlled the urban following two years of negotiations and because there were few companies like landscape. the eventual intervention of Andrew W. the Aluminum Company of America. At Mellon,72 U.S. treasury secretary from 1921 the beginning of the 1920s, the youth- We will now, using Tony Garnier’s to 1932 and a major aluminum share- ful, dynamic multinational had assets of words, look at how this “real” city in holder. The company bought participation close to $200 million and controlled over the Saguenay brought his “not real” city in what was at the time called the “Upper 30 companies busily involved in mining to tangible life. The next sections of this Development” (fig. 32), by opposition to bauxite and electrolyzing, transforming, article will outline the principal motifs of the “Lower Development” downstream. transporting, and selling aluminum in the project alongside the themes Garnier Then, after obtaining its first mega- every corner of the world.67 It had other used in describing his “not real” idea. watts from the “Upper Development” at

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fig. 32. Plan view, circa 1925, of the Lac Saint-Jean outflow with the Isle-Maligne fig. 33. The Saguenay River hydroelectric facilities around 1952. Plans date power plant and hydroelectric facilities designed by hydraulic engineer back to 1925 from the Aluminum Company of America and were William S. Lee. | Alcoa Archives, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania Archives, Library and completed by the Aluminum Company of Canada with the inauguration Archives Division, Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh (PA). of the Shipshaw II power plant and dam (foreground) in 1942. The first of the two plants, Chute-à-Caron, with its gravity dam, put into operation in 1931, is seen in the background upstream. The two spectacular projects successively created the most powerful generating station in their respective days. | Library and Archives Canada.

Isle-Maligne, the Aluminum Company of years, if not of all times.”73 To dam the Bauxite.75 However, this only partially America went on to build the most power- 30 metre wide river, a “precast concrete explains the choice of the Saguenay ful station in the world for its own use dam” was built on the shore and toppled location, as the company already had an at the “Lower Development” of Chute- with dynamite into the river. It weighed operation in Shawinigan. Although alum- à-Caron, with “1,340,000 horsepower close to 10,000 tons and was 28 metres inum production requires electricity, its of probably the cheapest hydroelectric high (figs. 33-34). ore, bauxite, must undergo two succes- power on the North American continent sive processes: alumina must be refined […].” This station was designed by engin- Although the company’s decision to set or extracted, then be reduced in solution eer James W. Rickey who, it should be up shop in the Canadian hinterland is with cryolite and calcium fluoride through noted, was previously stationed in Badin partly explained by the impossibility of electrolysis in a smelter. Because the high where, apparently building on the French transporting electricity over long distan- cost of refining bauxite, a single refinery idea to combine several stations (at least ces, the location had much to commend can be used to feed a large number of two downstream the Yadkin River from it. For Garnier, “the determining reason smelters. At the beginning of the 1920s, the Whitney dam), he proposed an hydro- for the establishment of a similar city the Aluminum Company of America— electric scheme very close to the one could be the proximity of raw materials, after dropping the French project to build that would take place in Arvida, where the existence of a natural energy source both an alumina plant and a smelter in the gravity dam of Chute-à-Caron in fact easily harnessed for industry, or the con- Badin76—mainly depended on a refinery echoes the one previously completed by venience of modes of transportation.”74 built before the war in East Saint Louis, the Aluminium Company of America at Aluminum Company of America and Illinois, to supply alumina to its smelters the Narrows, near Badin. The hydroelec- Alcan chroniclers have stressed certain in Niagara Falls and Massena, New York; tric station there was also, as would be legal requirements requiring the company Shawinigan, Quebec; Alcoa, Tennessee; Chute-à-Caron, the most powerful of its to establish a bauxite refinery on British and Badin, North Carolina. This may time. However, the building of Chute-à- territory before 1929 in exchange for a explain why by the mid-1920s the com- Caron was orchestrated in a feat “[taking 1916 operating lease in British Guyana pany had still not satisfied its obligations its] place with the notable pieces of recent conceded to its subsidiary Demerara under the Guyanese lease.

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fig. 34. This prodigious Saguenay River hydroelectric development plan, from Isle-Maligne (upper left) to Shipshaw II (lower right), displays the area’s potential in a luxuriant perspective that highlights the glittering smelter. | Alcoa Archives, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania Archives, Library and Archives Division, Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh (PA).

However, in grappling with constant ores, like those of the Arkansas mines contemporary postcards show as featur- bauxite supply problems in the days when that had allowed Aluminum Company ing decorative columns (fig. 35) ordered aluminum production was still gener- of America to break free of German and by Davis, was in fact probably needed ally based on experimental techniques, other outsourced alumina. However, the to supply the large number of potrooms the innovative Aluminum Company of uncertain success of the dry process and planned for—and built—in Arvida. The America—“born on research,”77 as it developments in the 1910s motivated the plans for this plant show us that that was said—had since the 19 th century company to switch its focus to adapting “450 miles north of Boston,” the advan- ceaselessly improved the processes for the Bayer process to American bauxite, tages of the site countered its remote- extracting alumina from various grades and most of the experimental dry process ness to back up the promise to establish (i.e., bauxite with higher or lower refineries were abandoned or, in the case “the world’s biggest aluminum industry.” silica or iron content), and concentra- of the East Saint Louis refinery, converted In the final analysis, it was self-evident tions (i.e., aluminum content) of baux- to the Bayer process. that, around this autarkic refinery, a ite. Charles Martin Hall, the American city on a similar scale deserved to be inventor of the electrolytic reduction So while to comply with the terms of the built. And while the world’s previous process (at the same time Paul Héroult British Guyanese lease, the Aluminum model cities often amounted to collec- invented it in France) and cofounder of Company of America could have built a tions of residences—the most original the Aluminum Company of America, refinery somewhere within the British examples, such as Margaretenhöhe in had tested a dry process for separating Empire, it turned instead, in Arvida, to Essen, Germany, 1909-1938, built on the out the alumina from other metals and construction of a refinery using the dry, initiative of Margarethe Krupp, or those impurities in bauxite.78 Compared to the or slag ore, process. This was because that followed Arvida, such as the cele- Bayer process developed for European the company intended to refine, besides brated Radburn, New Jersey, 1929—this bauxite and based on heating a liquid American bauxite, which was at the time city, like Cité Industrielle, was fully inte- bauxite-based solution under pressure, declining in alumina content, anorthosite, grated from the word go, with residences the dry process seemed more promising an abundant substance in the Saguenay and of course the smelter, as well as a for more siliceous low-grade American area subsoil. The slag ore plant, which downtown, hospital, schools and other

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institutions and in every neighbourhood a neighbourhood centre.

Already in 1911, Julien-Édouard-Alfred Dubuc, a well-known local industrialist, had sought to promote the site’s advan- tages specifically to attract U.S. promot- ers, including possibly the Aluminum Company of America, to found a city he called Saguenayville. A painting by Hiram Harold Green he commissioned in 1911 shows these advantages (fig. 36). “A major railroad passes between the factory and the town,”79 wrote Garnier: all around the Arvida site, a well‑estab- lished transportation network connected it via the Ha! Ha! Bay Railway and the Quebec and Lake St. John Railway to the deep-water anchorage of Baie des Ha! Ha!, where ocean vessels could deliver fig. 35. The Arvida bauxite refinery, or slag ore plant, was promoted on postcards from its inauguration in 1927. In light of unsatisfactory results from the initial dry process, a Bayer process refinery was brought on raw materials and products could be line to replace it in 1935, with plans by architect J.C. Meadowcroft. | Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. exported around the world. Engineer Edwin S. Fickes, who oversaw the birth of the Aluminum Company of America’s to the waterfall”81); at the very point than would Garnier’s segregation of park settlements in Shawinigan, Massena, where the railway lines meet and where and city. The typically furrowed terrain Badin and Alcoa, could not say enough the clay-covered rock provides a solid of the site was carefully surveyed in situ about the site: foundation for a factory, the Aluminum by the Aluminum Company of America’s Company of America acquired from some engineers and designers and used to For making aluminum, the Saguenay power sixty farmers the location for its planned create a true system of parks, like that is one of the most desirable on the Atlantic city at a cost of $1 million. “It includes,” of Olmsted, crisscrossing and separating seaboard of North America; it can be in Garnier’s words, “both mountains and the various parts of the city, dotting it developed at low cost, and Lake St. John a plain, the latter crossed by a river,”82 with green space even among houses and and its tributaries can be used as reservoirs the Saguenay. streets built on flat land. The Arvida plan to regulate the flow of the river so as to pro- integrates and draws on all the urban duce almost one hundred percent of primary The plan delivered by town planners planning expertise of its time, as much power; abundant labour and railway trans- Brainerd and Skougor takes advantage in adapting to its site (it incorporates for portation are at hand and, last but not least, of this specific topography crisscrossed by example the old Chemin Radin leading it is close to tidewater so that the bulky raw ravines and “coulées,” as they are called to its version of Garnier’s “old town”) as materials required, and much of the metal locally,83 allowing the city to be permeated in laying out streets according to that made, can be transported by water.80 with its natural surroundings. Here Morris adaptation, providing for future develop- Knowles’s contour system is adroitly ment, and creating a traffic hierarchy. In As we have seen, other industrial cities, appropriated and applied, systematically, addition to the thoroughfares common such as Port-Alfred (established by Dubuc) on an entirely different scale that what is to Brainerd’s work—in Arvida 106 feet and Kénogami, were also quick to set up seen in, for example, Eclipse Park. It pro- (31.8 metre) wide—roads are divided shop this part of the country. In August vides a permanent contact between the according to whether they connect city 1925, just beside William Price’s Kénogami city and its natural surroundings, more sectors, i.e., the factory, downtown, and and not far from the older town of realistically of course than Ford’s linear residential sectors, or run between blocks, Jonquière (like Garnier’s “old town next city would, but even more effectively neighbourhood centres, or internally

