In September, 1971, I went back to McGill - to my parent’s relief. Since I had left school, I was so absorbed in “searching for the meaning of life” I rarely let them know where I was or how I was doing. Fragments with news of my wanderings only made them more concerned. From this point on, I made sure I shared more with them. I didn’t realize the depth of the pain I had caused them until years later in a conversation with my younger brother, Mark. I asked him why he had never left Ottawa to see the world. Referring to my three-and-a-half year peregrinations around Canada, I was shocked when he said: “After what I saw you did to Mom and Dad, I decided I would never inflict that on them.”
In Montreal, I had no place to stay, almost no money, and was a month late for registration. Maureen Anderson pulled strings to get me registered. I bumped into Pieter Sijpkes in front of the School of Architecture. He had started his studies later than me - and I had dropped out for a while - so now we were in the same year. A deceased uncle had left him some money, some of which Pieter lent to me so I could pay my tuition. Pieter had a small room to spare in his flat on St. Urbain, above Pine. Our Polish-Jewish landlady lived next door. Sometimes she would be waiting for us as we went off to school, standing on her doorstep with her daughter. She grabbed her daughter’s wrist, raised it in the air, pointed to her daughter’s hand, and said, rolling the “r”, “Look Pieter, no ring!”
I told Pieter something about the Baha’i Faith. He sympathized. He thought world government was not possible. As an example, he mentioned East Germany. He had seen Germany, East and West, and, found it difficult to imagine sufficient good-will to take us from something like that to world government. Still, he hoped. His favorite poem, written in 1964, by McGill Professor, F.R. Scott, was “Creed”:
The world is my country
The human race is my race
The spirit of man is my God
The future of man is my heaven.
In October, 1971, John Lennon and Yoko One’s new song “Imagine” had almost the same message.
“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You, you may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man.”
These were examples of the wish for the oneness of humanity, but not with the help of religion. In the 1960s and early 1970s many young people were looking for a wider picture of truth. Our search included looking at Eastern philosophy and religion, Hinduism from India, Buddhism, China’s Dao De Jing, Yi Jing, and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. We had all heard about and admired the Barefoot Doctors.
I was upstairs at school, on the floor above our studio, listening in on a crit. It was for students in the year ahead of us. While I was focused on the discussion, a hand from behind patted and squeezed my shoulder. I turned to look. There was a smiling John Bland. He said nothing and went on his way. I have never felt a more fatherly welcome, and can still feel it today.
At the Student Union Building, I saw a notice for a performance by a group from Mainland China. They were touring North America. In Montreal they gave McGill students a special free performance in honour of Norman Bethune. At the time, I didn't know who Bethune was. The performance was non-verbal; mime, bird calls, yo-yo tricks, etc. For them, it was not just the novelty of being in a foreign country; it was also a great honor, to be on pilgrimage, to be at the university where Norman Bethune had taught.
Fig. 20 Studio Photo from Beijing. He Hongyu (my future wife) at lower left, 1971
China, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), was as far away as Mars. For us, our Chinese guests were real people let out from an isolated fifth of the world. When the show was over, we leapt up from where we had been sitting, hippie-fashion on the floor, and swarmed the performers. We crowded around them and hugged them; they responded very stiffly. We all exchanged little things we had in our pockets, a coin, a pen..... I never did find out who they were exactly, or what city they had come from. I had my first glimpse of China and felt excited.
In December, Pieter put a strip of cloth in a pan of water, then left it to freeze outside. The following morning it was a brick of ice reinforced with cloth; he stood on it and it supported his weight. Without asking permission, he made, on campus, a triangle of wooden beams and suspended them with ropes high up between three trees. From the beams, he draped bolts of cloth down to the ground to make a kind of tent. The base of the tent was a little larger than the triangle of beams above.
Soon this Tom Sawyer/Pied Piper had a team of classmates spraying the cloth with hoses to build a layer of ice on the cloth. When the ice was hard, he climbed a ladder to cut the ropes supporting the triangle of wooden beams. Miracle! The cloth-reinforced ice structure was standing! When the temperature warmed up enough, it collapsed. It was refreshing to witness someone who saw the campus, the city, and the world, as the university; not just textbooks and classrooms.
