Artist of the day: Artist of the day, January 17, 2020: Roger Taillibert, a French architect (#893)

Friday, January 17, 2020

Artist of the day, January 17, 2020: Roger Taillibert, a French architect (#893)

Roger Taillibert (1926 – 2019) was a French architect, active as a designer from about 1963 to 1987. He studied at the prestigious Ecole du Louvre and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

The renowned French architect created hundreds of buildings, including the Parc des Princes stadium and Deauville swimming pool in France and the Khalifa Stadium in Qatar.

But in Canada, he’s best known for the stadium that remains a defining feature of Montreal’s skyline. It remains the most visible legacy of the first Olympics on Canadian soil, but it has also been much maligned for ongoing maintenance issues and a surprise billion-dollar price tag that took the city 30 years to pay off.

Taillibert’s success in France in the 1960s and early 1970s and his penchant for sweeping, grand designs attracted the attention of then-Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, who asked him to design a stadium to house the 1976 Olympics and later the Montreal Expos baseball team.

Taillibert’s vision for the Olympic Stadium included a massive concrete dome with a retractable roof, held up by cables suspended from the world’s largest inclined tower, at 165 mètres high.

Claude Phaneuf, the city of Montreal’s main engineer for the Olympic installations, said Taillibert’s genius and his technique of using prestressed concrete allowed him to design buildings with dramatic curves that surpassed what anyone else could do.

Taillibert was an exacting taskmaster who “didn’t tolerate mediocrity,” but he was also a loyal friend. He remained proud of the design and continued to defend his creation over the years, despite criticism over its malfunctioning roof and an original price tag that ballooned to several times its original estimate.

Taillibert, who once sued the city over his unpaid architect’s fees, always insisted that the stadium’s problems were due to mismanagement and cost-cutting rather than a design flaw.

Taillibert’s career as an architect spanned decades, and his legacy includes buildings across Europe as well as in Canada, Jordan, and Qatar.

In recent years, Taillibert divided his time between Paris and his home in St-Sauveur in Quebec’s Laurentians region, where according to Phaneuf he continued to swim, cycle, and take an active interest in Quebec politics until his death.

In addition to being an architect, Taillibert was also an accomplished painter.

© 2020. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Roger Taillibert or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only