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fig. 36. Hiram Harold Green’s 1911 plan view of the Saguenay River and area from Jonquière to the Baie des Ha! Ha! This area was served by the Ha! Ha! Bay Railway, which ran from the port area (the site of Port-Alfred) to the Saint-Mathias range road (the future Arvida site) and intersected with the Quebec and Lake St. John Railway. | Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Société d’archives Sagamie.

fig. 37. Arvida Works’ “Plan showing topography in business section,” October 30, fig. 38. The engineers, technicians, and other designers at Arvida Works, 1926. This, like most Arvida plans, is stamped “Made in Canada,” which, responsible for planning and overseeing the construction of the city often beside a “Pittsburgh Drawing Number,” indicates that it likely and smelter. | Collection Charles Boivin. crossed the U.S. border, unlike Brainerd, Skougar, Rogers and Smythe, who probably never set foot in Arvida. The Aluminum Company of America was a multinational to the core and familiar with Canadian regulations. As Edwin S. Fickes reported in 1899, the company’s Niagara Falls, Ontario, smelter plans were prepared at the office of the Niagara Falls municipal engineer “so that they would not have to be imported from the United States and be subject to Canadian customs duty.” | Ville de Saguenay.

inside a block. They can be compared to uneven terrain, in order to accommo- going forward. It shows an office, dining the 20, 19, and 13 metre wide streets of date the monumentality of the planned hall, staff quarters, labourers’ quarters, Cité Industrielle (thought these are closer whole (fig. 37). family residences, a bank, post office, yet to the 58, 50, and 40 foot streets of dispensary, boiler house, and garage, all Badin), and are 80, 60, or 50 feet (24, 28, Work on all this, as well as the construc- linked to waterworks and sewers (fig. 39). or 15 metre) wide in order to accommo- tion of the city and factory, was begun in Based on the general city plan, which date cars, another corollary of the alum- the summer of 1925. Arvida Works, the spelled out each step of future develop- inum century’s modernity. The winding subsidiary the company established for ments or the residential, commercial, of the roads was probably not however the purpose, built temporary work camps and industrial zones, the Arvida engin- designed to slow down vehicle traffic, as in the future new city for the project eers subdivided the land into sections in American suburbs of the 1950s, but (fig. 38). These were duly photographed, (designated by letters) and subsections to create and enhance the picturesque like every other step of the worksite and (roman numerals) which were further character of each artfully selected site. city, and recorded in a “General Layout of subdivided into blocks (numbered), each Only the downtown area, called “business Camp Buildings” to display the meticulous of which three to five times as long as it district,” received large-scale levelling of planning and prove that work was really was wide. Their detailed plans show the

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fig. 39. Arvida Works, “General Layout of Camp Buildings: Sewers fig. 40. Drawing by O. Hjertholm, Arvida Works. “General Plan Showing Sections A and B and Water Lines.” | Ville de Saguenay. Arvida Townsite.” | Ville de Saguenay.

single-family detached houses typical of banks, a movie theatre, a grocery store, building for aesthetic reasons testify to the Arvida design, each set in the cen- and a hospital (fig. 43). The assembly hall his idea of the city’s function as a promo- tre of a 50 by 100 foot (15 by 30 metre) imagined by Garnier is echoed in 1920s tional tool, whatever its role in ensuring lot, backing on the others and facing the Quebec by a Catholic church seating 1,000 workers’ well-being (and productivity). street (figs. 40-42). The new city was tak- and a Protestant one as well, both paid Like Garnier who planned out even the ing shape. for by the Aluminum Company of Canada street lamps of Cité Industrielle, the (Aluminum Company of America’s subsidi- Aluminum Company of Canada carefully In the history of urban design, Arvida ary for Arvida) as was of course every- planned down to the last detail, including stands out not just for the integration thing else (figs. 44-45). The model city, the urban furniture, garbage cans, tour- of its “machine city” and the refinement which stood out on the Canadian scene ist plaques, and (aluminum) street signs of its plan. The Aluminum Company of for the excellence of its general, tech- (fig. 48). It planted hundreds of trees, America’s industrial city stood on the cut- nical, and vocational schools even had its developed parks and playgrounds, and ting edge of North American research, own newspaper, The Arvidian, a cousin awarded prizes each year for the most standing out for its worker accommoda- of Alcoa, Tennessee’s Aluminum Bulletin beautiful yards. Although fully electri- tions, urban facilities, and the aesthetic (fig. 46). And although there was no fied, Arvida had no more need for power value of its landscape and monuments. museum of local identity like the one in poles and overhead lines than did Cité Cité Industrielle (also recommended by Industrielle, where, wrote Garnier, “the “In order to arrive at a design Patrick Geddes), Arvida boasted base- Administration takes care of wastewater that completely fulfills the moral ball and football fields, tennis courts, and waste disposal, and also oversees and material needs of the and a skating oval, as well as a town regulation of the dam and the provision individual”84 hall, hotel, arena, and had a library on of energy, light, and heat to the factories – Tony Garnier, Une cité industrielle the way (fig. 47). Geddes-style regional- and individuals.” In Arvida, it was said, ism had here found more effective forms In July 1926, the smelter produced its first of expression. Every modern improvement has been ingot. A month later, with 800 workers provided: running water, sewers, and still hard at work on construction, the Beyond paper drawings and plans, Arvida, electricity. The power lines will run along first Arvida residents moved into their a worthy heir of the Beaux-Arts tradition, underground passageways throughout the homes. Engineer Harold Wake, who had to marry beauty and functionality. city—not a single pole will be seen in the ruled the worksite with an iron hand, No façade or sight-line could be left to streets except for street lamps. Every declared victory: less than three years chance. Reports of Davis demanding the street will be paved and residential houses, after the first plans had been laid: Arvida repainting of a gas station or the demo- for workers and upper-level company offi- was now a real community, with houses, lition and reconstruction of a factory cials alike, will be detached.85

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fig. 41. Arvida Works, “Layout of Houses and Lots, block no. 7, section B.,” June 1926. | Ville de Saguenay.

fig. 42. View from the roof of the carbon-baking building (electrode manufacturing plant) in 1927, showing the first four potrooms and the new residential area with its single-family detached houses. At left, the Alumina Storage Building is visible, as well as the hospital in the background to the left, near homes. | Library and Archives Canada.

fig. 43. Postcard of the Arvida Hospital from 1927. | Bibliothèque et Archives fig. 44. Copy of plan for the Sainte-Thérèse Church and rectory, Alfred Lamontagne, nationales du Québec. April 1927. | Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

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fig. 45. Arvida’s First United Church, circa 1930. | Société historique du Saguenay. fig. 46. July 31, 1929, of The Arvidian: The Saguenay Valley Democrat. | Private collection.

fig. 47. The earliest Arvida residents still vividly remember the role that fig. 48. Arvida Works, “Street Sign Post,” 1928. | Ville de Saguenay. company-provided sports facilities and recreational activities played in life in the model city. Hockey game circa 1940. | Private collection.

