Norbert Schoenauer Collections :: Housing Archive


CASE STUDIES URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNITIES SCHOENAUER'S MONTREAL LANDSCAPES AND NATURE HOUSING TYPES

Landscapes and Nature

"Norbert Schoenauer was an urban planner of extraordinary renown. He was an inquisitive researcher, an innovative designer and a generous humanist. He trained in planning at McGill with Harold Spence Sales, graduating in 1959. His thesis, on the morphology of the villages along the Richelieu valley reflects his profound interest in landscape, natural systems and built environment. The appreciation of physical geography, the shape of landforms, natural drainage patterns and vegetation was impressed upon us students of Spence Sales by his sensuous love of landscape and its interpretation, long before influential writings such as McGargs's "Design with Nature" were published.

Fermont demonstrates many of Schoenauer's often articulated beliefs about the urban environment. He believed that planning and urban development should embrace, not destroy, natural landscapes, and that climatic, topographical and biophysical conditions were opportunities for better planning, not constraints on creativity" (Wolfe: 2003).