Place Ville Marie (Axonometric View) Montreal, Quebec — completed 1962 The seven-acre civic and commercial complex that redefined downtown Montreal and inaugurated its underground city. The cruciform tower — forty-seven storeys, organised into four narrow wings around a central core to maximise daylight — was designed by Henry N. Cobb under I. M. Pei, with ARCOP as associate architects and Vincent Ponte as urban planner. Built over a fifteen-metre railway trench cut into the flank of Mount Royal, the project lifted a three-block public plaza above the tracks of the Canadian National Railway, beneath which an entirely new infrastructure of retail, transit, and parking was conceived — the founding gesture of Montreal's RÉSO. At its inauguration the tower was the tallest building in the Commonwealth. The axonometric makes legible what the street cannot: the relationship between the cruciform mass above and the layered civic infrastructure below. I. M. Pei & Partners with Henry N. Cobb; ARCOP, associate architects.