Garnier’s “large public bath […] with we have seen, at this particularity of than that of living close to their place of many dressing rooms and baths [and] North American housing. work. To grasp the novelty of this city, showers” was however not reproduced we need to picture ourselves in Tony in Arvida, as every house had its own The first part of Arvida to be built, called Garnier’s world, a world in which houses sanitary facilities—in accordance with Section A, was of course the part closest where each bedroom had “at least one standard North American usage. Jacques to the smelter (fig. 49). But the first resi- window” could seem like a dream. It Gréber had expressed astonishment, as dents found many more benefits there was no small challenge, as the company

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who had previously supervised the con- struction of 700 houses of a half-dozen types in Alcoa, the company developed 65 distinct housing models for the first phase of construction alone. To attain this degree of variety, the company put together a remarkable organization, run- ning a construction site of unprecedented proportions: by 1926 the first 270 houses had been built in twenty-nine models, most offered in left and right versions, the mirror-image of each other.

“The monotony of today’s typical street alignment is completely avoided”87 – Tony Garnier, Une cité industrielle

Forty years after Pullman, the orthogonal plan—considered “the world’s most per- fect,” and greatly favoured by Garnier— fig. 49. Aerial view of Arvida’s “section A” close to the smelter, around 1927. | McCord Museum of Canadian History. was no longer sufficient to ensure the fortunes of a company town as ambitious as the one the Aluminum Company of had decided, as it had done in Badin, to the rule. A particular North American America was planning. Arvida used curvi- house all workers, skilled and unskilled, in innovation, the Sears Modern Home, linear patterns carefully modeled on the single-family detached houses and create allowed buyers to order a prefabricated contours of the land, and overcame the a place where “not a single house was house in their choice from a variety of “monotony of alignments” feared by built,” as the Wake put it, “that resembles house designs via mail order catalogue, Garnier through a meticulous arrange- its neighbour.” though they were more expensive than ment of residential architecture—the the houses in Arvida. Other prefabri- prime matter of the urban landscape. The Le Corbusier was said to be particularly cated models, like those from Canadian decision in Arvida to build single-family impressed by the variety of dwellings Aladdin, a few of which were built by detached houses on fence-free lots, as proposed by Garnier in Une cité industri‑ Shawinigan Water and Power, were so in Alcoa and previously Badin, reflects elle.86 Given the contemporary tendency primitive that they became object of scorn Cité Industrielle’s vision of a spacious to uniformity, this is hardly surprising. among architects; in Arvida they were parkland free of barriers and demarca- Although the Werkbund and other Berlin, banned. And, while the forty house types tions between lots. Arvida, like Garnier’s Stuttgart, Vienna, and Prague architec- developed for the paper city of Eclipse proposed city—which incidentally is tural exhibitions showcased neighbour- Park impressed the critic Lawrence Veiller, much closer to American than European hoods planned with a variety of houses few were ever built. At best, as Veiller models—marks a clear departure from “from street pattern up,” most develop- also noted, an attractive landscape might the rowhouse tradition of the English ments at the time more closely resembled be created through winding streets lined company town typical of Saltaire, U.K.; Thomás Bat’a’s Zlín in what is today the with duplexes, quadraplexes, and quintu- Pullman, Illinois; and the “corons” of Czech Republic, based essentially on a plexes, as seen in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Belgian and French mining villages. The single model reproduced hundreds of Arvida Works, however, championed party wall, still present in symbolic form times. Even in North America, the idea of the single-family detached house from at least in the fences separating houses varied housing—much less its actual con- the start. Drawing, undoubtedly on the in Eclipse Park (fig. 13), is completely struction—was the exception rather than abilities of Wake’s assistant L.S. Grandy, forgotten here in favour of a pastoral

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monumentalization of the home that will later in the century characterize suburbs throughout North America (fig. 50, 51).

Although traditions of multi-family hous- ing were better established in Europe than in North America, the choice of var- ied single-family detached houses reflects not just American practices but also the ideal of many utopians, Fourierists of fig. 50. Early postcard showing Arvida houses like elements of a park. | Société historique du Saguenay. course excepted. Many company towns, moreover, still provided such housing only to managers and qualified employ- ees—Quebec’s notorious “quartiers des Anglais”—while the most paternalis- tic of them generally opted for a less costly option building like row hous- ing—semidetached and the more French quadraplexes of Badin being a step up. Arvida houses, on the other hand, are designed specifically to foster a sense of fig. 51. An Arvida street around 1930, with its houses on unfenced lots, as if sprung up in a park. All trace of ownership and belonging on the part of the partitioned space corollary of row housing inherited from European industrial cities has given both labourers and qualified employees. way to the semiotic of the single-family detached home. | Société historique du Saguenay. This was accomplished first and foremost by promising Arvida families a level of “the city shall comprise but one ward.” or English or Scottish Canadians, were comfort absolutely unattainable in the The distribution of house types con- often Protestant. Labourers seem mainly major centres: “The principal objection firms that the usual segregation found to have been Catholic (or Orthodox), to our houses,” as Wake put it, “comes in industrial towns was no more. Houses although Catholic French Canadians only from the fact that they are of a better for various classes of worker were built made up half the population at the time. quality than is necessary for […] the side by side. Only after planning was Arvida was thus quick to develop two ordinary workman.”88 The second lure long complete did the reality of Arvida’s distinct districts, although, as historian being that despite being anchored in a incarnation on Quebec (and Catholic) José Igartua noted, “white and blue col- very American capitalist spirit, the resi- soil succeed in splitting the community lar workers mixed in both.”90 dential landscape of Arvida manifests in two. Planners Brainerd and Skougor an identity-forming egalitarianism that had not anticipated the complexity of For all that, the homes of the seventy- echoes Cité Industrielle’s regionalism and harbouring Catholic and Protestant reli- odd staff and two hundred labourers credited socialism. gious traditions in the same city. Thus were essentially indistinguishable. As in in place of a single neighbourhood the community of Margarethöhe, known Thus, instead of establishing distinct com- centre and church, Arvida’s Section A at the time for its egalitarian housing in munities of workers, specialized employ- ended up with two: the area planned which outside features indicated noth- ees, and managers—more “quartiers des around Sainte-Thérèse Church drew ing about the social standing of the Anglais”—the company opted in Arvida Catholics, while the corner of Moissan occupants, none of the first 270 houses for the mixed neighbourhoods pro- and La Traverse, where the Protestant in Arvida had any adornment or special scribed by American racial segregation. church was to rise, drew its own prac- character showing the class of worker The company had eventually been forced titioners, who represented, at least in living inside. The most imposing houses to prohibit black workers from owning Arvida’s early years, more than a quar- might be home to French Canadians, property in Alcoa’s white districts, but ter of the city’s population.89 Specialized Russians, Czechs, or Poles, while smaller in Arvida the city charter declares that employees, often American engineers houses might belong to American or

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fig. 52. Two of the house models listed by Arvida Works in the catalogue Arvida: Townsite Houses. One is a type fig. 53. House model type C-5, built for $9103 each B-2, with separate kitchen and dining room, built for $5225 (1926); the other is type A-4 based on “the usual (1926). | R io Tinto Alcan (Saguenay). type of house in the province” with “salle familiale,” built at a cost of $5022 (1926). | Rio Tinto Alcan (Saguenay).

