SATURDAY,NOVEMBER2,2019| THEGLOBEANDMAIL O B 21
‘K
eep moving forward” was the personal man-
tra of architect René Menkès as he migrated
from Nazi-occupied Paris to a welcoming
Montreal, and through his long career reshaping sky-
lines across Canada.
Mr. Menkès, who died on Oct. 7 of complications
from pneumonia, made his mark through the design
of towers. As a partner with the firm WZMH, he led
the design of the National Bank of Paris Building and
Cathedral Square, among a half-dozen major build-
ings in downtown Montreal; he also oversaw the Roy-
al Bank Plaza in downtown Toronto, with its thin
coating of gold, which supplanted the bank’s Mon-
treal headquarters. In the eighties, he led the design
of the Aquitaine tower at La Défense, outside Paris.
René Menkès was born on Feb. 10, 1932, in Paris to
Issia and Tussia (née Sobelevitch) Menkès. His father
and mother were both Jews who had immigrated to
Paris – from Russia and Germany respectively – and
by the 1930s, they saw clearly the threat of fascism. In
1939 they made a long visit to Montreal, considering
it as a potential home; and when the Nazis occupied
Paris in 1940, they had tickets ready for their Atlantic
passage. It was a lucky escape – a quarter of French
Jews would be murdered during the Holocaust.
Young René was not obviously marked by the experi-
ence or by his transition to life in Canada. “He found
Montreal a very welcoming place,” his daughter Alex-
andra says. “And as he grew older, he
thought of himself as European but al-
so a Canadian first.”
Mr. Menkès learned to play hockey,
attended the prestigious Lower Canada
College, and while still in elementary
school, discovered his intellectual pas-
sion: architecture. He liked to draw and
paint pagodas, and soon other types of
buildings spotted in magazines.
He began architecture school in
1948, at the age of 16. “I was at that time
clearly determined to go into architec-
ture. There was no other thought in
mind,” he told a McGill University re-
searcher in a 1999 interview.
He first attended Dawson College, with a class in-
cluding war veterans (“We grew up very fast at that
point,” he recalled). He then enrolled in McGill’s five-
year program. The curriculum was modernist but al-
so, similar to more traditional schools, emphasized
drawing. Arthur Lismer taught a weekly class in free-
hand sketching, at which Mr. Menkès excelled. His
class of 16 students included several who would have
rich careers in architecture in the postwar years:
Louis Papineau and Guy Lajoie, who would found
PGL and design Mirabel Airport; and Dimitri Dima-
kopoulos, of the Montreal firm that would design
Place des Arts.
Mr. Menkès had his first experience of designing
skyscrapers in New York. He moved there in 1955 and
took a job at Harrison & Abramovitz. The firm had
some of the most important commissions in New
York City and the state; the young Mr. Menkès, ac-
cording to his daughter, worked on the Time & Life
Building and the Metropolitan Opera House at Lin-
coln Center. “He loved big projects, and it must have
been very exciting for him to work in that environ-
ment in Manhattan,” Alexandra Menkès said.
He also met the love of his life. On a blind date with
friends, he encountered Ann Sullivan, a fashion mod-
el; the two were married within a year, in 1959. They
would go on to have three children in the next dec-
ade.The newlyweds returned to Montreal in 1960,
and Mr. Menkès took a job with the young British-
Canadian architect Peter Dickinson. Mr. Dickinson’s
office, based in Toronto, was a hotbed of modernist
design in Canada, and the architects soon had pro-
jects across Ontario, in the North and in Montreal. Mr.
Menkès, who ran the Montreal office, would regular-
ly jet into Toronto for meetings – which a recent book
about Mr. Dickinson recalls as heavily male and filled
with clouds of cigarette smoke – but always returned
to Montreal. In that first year the office was designingthe Tour CIBC, next to Dorchester Square, which
would open in 1962 as one of the city’s tallest build-
ings.
There would be more towers, but without Mr.
Dickinson. He died of cancer in late 1961 at the age of- A group of even younger associates, including Mr.
Menkès, established themselves as Webb Zerafa Men-
kès Housden, or WZMH.
WZMH became a force in Canadian architecture in
the 1960s and 1970s, designing or contributing to of-
fice towers and institutional buildings across the
country, including Calgary’s Municipal Building and
the CN Tower. Mr. Menkès’s Montreal office special-
ized in high-rises. “There was a strong modernist aes-
thetic in the office, and he was a strong proponent of
that,” says Carl Blanchaer, an architect who began
working with Mr. Menkès at WZMH in 1981 and is now
a principal of that firm. “He was trying to find a time-
less language for architecture.”
That language was in keeping with the dominant
ideas of the late modernist period: Mr. Menkès’s
buildings were sometimes in concrete but increasing-
ly with skins of reflective glass. These were intended
to break up their large masses and evoked an orderly
and technologically advanced future. WZMH grew
quickly, and by the 1980s had hundreds of employees
and a handful of foreign offices. Mr. Menkès was in-
terested in both the financial and human aspects of
such a large operation, his daughter recalls. “Archi-
tecture is very much about working with a team of
people, and he really prized those collaborations. It’s
also a business and he understood that
clearly.”
But unlike many executives in fast-
growing businesses – and many archi-
tects – Mr. Menkès by all accounts was a
warm and thoughtful colleague. “He
had a real generosity of spirit,” Mr.
Blanchaer remembers. “He was a very
gracious person; he was able to draw
on the talents of the people around
him and didn’t feel the need to claim
credit.”