Joe Carter, Joe Baker, Pieter Sijpkes 2012
While I had been away from McGill, roaming around Canada for over three years, the social concerns that pulled me out of the School of Architecture had come to it via Joe Baker.
He had put in place an academic program in the School of Architecture called the Community Design Workshop. Here, students could study architecture by applying it to the needs of lower-income districts of Montreal. He ran studios in Point St. Charles, Griffintown, Verdun, Mile End and Milton Parc. Our design assignments were not imaginary, they were real; we worked on kindergartens, legal aid clinics, even housing.
He had left private practice to teach. He was passionate about the conservation of urban heritage and the preservation and renovation of low-income housing and neighbourhoods. He joined several Montreal citizen organizations to help find alternatives to destructive development patterns that were damaging poorer, older neighbourhoods. He directed Loge-Peuple in Point St. Charles, a pioneering non-profit organization, that purchased and renovated over 100 units with the support of government funding to ensure affordable housing.
In the Winter Term of 1972, as part of Prof. Baker’s program, Pieter and I were interested in Pointe St. Charles. It was just across the LaChine Canal from the St. Henri-Little Burgundy- Griffintown part of the city I had seen in my first term at McGill. We asked Joe Baker, “What should we do?”. He said, “Go there and see what they need”. That was the core of the curriculum.
Pieter and I saw quite a bit of unused land and decided to do a study of Pte. St. Charles to see how that land might be better used. Our survey included an axonometric map of the area, traced over a city map. We rode along all the the streets on our bicycles to record the number of floors of every building.
Map of Pointe Saint Charles drawn by hand, 1972
Opportunities for Youth Project Site Office
* * *
In April, 1972, I moved to the LaSalle district of Montreal to help form a Local Baha’i Assembly. Before amalgamation in 2002, the many districts of greater Montreal had more autonomy, and each had their own Baha’i Assembly. Often, in those days, an election was not needed. There were only 9 adults in the community, some like me has just moved in, so the assembly formed by acclamation. The core of the community was two Persian families, the Javanmardis and the Khodadadehs. Mrs. Khodadadeh looked at my student wardrobe and long hair and said, “Have you looked at yourself in a mirror?” It was helpful to get some feedback.
* * *
During the summer, to put our ideas into practice, Pieter and I obtained a federal government grant through a program called “Opportunities for Youth”. It was a summer employment plan where young people made proposals for community service projects. If the project was accepted, it was funded. We planned to create adventure playgrounds and vegetable gardens on some of the underused land identified in our study. We went to a local community service office and met Ernie Vaudry. “Can you find thirty young people for this summer?”, we asked. The next Monday there they were; including, “Peanut”, a biker with long hair and tattoos.
On two empty lots, Peter oversaw the construction of Adventure Playgrounds, places where the children participated in building them. I looked after the planting of two vegetable gardens on unused railway lands and a backyard cleanup service. Pieter and I would meet for lunch at a small Indian restaurant on Wellington St., play Anne Murray singing, “It takes time to move a mountain” on the juke box, and commiserate about the difficulties we had encountered that day. We wrote a report about our project called “Adventure Playgrounds, Green Thumbs and Sore Thumbs” with photos by fellow student Rick White.
Between Joe Baker’s Community Design Workshop and the Federal Government, Opportunities for Youth Program, architectural education and work activity were meaningfully connected.[ I was in China when Joe Baker died in 2016. I contributed a brief video to the celebration of his life held at the School of Architecture-tribute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDXX-w_6quU ]
Our Pointe St. Charles project was a glimpse of what the education-community relationship could be like; of what happens when you connect the needs of the community with youthful idealism and zeal, and an attitude of service. We created summer employment for thirty people. It was meaningful work for the participants. We demonstrated good alternatives for the use of vacant land. It added to the on-going efforts to create play areas that are also group learning experiences, and we contributed produce to the local food bank. By “suffering” together, Pieter and I became life-long friends. Soon after, he moved to “the Pointe” and lives there still.
Reflecting on my return to school, I remember asking myself; “I’m 24 years old and I’ve learned how to grow broccoli; what does that have to do with architecture and saving the world?”