English Canadian engineers. Telling them model Arvida house designs on “a typical regionalist, neo-French Canadian archi- apart meant looking for the closets, cen- ordinary house common in the province tecture, made up of modern interpreta- tral heating systems, and hardwood floors of Quebec,”92 which would help make tions of the local heritage (figs. 55-57). more common in the second group than workers feel more at home. It was certainly the first case of this rep- the first. Differentiation was through the ertory actually being built. No wonder total comfort of manager and specialized Architectural regionalism was at the the local paper, Le Progrès du Saguenay, staff houses, with luxury features rather time certainly winning converts, at least lauded this “company that shows such than size accounting for different produc- in theory: in addition to the California concern for us.”95 These first houses, tion costs. These ranged from $4,200 (in houses of Irving J. Gill or the “Mexican” together with those to come in the 1930s 1929 dollars) for the four type A-3 houses, houses of Bertram Goodhue’s Tyrone, and 40s from some of Canada’s most to $14,223.50 for the two type J-1 and New Mexico, there was also the indus- important architects, were, and continue J-2 houses. In Arvida, you really couldn’t trial town of Norrbyskär in the late to be, warmly received. Initially rented at judge a book by its cover (figs. 52-53). 19th century, which borrowed typically preferential rates (for company workers) Swedish architectural features.93 The ranging from 5.6% to 7.6% of the cost This is confirmed by another particularity usual approach of the Arvida designers, of their construction96 (thus as a rule at of the Arvida habitat, where according to Richard Haviland Smythe, James Gamble lower rates of return than what industrial Wake, “one hundred of the original […] Rogers II, and Brainerd and Skougor, was housing professionals recommended at houses [of] the Quebec design”91 could reflective of this Zeitgeist, as seen in the the time97), they were after 1927 sold via be found. Mainly clustered around the Latin American style of the María Elena, lease at no real profit at all through an Catholic church, some of these houses Chile, plans delivered at the same time innovative process locally known as the featured a single salle de famille—not (fig. 54), and probably reflect the express “partial payment plan.”98 After the mixed a family room—in place of separate liv- intention of the Aluminum Company of success of house sales in Alcoa (fig. 58), ing room, dining room, and kitchen. This America as well. But at a time when the company in Arvida committed even relatively archaic space shows the way the Province of Quebec Association of more to its decision to encourage worker Arvida’s habitat was designed to foster Architects had just called for a return home ownership, calculating monthly identity: the salle de famille was typical of to “the tasteful architecture of yester- payments according to the worker-pur- the traditional French Canadian dwelling, year,”94 the decision to opt for “typical” chaser’s income rather than according settler houses, while Arvida’s Americans local styles was significant. Wake’s effort to preset terms (in Alcoa this had been were more likely to expect a separate was in fact one of the first attempts to ten years if the purchaser was unable to kitchen and dining room. Wake proudly codify Quebec’s vernacular architecture. pay upfront99). Two years later, 88 Arvida told of rejecting most of the house plans All of Arvida, not only its residents, would houses had been snapped up under the designed for Arvida in the United States, thereby gain an identity: Arvida would special terms provided by the company, accepting only the elevations, in order to constitute one of the first repertories of which went so far as to reduce payments

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fig. 54. Street in Maria Elena, Chile. | Patricio Cabezas. fig. 55. The Saguenay Inn is an Arvida landmark and one of the most impressive monuments of Quebec regionalism. It was built in 1939 from plans by architect Harold Lea Fetherstonhaugh, partner of Alexander Tilloch Galt Durnford, who probably influenced this magisterial take on French Canadian vernacular architecture, according to Robert Hill’s analysis (Biographical Dictionary of Canadian Architects). | Photograph by Guillaume St-Jean.

fig. 56. The regionalist figuration of this house, built in Arvida in 1942, earned fig. 57. One of the houses built in the 1930s from architect Léonce Desgagné’s it and many of its Arvida siblings a place in Inventaire des œuvres plans for Arvida house type D-5 and inspired by the bellcast eaves d’art du Québec, under the heading “modern residence in the French of French Canadian houses in the Bas-du-Fleuve region. | Photograph by Canadian style.” | Sylvio Brassard, Inventaire des œuvres d’art du Québec, 1944, Marc Ellefsen. Société historique du Saguenay. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. from worker-owners in financial difficul- of Cité Industrielle’s collectivist prin- Times had changed since the days when ties. In its own way, the Arvida system, ciples into the materialist language of paternalistic companies held workers to which we will return, recycled the North America? On October 1, 1929, virtually captive in a web of company advantages of the collective ownership Wake reported that $68,607 had been housing, company stores, and company system championed by Ebenezer Howard, received through the lease and the sale jobs. Most theorists and critics at the time and probably by Garnier. Could the com- of building lots in the residential sector agreed it was in the company interest pany’s decision to sell off lots and build- and downtown. Most telling is the pride not to hold on to any residences it might ings downtown without measures to with which he adds that “quite a number build, some even arguing for instalment retain control while going out of its way of our people have been paying for a suf- plans, since this would provide the advan- to help workers lease and acquire their ficient length of time that they now have tage of freeing the company from control own homes be considered a translation a real interest in the property.” of its worker residences in the long term

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while allowing it to safeguard the town’s Nonetheless, whatever the benefits in flowers, shrubbery and neat surround- architectural quality in the short term. It enhanced worker stability and loyalty to ings mean.”105 The general reforming might even provide the company with a be gained by treating Arvida residents spirit—as in most company towns the way to raise funds through the govern- better than they would be elsewhere, the sale of alcohol was prohibited—was what ment housing grants that first appeared bottom line remained the bottom line, enabled the development of the Quebec at the end of the 1910s. By the 1920s, following the dictates of the capitalism house, the lease purchase system and town planners and no doubt many indus- Davis manipulated so adroitly. Capital which, handed on and exercised by local trialists themselves had in any case grown dictated the concretization of Garnier’s Aluminum Company of America author- more cautious about the real benefits of “not real” city. Money was at the bot- ities, brought to workers an environment company towns after their experiences in tom of the “systematic organization” they otherwise could only dream of. So the Great War, which had seen a prolif- that Jacques Gréber described in North it was that when Davis expressed a wish eration of single-industry towns planned America. It is also the key to the feat of to consolidate the promotional image of around factories to supply the war building the first 270 Arvida houses in Arvida in a new “staff house” to impress effort. While acknowledging the exper- 135 days. visitors, Wake, who had looked at several tise acquired through the United States architectural options to make houses even Housing Corporation and the Emergency “The building materials used are more affordable, replied as follows: Fleet Corporation’s housing division, indigenous to this region.”102 which between them built close to 30,000 – Tony Garnier, Une cité industrielle I do not think such a building is necessary housing units in over 150 new towns dur- for the benefit of our employees for the next ing the war, Morris Knowles, author of Obviously Arvida as it was manifested few years at least, because they have prac- the textbook Industrial Housing, wrote did not share the socialism of Cité tically all of the benefits which such a club- in 1920 that “at its best the duty of man- Industrielle.103 Historians are divided as to house would provide right in their present aging an industrial town is an onerous the reason for the absence of churches locations, and, in some ways, I think the one; it complicates rather than simplifies in Garnier’s project. Unlike the relatively separate houses much more suitable than plant administration […]. It is perhaps the anticlerical atmosphere of a France that one big building, and I do not think they cost very reason why so many industries have had recently legislated the separation of much more to operate.106 held aloof from the whole question of Church and State, the church-dominated industrial towns […]. Isolated sites should society of North America could probably It is clear however that Arvida’s system be chosen only as matter of necessity.”100 not imagined Arvida without them. In of land tenure, however idealistic it may any case, we can see that the Garnier’s appear in the North America of company Even so, the sale of housing stock in com- “progress in the social order”104 is trans- towns, could be opposed, in its underlying pany towns remained for a long time lated in the Aluminum Company of ideology at least, to the “free reign over the exception. A Central Mortgage and America as a certain (and unusual) egali- the disposition of land” Garnier referred Housing Corporation report from 1953 tarianism combined with a benevolent to.107 Private property remained, after even declared “company ownership of paternalism regarding its workers’ needs all, an article of faith for the overwhelm- family dwellings the universal hallmark and futures. Describing the garden con- ing majority of 20th century government of the single-enterprise community.”101 It tests organized to get people involved urban planning and housing programs. may then appear that the commitment to in beautifying their homes, Wake com- The individual single-family houses that a social ideal outweighed straightforward plained that “the people occupying the are its corollary are different from the financial concerns for the Aluminum Quebec type house (renting at a lower typical residences in Une cité industri‑ Company of America and the Aluminum rent) have made little or no effort to elle, both in their detached design and Company of Canada. They defied ordin- improve the appearance of their yards, in their architectural diversity. Perhaps ary recommended practices with a prop- due […] more than anything else to however it is precisely by diverging from erty management system bringing no the fact that they have always lived in Garnier’s prescription that Arvida man- returns on in situ worker housing, and unimproved surroundings” but straight aged to pass the reality test that left so followed instead a utopian course toward away pledged “to overcome [this attitude] many paper cities hanging in the air. It a spectacular model city combining the eventually by education of the children in held to Garnier’s “simplicity of means,” in new industry with a new aesthetic unity. the schools to an appreciation of what which “our structure stays simple, without

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fig. 58. Advertisement from the Alcoa Aluminum Bulletin of 1919, promoting home ownership in the Aluminum Company of America’s Tennessee town via a variety of schemes.

ornament,”108 allowing it to deliver what the most innovative projects of the time, even the collective housing of Bruno Taut’s Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin were unable to: lost-cost housing in a land- fig. 59. Arvida Works, “Workmen’s Houses 1926: Full Size Details of Interior and Exterior Finish and Doors scape designed to foster identity. and Windows.” | Ville de Saguenay.