He did, however, enjoy a new chal-
lenge. Moving forward, in 1994, he part-
ed amicably with WZMH to launch a
second firm, which would become Menkès Shooner
Dagenais LeTourneux (MSDL). He recruited two
younger architects from WZMH, Yves Dagenais and
Anik Shooner, as his partners, and the young firm
continued to specialize in offices and high-rises. “He
was deeply interested in pleasing the client and en-
suring that the building really functioned the way it
should,” Mr. Dagenais says.
The firm continued his specialization in large
commercial buildings and carried on Mr. Menkès’s
tradition of creating a humane workplace. “He really
understood that to have a great building, you need
happy people,” Mr. Dagenais adds. “We learned a lot
from that about how to run a practice and run an
office.” Mr. Menkès retired from practice in 2009, but
continued to drop into the office frequently, Ms.
Shooner recalls. “He was a very warm person and al-
ways ready to offer advice. We always valued that.”
Mr. Menkès, who was 87, leaves his wife, Ann;
three children, Katrina, John and Alexandra; and two
grandchildren.
His professional highlights with MSDL included
designing the headquarters of the Canadian Space
Agency in St. Hubert, Que., whose aerodynamic
forms and sleek metal cladding “really captured the
aspirations of the agency to lead the way with space
travel,” Mr. Dagenais says. That building also prefig-
ured a change in architecture. The glass skins that
had been so fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s dis-
appeared. And while all-glass towers have had a re-
naissance in the past decade, Mr. Blanchaer suggests
that the next generation of commercial buildings will
be less carbon-intensive and more energy efficient.
This is already evident in MSDL’s recent work. Ms.
Shooner suggests that Mr. Menkès would have been
more than ready to make this change. “He was always
ready to embrace the future, and he wanted to build
something that would survive him. I think he was
proud that our office will do that.”
ARCHITECTHELPEDCITIES
REACHFORTHESKY
Aspecialistindesigningtallbuildings,heco-foundedthefirmWZMH,
whichworkedonmajorprojectsacrossthecountry,includingtheCNTowerArchitectRenéMenkèswasastrongproponentofthemodernistaestheticandwastryingtofind
a‘timelesslanguageforarchitecture,’asoneofhiscolleaguesputit.RENÉMENKÈS
ARCHITECTURALFIRMPARTNER,87ALEXBOZIKOVICArchitecture is very
much about working
with a team of
people, and he really
prized those
collaborations.ALEXANDRAMENKÈS
DAUGHTEROFRENÉ
MENKÈSOBITUARIES
To submit anIRemember:[email protected]
Send us a memory of someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page.
Please includeIRemember in the subject fieldP
aul Barrere, a guitarist, sing-
er and songwriter best
known for his long tenure
with the rock band Little Feat,
formed in 1969 and known for its
distinctive blend of musical influ-
ences, died Saturday in Los An-
geles. He was 71.
The band announced his
death, at UCLA Medical Center, on
its website. No cause was given,
but Mr. Barrere had learned a few
years ago that he had liver cancer.
Little Feat never reached the
upper echelons of rock stardom
and never had a hit single. But it
became a staple on album-orient-
ed FM rock radio with infectious
songs such asDixie Chickenand
Sailin’ Shoes, and it attracted both
critical acclaim and a fiercely loy-
al following.
The band’s sound was distinc-
tive, if hard to categorize – it
mixed, Jon Pareles of The New
York Times wrote in 1991, “New
Orleans rhythm and blues, coun-
try, hard rock, and touches of funk
and jazz.”
Mr. Barrere was not an original
member; he had auditioned as a
bassist when the band was being
formed but was passed over for
Roy Estrada. “As a bassist,” Mr.
Barrere later said, “I make an ex-
cellent guitarist.”
After Mr. Estrada left the band
in 1972, it grew from a quartet to a
sextet with the addition of Mr.
Barrere on rhythm guitar and vo-
cals as well as Kenny Gradney on
bass and Sam Clayton on percus-
sion. The reconstituted Little Feat
incorporated a strong dose of
New Orleans funk into what had
been essentially a country-rock
approach. The resulting sound, as
captured on the new lineup’s first
album,Dixie Chicken(1973), won
the band a legion of new fans, al-
though chart success remained
elusive.
Mr. Barrere wrote or co-wrote
some of Little Feat’s best-known
songs, includingAll That You
Dream,Time Loves a HeroandOld
Folks Boogie. He occasionally sang
lead, although singer, lead guita-
rist and chief songwriter Lowell
George remained the band’s focal
point. Mr. George died in 1979,
and Little Feat broke up that year.
Mr. Barrere went on to work
with the group the Bluesbusters
and recorded two albums as a
leader, but he was largely inactive
until Little Feat reunited in 1987.
To fill the gap left by Mr. George’s
death, the band added two mem-
bers and Mr. Barrere began doing
more of the lead singing and
songwriting, as well as taking
more of the guitar solos. Little
Feat has remained together ever
since, with relatively few changes
in members, and recently toured
in celebration of its 50th anniver-
sary. Mr. Barrere did not take part
in the tour but had said that he
hoped to rejoin the band next
year.
Paul Barrere was born in Bur-
bank, Calif., on July 3, 1948. His
parents, Paul and Claudia Barrere,
were actors who both worked un-
der the professional name Bryar.
He leaves his wife, Pam, and three
children, Gabriel, Genevieve and
Gillian.NEWYORKTIMESNEWS SERVICELittleFeat
guitarist
wrotesome
ofband’s
best-known
songs
PaulBarrerePAULBARRERE
MUSICIAN,71To submit aLivesLived:
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Canadians who have recently
passed. To learn how to share the
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go online to tgam.ca/livesguide