To build 270 houses in twenty-nine archi- tectural configurations in 135 days, the Aluminum Company of America drew on construction in situ (fig. 62). Arvida’s con- consideration of Lyon residents’ expect- its extensive industrial experience and tribution to the history of worker housing ations regarding collective or single- know-how. It thus provided concrete rests for that matter on its use of wood, family housing falls outside the scope of foundations for every house—a virtual which, unlike the cast concrete sections this article, we must note that Garnier’s necessity in the Canadian winter, though advocated by Garnier and widely used typological catalogue of housing designs often treated as a luxury reserved for in Europe, allowed for both standardiza- is typically French, while the single-family paper cities like Eclipse Park—using only tion and diversity. Framing components detached house has deep roots in North four sizes beneath the great variety of could therefore be cut in advance and American culture. house-types. Each model was planned used on different houses interchange- in detail: beside the attractive drawings, ably. This was because traditional wood But this is not the sole key to this Canadian charming for investors but otherwise frame construction was as widespread in incarnation of Cité industrielle. A number perfectly pointless, a set of elevations, North America as Garnier’s concrete and of North American companies seeking to plans, cuts, and details were used to cement was in the southeast of France. diversify their activities and investment apply the American ready-cut system In any case Garnier was fully aware that potential built resource towns, establish- on an unprecedented scale (figs. 59-61). “other systems of construction, other ing subsidiaries to do the building: Price Construction would not be individual; it materials would lead, no doubt, to other Brothers created Kenogami Land and was the overall vision that would provide forms that would also be interesting to Kenogami Loan (1912); Julien-Édouard- the intended variety. Possible variations study.”109 Arvida and Cité Industrielle here Alfred Dubuc established Compagnie in trim (corniches, doors, windows, and share a spirit, not unrelated to the region- immobilière de Port-Alfred, Société frames) were listed and standardized, alism of Geddes, of being rooted in their de construction ouvrière, and the Ha ! both to increase the number of per- local area and thus perfectly adapted Ha ! Bay Land and Building Company mutations available and of course to to the geography—even, in the case of (1915); the Shawinigan Water and Power allow for mass production, speeding up Arvida, to the local culture. Although the Company created the Shawinigan Falls

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fig. 60. Arvida Works, “Typical Sashes.” | Ville de Saguenay. fig. 62. Arvida Works, “Stud[d]ing for A, B, C, D, E Doors for Workmen’s Houses.” 1926. | Ville de Saguenay.

fig. 61. Arvida Works, set of plans for the model B-4, 1927. | Ville de Saguenay.

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fig. 63. Construction site of the “city built in 135 days.” A railcar distributes fig. 64. Arvida Works, “Progress Chart: Arvida Houses 1926-27,” precut architectural components from lot to lot. | Société historique du Saguenay. July 24, 1926. | Ville de Saguenay.

Hotel Company (1900) and Shawinigan foundations, reused from house to house. representation,” a key part of the com- Falls Arena Company (1910) to develop Precut framing components (from a saw- pany brand. The Aluminum Company part of Shawinigan. South of the border mill set up near the site), duly identified of America photographed it from every in Beloit, Wisconsin, the Fairbanks Morse according to sets of detailed plans refer- angle and invited distinguished visitors Company, before significantly scaling ring to the house model in question, were such as the prime minister and presidents back on the scope of their project, created delivered on railcars running along tracks of the Engineering Institute of Canada Eclipse Home-Makers110 to carry out it out. following the future streets from lot to and the Mellon National Bank, who could lot. The houses could then be assembled in 1926 attest Arvida’s manifestation as Yet if none of these projects came close with a hammer and nails. “They fitted much more than a paper city. The “huge to rivalling Arvida’s 270 houses in so so nicely,” it was said, “that house after investment in Canada”111 announced in many models in 135 days, it was because house was put up without a saw being April 1926 was also reported breath- the Aluminum Company of America and used on the framing” (fig. 63). It was lessly in September’s New York Times: the Aluminum Company of Canada had like the Alcoa, Tennessee site before it “In three months, 300 houses have been successfully and profitably pushed the but even more efficient, and was the erected and two churches are being economic system to its limits, making a talk of the town. “Houses are being built built”112 (fig. 65). bundle by doing it with an implacably [in Arvida] in much the same fashion as “systematic organization.” The Arvida Henry Ford builds automobiles, with the Thus it was as Garnier foresaw: the indus- construction site, designed as much to exception that the carpenters go to the trial conditions that conjured Arvida in attract purchasers and workers as invest- work instead of having the work come the first place were what allowed it to ors, gigantic in scale due to the divers- to them.” All that was left was to watch become real. ity of models and the number of houses and monitor its growth, in detail, using all going up at the same time, required plumbing, interior painting, and other Epilogue an unprecedented degree of planning. “progress charts” (fig. 64). The assembly House models were first distributed on line that was Arvida churned out a new After the completion of this initial phase, “House Designation Charts.” with the house every five hours. the city continued to spread across the resulting diversity carefully mapped out surrounding countryside until the 1960s. in the blocks of the first phase. Excavation It is hardly surprising that, like the col- A fitting object of representation for a of sites began on June 15, 1926, followed our plan and house images, the city con- multinational in constant expansion, by assembly of formwork for the concrete struction site itself became an “object of it could take pride in its catalogue of

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fig. 65. The area around Sainte-Thérèse Church, Arvida, in 1928. | Collection Charles Boivin.

distinctive buildings and its array of industrial utopia and forged in a trad- Thus, if Arvida’s downtown had not yet houses, schools, churches, businesses, ition of excellence that its residents still attained the monumentality seen in the and parks, designed by such notable enjoy the benefits of. The commitment 1926 City Beautiful plan, this was no figures as Frederick Gage Todd, Ernest of the aluminum companies of America doubt because immediate completion Isbel Barrott, Léonce Desgagné, Harold and Canada and Alcan to this model city was less important to Arthur Vining Lea Fetherstonhaugh, Alexander Tilloch never flagged with continued growth: Davis’s social utopia than was its liv- Galt Durnford, some of the best-known despite a seven-fold increase in popula- ing environment. The construction of Canadian architects and landscape tion between 1939 and 1950, the new the first two commercial blocks, which designers of the period (figs. 66-68). neighbourhoods that sprang up were as resembled those of Badin and Alcoa, During the Second World War, when the charming as the old (fig. 69). After the took place under very tight company smelter, with its fully integrated produc- meticulously documented boom mapped supervision to ensure architectural tion process, attained the jaw-dropping out in complex charts now held in the quality. “It has taken constant super- capacity the 1925 plans had aspired to municipal archives,113 the city could boast vision and endless patience to get the and catapulted the city to the status of property valued at over $45 million on buildings constructed according to world aluminum capital, a new power an initial investment of a little under the plans,”115 complained Wake as he plant (James Curzey Meadowcroft) was $700,000 (1948) and a full documentary struggled with the whims and finan- built on Arvida’s north side, Shipshaw record in the tradition of the original, cial reversals of businesses that had II, of course one of the world’s most ambitious plans. A new hospital with its acquired lots in the business district. powerful generating stations, received aluminum ornamentation was built in A subsequent slowdown in Arvida’s the Canadian government’s highest the 1950s, confirming the city’s region- development has been attributed to architectural award and created a sen- alist vocabulary: It was also located “on the splitting up of the company in sation rivalling that of the world’s first a mountain north of the centre of town,” 1928. Suspected of monopoly, the com- aluminum bridge, which the company, to quote Garnier, and to this day “cur- pany hived off its Canadian operations now Alcan, would build just upstream tains of greenery frame [it] to the east and formed the new, autonomous a few years later. Arvida was born as an and west.”114 Aluminum Company of Canada. Arthur

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fig. 66. This elegant take on French Canadian vernacular architecture, one of the new models of house built in Arvida during and after the Second World War, was designed by the firm Fetherstonhaugh and Durnford, specifically (it bears his initials) by Alexander Tilloch Galt Durnford before he left to serve in the Royal Canadian Navy. It was submitted by Harold Lea Fetherstonhaugh while Fetherstonhaugh was serving on the Arvida Planning Commission. | McGill University Archives.

fig. 68. In 1936, architect Ernest Isbel Barrott, known at the time for his work on a number of housing developments (including several houses for the town of Iroquois Falls for Abitibi Lands and Forests) delivered plans for 17 new Arvida house models as well as this set of watercolours illustrating the variety of landscapes available with the proposed models. | Collection Pierre Thibault.

fig. 67. Landscaper and architect Frederick Gage Todd was the first president of the Arvida Planning Commission, established in 1942 by the Aluminum Company of Canada. This 1946 plan of Oerstedt Park was one of a number projects he designed for the model city. | Ville de Saguenay.

fig. 69. Like many views of Arvida, this image was also produced as a postcard. It shows one of the new neighbourhoods built during the Second World War, and demonstrating the same attention to aesthetic aspects as previous developments. | Collection Charles Boivin.

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As we see in the buildings completed between 1930 and 1960, the innova- tive Arvida Planning Committee the company established in 1942, and the Arvida of today, the model city and world aluminum capital has managed to preserve and even amplify that image-creating impulse that origin- ally carved it out of nature “450 miles north of Boston.” Arthur Vining Davis’s vision aside, Arvida began its existence as just another Aluminum Company of America asset, but went on to become the birthplace, centrepiece, and flag- ship of its Canadian successor, as that company rose to the forefront of world aluminum producers and its homeland took its place as a world aluminum power (fig. 70). Taking over from its forerunners Badin and Alcoa, Arvida, by the mid-20 th century, had fulfilled the utopian dream it sprang from. And Cité Industrielle?

In the end, it serves little purpose to draw firm conclusions as to the ignor- ance or awareness of one or the other model in this case. All the same, in winding up our observations, there fig. 70. Armed guard by the Shipshaw dam. The power station was built in barely 18 months in 1942, still according is no doubt that Cité Industrielle was to the 1925 hydroelectric development plans. The dam, smelter, refineries, and city of Arvida took more anchored in its time—less “not on strategic importance to the Commonwealth during the Second World War, and exceptional measures were taken to protect them, including construction of antiaircraft batteries and the establishment real”—than some of Garnier’s suc- of the Bagotville Military Base. | Library and Archives Canada. cessors acknowledged. Beyond any importance Arvida might have to the history of urban planning in the West, Vining Davis’s appointment of his sale and I believe we will be able to the transfers of knowledge across the brother Edward K. Davis as president get rid of them when the town grows Atlantic that we have tried to trace of the new multinational operating a little more.”116 The social appropria- here perhaps reveal unrecognized con- Arvida Works seems however to indi- tion characteristic of the model city nections between Garnier’s project and cate an underlying desire not to lose worked to Arvida’s advantage here. his horizons and between the two cities sight of his great project. In any case it While in Alcoa, Tennessee, the last ves- and their times, while shedding light on seems more likely that the slowdown in tiges of the unfinished downtown were an unexplored network of relationships Arvida’s commercial development was demolished, Arvida’s downtown saved between the Cité Industrielle ideal, not a result of what some have seen the industrial city from becoming just set forth with great realism in Europe as a brutal rupture in the founding another bedroom community. Today, as within that continent’s long utopian of the future Alcan, but rather of the the smelter is itself at the center of a tradition, and the unique—and typ- Great Crash of 1929. Wake noted that redevelopment project, Arvida’s down- ically North American—conditions of year that “all of these stores are for town awaits only completion. fulfilment that gave rise to Arvida.

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Notes 8. Hegemann, Werner, 1938, City Planning and This paper led to a publication: Morisset, Housing, vol. III, A Graphic Review of Civic Lucie K., 2009, “Ville nouvelle pour pays Art 1922-1937, New York, Architectural Book neuf,” In Philippe Dufieux (ed.), Tony 1. A great number of people were critical to Publishing Company, cover and p. 6. Garnier, la Cité industrielle et l’Europe, Lyon, the documentary research underpinning this CAUE du Rhône Éditions, p. 105-130. article. To name but a few of them: Gilles 9. Green, Hardy, 2011, The Company Town: Bertrand, Line Lafontaine, Martin Lanthier, The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills 12. UNESCO World Heritage Committee, and Suzanne Lemaire (Library and Archives that Shaped the American Economy, Twenty-Fifth Session Report, Helsinki, 2001, Canada), Anne Buteau and Nicol Guay Philadelphia, Basic Books, 2010; Dinius, 429REV. (Rio Tinto Alcan Saguenay), Paul Chénier Oliver J. and Angela Vergara (ed.), Company 13. Wiebenson, Dora, 1960, “Utopian Aspects (Canadian Centre for Architecture), Becky Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, of Tony Garnier’s Cité industrielle,” Journal Darrell (Blount County Genealogical and and Working-class Communities, Athens of the Society of Architectural Historians, Historical Society), David Duggan (City of (GA), University of Georgia Press; Grandin, vol. 19, no. 1, p. 16-24. Alcoa, Tennessee), Gaston Gagnon (Ministère Greg, 2009, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of de la Culture, des Communications et de Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, New 14. Even to the point of proclaiming it a “Vision la Condition féminine du Québec), Davis York, Picador; Alanen, Arnold R., 2007, of a Mediterranean Socialist Arcadia,” as did Summerlin, Jim and Jane Harrison, Martha Morgan Park: Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Kenneth Frampton in Modern Architecture: Garber, Larry Drye (and all the other board Forging of a Company Town, Minneapolis, A Critical History (1980, New York, Oxford members of the Badin Historic Museum who University of Minnesota Press. University Press, p. 103). welcomed me), Nancy Hadley (American 10. To take these well-known examples: 15. Mariani : 38. Institute of Architects), Nicole Hébert (Rio Garner, John S. (ed.), 1992, The Company Tinto Alcan Montreal), Paul K. Kerr (Beloit 16. According to Mariani : 12. Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Historical Society), Roger Lavoie (Ville de Industrial Age, Oxford, Oxford University 17. “C’est à des raisons industrielles que la Saguenay), Claire Leymonerie, Patricia Press; Crawford, Margaret, 1995, Building plupart des villes neuves que l’on fondera Helle, and Jenny Piquet (Institut pour l’his- the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of désormais vaudront leur fondation.” (Ellis, toire de l’aluminium), Art Louderback (and American Company Towns, New York, Verso; translator, in Mariani’s edition of Une cité other staff at the Senator John Heinz History Frey, Jean-Pierre, 1986, La ville industrielle industrielle, op. cit.) Center of Pittsburgh), Jacques Morin, et ses urbanités. La distinction ouvriers/ Colombe Dallaire, and Céline Villeneuve 18. Commercial promotion of Hershey, now a employés. Le Creusot 1870-1930, Brussels, (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du resort town, from [http://www.hersheypa. Mardaga; Reps, John W., 1965, “The Towns Québec), Barbara R. Stewart (Alcoa), Bruce com], accessed on February 7, 2011. the Companies Built,” The Making of Tabb and Tanya Parlet (University of Oregon Urban America. A History of City Planning 19. These examples are taken from Reps : 414- Libraries), Jonathan A. Underwood (Stanly in the United States, Princeton, Princeton 438; see also Alanen, op. cit. County Historic Preservation Commission University Press, p. 414-439. 20. Ford’s adventures in Muscle Shoals are and Museum). 11. We have published a number of writings on recounted in Grandin : 66s. I also wish to acknowledge the excellent Arvida in the last fifteen years. Alongside 21. Cited in Grandin : 67. work of Ken Howe, translator at Anglocom, our Arvida, cité industrielle. Une épopée for giving this article its English form. 22. Carr, Charles C., 1952, Alcoa: An American urbaine en Amérique (Québec, Septentrion, Enterprise, New York, Rinehart, p. 174-176. 2. Eaton, Ruth, 2001, Cités idéales. L’utopisme 1998), there are: (Morisset, L.K.), 2006, et l’environnement (non) bâti, Anvers, Fonds “Arvida, ville du patrimoine mondial ?” 23. Grandin, op. cit. Mercator, p. 199. Saguenayensia, vol. 48, no. 2, p. 9-27; 24. The case is recounted in Crawford : 164. (Morisset, L.K. and Luc Noppen), 1996, 3. Mariani, Ricardo, 1990, Tony Garnier. Une “La ville de l’aluminium,” Les villes indus‑ 25. Veiller, Lawrence, 1918, “Industrial Housing cité industrielle, New York and Milan, trielles planifiées au Québec, Montreal, Developments in America,” Architectural Rizzoli, p. 38. See also on this interpreta- Centre Canadien d’Architecture / Boréal, Record, no. 43, March, p. 231-256; Beloit tion, among others, Siderakis, Kriti, 1996, p. 167-227 and 259-270; (Morisset, L.K. and Historical Society, Historic Preservation “Introduction,” Tony Garnier. Une cité Luc Noppen), 1995, “Arvida, ville de l’alu- Division, undated typescript, Eclipse Park, industrielle, Princeton Architectural Press. minium,” Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de Thematic Study no. 15, p. 208-253; National 4. Le Corbusier’s letter to Tony Garnier on fin- l’aluminium [Paris], no. 16, p. 39-59. We will Park Service, 2003, Park Lane Apartments, ding Garnier’s work in a bookstore in 1919 not repeat the references cited in those Jackson County, Missouri, United States has been reproduced a number of times. See publications as they can be found in those Department of the Interior, National the reprint of Princeton Architectural Press, works. The sources for this article come from Register of Historic Places, p. 21. 1989. new research. 26. Adams, Thomas, 1918, “Community 5. Cited and analyzed in Mariani, op. cit. We thank Jean-Michel Leniaud and Philippe Development in Wartime,” Landscape Architecture, no. 8, April, p. 109-124. 6. Mariani, id. Dufieux for the opportunity to give an ini- tial presentation on this topic at a sympo- 27. Lavedan, Pierre, 1956, Histoire de l’urba‑ 7. On this topic, see Hodge, Gerald and Ira M. sium on Garnier’s cité industrielle in Lyon, nisme, vol. III, Paris, Laurens, p. 224. [Our Robinson, 2002, Planning Canadian Regions, an initiative of Rhône’s Conseil d’architec- translation.] Vancouver, UBC Press. ture, d’urbanisme et de l’environnement.

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28. [Arthur Vining Davis obituary], New York aux États-Unis: from City Beautiful to Cité- combination of four dwellings, seem to Times, November 18, 1962. Jardin,” Urban History Review, vol. 29, no. 2. come from the row housing and “corons” common in early mining towns. 29. Ibid. 39. Our translation. 51. “[…] la surface construite devrait toujours 30. “Montreal Star lauds Arvida district,” The 40. “L’habitation collective. Cités-jardins – villes être inférieure à la moitié de la surface Arvidian, Arvida, September 19, 1927, p. 1. ouvrières.” [Our translation.] totale, le reste du lot formant jardin public 31. Under its former name, the Pittsburgh 41. “L’organisation méthodique.” [ O u r et étant utilisable aux piétons : nous voulons Reduction Company, the Aluminum translation.] dire que chaque construction doit laisser sur Company of America acquired the settle- 42. Gréber, Jacques, 1920, L’architecture aux la partie non construite de son lot un pas‑ ment of Bauxite, Arkansas, previously deve- États-Unis. Preuve de la force d’expan‑ sage libre, allant de la rue à la construction loped by the General Bauxite Company, to sion du génie français, Paris, Payot et cie, située en arrière. Cette disposition permet turn it into one of its “company towns” and p. 101-126. la traversée de la ville en n’importe quel build houses and facilities for its workers. sens ; indépendamment des rues qu’on n’a More so than for Alcoa, Badin or Massena 43. See notably Draper, John E., 1989, “Paris- plus besoin de suivre ; et le sol de la ville, where the Aluminum Company of America’s sur-le-Lac : les sources du “Plan of Chicago,” pris d’ensemble, est comme un grand parc, developments were built onto preexisting in John Zukowski (ed.), Chicago : naissance sans aucun mur de clôture pour limiter les settlements, it is the case of Bauxite, and d’une métropole 1872-1922, Paris, Éditions terrains.” (Ellis, translator, in Mariani’s edi- of course particularly of Arvida, that led de la Réunion des musées nationaux, p. 106- tion of Une cité industrielle, op. cit.) the engineer Edwin S. Fickes, one of the 129, as well as, in the same volume, Loyette, It must be noted that although similar Arvida project heads, to attribute to the Henri, “Chicago, une image française,” arrangements can be found in later planned company a “policy of always providing, in p. 120-135. towns, Garnier’s proposal, in 1917, describes backward or isolated communities, excellent 44. “L’exposé d’une théorie urbaniste,” The an arrangement very unusual at that time. schools and medical care, supplemented Arvidian, November 16, 1928, p. 3. To find it in Badin, built before the publi- by hospital facilities, for the benefit of its cation of Une cité industrielle, is thus even employees.” (Cited in Smith, George David, 45. It would become the National Capital more surprising. 2003, From Monopoly to Competition: Commission in 1959. The Transformation of Alcoa, 1888-1986, 46. S e e Hachez-Leroy, Florence, 1999, 52. T his information on the growth of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, L’aluminium français. L’invention d’un mar‑ Aluminium Français is from the article by p. 118.) ché 1911-1983, Paris, CNRS Éditions. See also Smith, Michael S., 1998, “Putting France in the Chandlerian Framework: France’s 32. “A Garden City for Canada,” Journal of the Gignoux, Claude J., 1955, Histoire d’une 100 Largest Industrial Firms in 1913,” The Town Planning Institute of Canada, vol. IV, entreprise française, Paris, Hachette. Business History Review, vol. 72, no. 1, no. 4, 1925. 47. When controlled by the Northern Aluminum p. 46-85. 33. Fickes, Edwin S., 1938, History of the Company, future Southern Aluminum 53. Wilkins, Mira, 1993, “French Multinationals Growth and Developments of the Aluminum Company created by Aluminium in 1911, in the United States. An Historical Company of America, unpublished types- the Badinville project was at first planned Perspective,” Entreprises et histoires, no. 3, cript; Alcoa Archives, Library and Archives upstream, near a dam built by the Whitney mai, p. 18. Division, Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh Compay some ten years earlier. The engi- (PA). neers working for the Southern Aluminum 54. Archives at the Institut d’histoire de l’alu- Company later proposed to establish dams minium keep several traces of a cordial rela- 34. “Une ville construite en 135 jours, qui ne at the sites called the Narrows and the Falls, tionship between Davis and Badin. connut ni les taudis, ni les laideurs à la va- where they finally were built, which resulted comme-je-te-pousse, où l’on n’eut pas à in the change of the townsite from Whitney 55. This information has newly come to light débâtir pour construire.” [Our translation.] to the actual Badin. (Lugeon, Maurice, prof in recently uncovered documents. (Fickes, op. cit.) 35. Saunier, Pierre-Yves, 1999, “Changing the Lausanne, 1913, Rapport géologique sur le City: Urban International Information and projet de barrage de la rivière Yadkin aux 56. American Architects Directory, R.R. Bowker, the Lyon Municipality, 1900-1940,” Planning environs de Whitney (Car. du Nord, EUA), 1956, p. 59. Perspectives, no. 14, p. 19-48. 21 janvier, Institut pour l’histoire de l’alu- 57. Fickes : 258. minium, collection Pechiney.) 36. Casemann Collins, Christiane, 2005, Werner 58. “Large Areas in Need of Transit,” New York Hegemann and the Search for Universal 48. Rapport des administrateurs soumis à la Times, February 23, 1919; and “Sees Shuttle Urbanism, W.W. Norton & Co. première assemblée annuelle des action- Cure in Moving Sidewalks,” New York Times, naires, tenue à New York, le lundi 9 juin 37. See, for example, the article by Simpson, November 29, 1918. 1913. Institut pour l’histoire de l’aluminium, Michael, 1982, “Thomas Adams in Canada collection Pechiney. 59. American Architects Directory, R.R. Bowker, 1914-1930,” Urban History Review / Revue 1956, p. 522. d’histoire urbaine, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 1-16. 49. Andrew Ellis, translator, in Mariani’s edition of Une cité industrielle, op. cit. 60. According to his 1946 responses to the 38. On Jacques Gréber’s North American Questionnaire for Architect’s Roasters, held experience, see Gournay, Isabelle, 2001, 50. In Zollverein, Le Creusot, Montceau-les- by the American Institute of Architects (NY). “Revisiting Jacques Greber’s L’architecture Mines for example. The quadraplexes, or

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61. Aluminum Company of Canada Limited, 76. To my knowledge, that would have been, 85. “Toutes les améliorations modernes ont été 1929, Analysis of Procedure at Arvida in at the time, the only integrated—alumina prévues : approvisionnement d’eau, égouts, Connection with City Development, Arvida, and aluminum plants—production site in électricité. Le courant électrique est amené October 1. Typescript, Archives de Ville de America before a similar, but much larger dans les conduits souterrains par toute la Saguenay; and Fickes, op. cit. project, was put up in Arvida. The French ville et il n’y aura pas un seul poteau dans project is known to us from the Pechiney les rues, excepté les lampadaires. Toutes 62. Fickes : 258. archives kept at the Institut de l’histoire de les rues seront pavées et les maisons rési‑ 63. This is Arvida type K3. Some of the houses l’aluminium. Hyppolyte Bouchayer, in 1938, dentielles, pour les ouvriers comme pour built during Arvida’s second and third recalls that the Badin refinery was comple- les officiers supérieurs de la compagnie, phases and signed only by the Arvida Work’s ted in 1914, but was finally bought back by seront toutes détachées les unes des autres.” designers may also be related to some of the Compagnie d’Alais, Froges et Camargue (“Arvida, ville-champignon : M.H.R. Wake Rogers’s work. On his Winter Park houses, from the Aluminum Company of America, décrit la construction d’Arvida en 135 jours,” see McClane, Patrick W. and Debra A. then dismantled and rebuilt in Saint- Le Devoir, Montreal, October 8, 1926, p. 8.) McClane, 2004, The Architecture of James Auban (France) in 1916-1917. (Bouchayer, [Our translation.] Gamble Rogers II in Winter Park, Florida, Hyppolyte, 1938, Note sur la Southern 86. Siderakis, op. cit., passim. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Aluminium Co, October, Institut d’histoire 87. “Il n’y a pas lieu de craindre la monotonie de 64. “Washington, aujourd’hui l’une des plus de l’aluminium, collection Pechiney.) nos alignements actuels.” (Ellis, translator, belles villes du monde, demain la plus belle.” 77. Carr : 135. in Mariani’s edition of Une cité industrielle, [Our translation.] 78. The dry process set up in Arvida is simi- op. cit.) 65. New York Times, May 17, 1927. lar to the process known in France as the 88. Attributed to Wake, Harold, 1929, “Analysis Deville process (after its inventor, Henri 66. “L’imitation du modèle advient sélective‑ of Procedure at Arvida in Connection with Sainte-Claire Deville). It involves calcina- ment.” [Our translation.] City Development,” Arvida, October 1. ting a mixture of crushed bauxite, lime, and Typescript, Archives de Ville de Saguenay. 67. Campbell, Duncan C., 1985, Mission mon‑ coke. The resulting sinter is then leached to [Our translation.] diale ; Histoire d’Alcan. Vol. 1 Jusqu’à 1950, obtain an aluminate solution, which is filte- Toronto, Ontario Publishing Company red to remove impurities. When the water is 89. According to Igartua, José, 1996, Arvida au Limited. Translation by Geneviève Heuet- removed, the resulting aluminum hydroxide Saguenay. Naissance d’une ville industrielle, Fauteux of Global Mission: The Story of precipitate is used to produce alumina. The Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s Alcan, vols. 1 to 1950. Bayer process involves heating a mixture of University Press, p. 42. [Our translation.] ground bauxite and sodium hydroxide under 68. This population information is from Linteau, 90. Igartua : 121. Paul-André, André Durocher and Jean- pressure, which is decanted and filtered to 91. Attributed to Wake, op. cit. [Our translation.] Claude Robert, 1989, Histoire du Québec separate the aluminum hydroxide from the contemporain. Vol. 1, De la Confédération other bauxite constituents, which are remo- 92. Id. à la crise, Montréal, Boréal, passim. ved as “red mud.” The aluminum hydroxide is precipitated by cooling, then calcined to 93. According to Ahlund, M., “The Company 69. Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, from Le Devoir, produce alumina and water vapour. Town in Scandinavia,” in Garner, Company December 9, 1927. Town: Architecture and Society…, op. cit. 79. “Une voie ferrée de grande communication 70. “Ici, c’est la force du torrent qui est à l’ori‑ passe entre l’usine et la ville.” (Ellis, trans- 94. “L’architecture de bon goût d’autrefois.” gine.” (Ellis, translator, in Mariani’s edition lator, in Mariani’s edition of Une cité indu‑ [Our translation.] of Une cité industrielle, op. cit.) strielle, op. cit.) 95. “La compagnie [qui] fait preuve d’excellen‑ 71. Smith, G.D. : 142-143; Carr : 174-178, 211-216. 80. Fickes : 252. tes dispositions à l’égard des nôtres.” [Our translation.] 72. Smith, G.D. : 143. 81. “ancienne ville au bord du torrent.” (Ellis, 96. José Igartua calculated that the annual rent 73. Dunn, C.P., 1930, “Blasting a Precast Dam translator, in Mariani’s edition of Une cité for a labourer’s house remained excessive into Place. Monolithic Structure Erected industrielle, op. cit.) at $350, equal to 40% of a day-labourer’s Vertically and Toppled into Place in Swift 82. “à la fois, des parties de montagne et une salary and 26% of a pot-man’s. (Theorists Saguenay Current,” Civil Engineering, vol. 1, plaine, celle-ci traversée par un fleuve.” at the time recommended that 20% of a no. 30, p. 159. (Ellis, id.) worker’s salary be devoted to housing.) 74. “La raison déterminante d’une pareille cité 83. This is probably a borrowing back of the (Igartua : 116-117.) peut être la proximité de matières premières English word “coulee,” which was originally 97. In 1920, Morris Knowles (Industrial Housing, à trouver ou bien l’existence d’une force borrowed from the French word for “flow.” New York, McGraw-Hill, p. 23) recommended naturelle susceptible d’être utilisée par le rents providing a minimum return of 10% on travail, ou encore la commodité des moyens 84. “En cherchant les dispositions qui donnent investment, including capitalization, main- de transport.” (Ellis, translator, in Mariani’s le mieux satisfaction aux besoins matériels tenance, and depreciation. It seems that edition of Une cité industrielle, op. cit.) et moraux de l’individu…” (Ellis, translator, in Mariani’s edition of Une cité industrielle, the company’s original plan in Arvida was 75. Smith, G.D. : 142; Campbell : 32. op. cit.) to rent houses for between 8% (types A and D) and 10% of construction costs, estimating

JSSAC | JSÉAC 36 > No 1 > 2011 39 Lucie K. Morisset > analysis | analyse

3% for maintenance, 0.66% for taxes, 0.34% responsible for its members’ well-being.” for insurance, and 4% for interest. Workers The French writing of Garnier might tell and employees however proved unable to more in that way: “La Société a désormais pay more than 5.63% to 7.6%. (Wake : 10.) la libre disposition du sol, et que c’est à elle de s’occuper de l’alimentation en eau, pain, 98. The Arvidian, June 5, 1928. viande, médicaments, en raison des soins 99. “We find out the maximum monthly pay- multiples que réclament ces produits.” ment which the purchaser indicates he is 108. “Notre structure reste simple, sans orne‑ able to pay and if that shows a reasonable ment.” (McGoldrick, op. cit.) margin over the rent charged we make the contract. The sales price of the property is 109. “D’autres systèmes de construction, d’autres the cost of the building, plus the sale price matériaux conduiront, sans doute, à d’autres placed on the lot, plus cost of any sidewalk formes qu’il sera aussi intéressant de recher‑ and extraordinary improvements that have cher.” (McGoldrick, id.) been made on the property. We take this 110. Beloit Historical Society : 247. sale price and add interest on the unpaid balance at 4%, plus taxes and insurance, 111. New York Times, April 28, 1926. and divide the total thus obtained by the 112. New York Times, September 27, 1926. monthly payments, which gives us the number of months the contract has to run. 113. Lemieux, R.A., n.d., Growth of the city of Naturally our contracts will be very long.” Arvida Since its Incorporation, curve chart, (Wake : 11.) E-976, Ville de Saguenay.

100. Knowles, Morris, op. cit., p. 43. 114. “Sur la montagne au nord du centre de la ville […] des rideaux de verdure [l’encadrent] 101. Walker, Henry W., 1953, Single-enterprise à l’est et à l’ouest.” (McGoldrick, op. cit.) Communities in Canada: A Report to Central Mortgage and Housing 115. Id. Corporation, Kingston, The Institute of Local 116. Id. Government / Queen’s University, p. 3.

102. “Ce sont les matériaux en usage dans cette région qui seront employés par nous comme moyens de construction.” (Ellis, translator, in Mariani’s edition of Une cité industrielle, op. cit.)

103. Although socialist ideals attributed to Garnier could be understood in another way if placed in the American context. Une cité industrielle probably would gain from a new reading in that way.

104. “Progrès d’ordre social.” (Ellis, translator, in Mariani’s edition of Une cité industrielle, op. cit.)

105. Id.

106. Id.

107. “La Société a désormais la libre disposition du sol.” (Marguerite E. McGoldrick, transla- tor, in Siderakis’s edition of Une cité indus‑ trielle, op. cit.) It is not clear, however, which meaning Garnier gives to “La Société” and whether he is really referring to a socialist tenure, as it has been written, or if he is only describing a mode of governance, especially since he continues: “Society then would have free reign over the distribution of land as well as water, bread, meat, milk, and medicine, since these products are

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