The week before school started, I attended the second of two required “Sketching Schools”. We spent a week in a town outside of Montreal; every year a different place. This year it was Mattawa. I couldn’t afford a hotel so I brought a rope, a sheet of plastic, some clothes pegs, and a sleeping bag. At night I would go into the woods at the edge of town, tie my rope between two trees, throw the plastic sheet over the rope to make a tent, hold it in place with the clothes pegs, and put my sleeping bag inside.
I sat for two days on the lawn of a convent to make an oil pastel painting of the town across the river. Each day a nun brought me a glass of milk and some cookies.
Oil Pastel of Mattawa, Ontario 1972
Gentille Tondino came by as I was working. He suggested, later, I take a piece of paper, and cut a small hole in it. Hold the hole over your picture and see what pictures you can find inside. Some results are shown below.
For the last term at McGill, in the fall of 1972, we had Norbert Schoenauer as our design professor. I am extremely grateful to have had this man as a teacher. He was not only very knowledgeable and experienced, he was very skillful at sharing what he knew. He emphasized housing and the people in them, designed at appropriate densities with human scale that made a sense of neigbourhood. He was doing this long before terms such as sustainable, walkable, and family-friendly became part of our vocabulary.
There was a moderation in his thinking and teaching. He emphasized “optimum” solutions. He considered singe family homes, in general, as wasteful used of resources; nor did he agree with high-rise housing. For him five stories was optimum. At that height, trees in courtyards would be the same height as the building, giving it shade in the summer and light in winter. Also, above that height parents would not be able to see their children playing in the garden below. Here, the “social caring” that I had been looking for was married to design.
He was also a humble man. He saw me sketching a floor plan of an apartment with an alcove on a larger space. He said, “This is a good direction to explore. I am very interested in this idea. Your work will also help me.” He was making me a partner in the search for better design.
I would qualify my last two terms at McGill, with Joe Baker and Norbert Schoenauer, as ‘divine intervention’.
* * *
Left to right: Joe Carter, Stuart Kinmond, Debbie Hawkins, David Covo at Pieter Sijpke’s loft on St. Laurent near St. Catherine, Montreal 1973
In January, 1973, I worked, again, for John Schreiber. In the office, John was “the boss” but also a teacher; everyday was a mixture of doing and learning. His talented partner, Ron Williams, later a professor and director of the School of Landscape Architecture at the Universite de Montreal, was a gifted artist, and had a puckish sense of humour. He used to whistle and hum - at the same time - the Ode to Joy. The office was warm, friendly and dedicated. We had good commissions to work on, for example, in Ottawa, the landscape design of the Portage Bridge/ Victoria Island/Le Breton Flats area.
In April, LaSalle had enough people to form an Assembly, but Pointe Claire was short one person, so I moved there. I found a place to live on Chemin Du Bord-du-Lac near Rue Golf, right on the waterfront in the old village. I took the 25KM-bus ride downtown from Pointe Claire every day. I came early enough to have toast and poached eggs at Dunne’s Restaurant on St. Catherine Street, not far from the office. I sat at the bar on a stool to read a book and enjoy the clatter and skill of the men throwing eggs and toast around in their stainless steel workspace, cracking three eggs at a time with one hand.
Our Baha’i communities were struggling and small, and in the context of the world, obscure. We set up a community pattern of activity that includes the monthly Feast, and various Holy Days. The latter commemorated events in the history of the Faith such as the birth and death of the Founders of the Babi and Baha’i Faith, the Bab and Baha’u’llah. Individually or collectively we organized gatherings in our homes called “Firesides” where friends were invited to hear and talk about the Baha’i Faith. If there were children in the community, we started a children’s class.
At home I played guitar, grew hydroponic plants, and had visitors, including my younger brother Mark and our cousin Steve. That summer they were cycling across Canada. They had come from B.C. and were headed for St. John’s. They were muscled, sun-burnt, and very hungry. They stormed into my place, ate and drank everything in my refrigerator, and then left. Travel had become a sport, not a search. Although the difference in our ages was only six years, I felt a generation gap. The crowds of young people on the road, “in my day”, didn’t know where they were going, but were looking for something; this younger generation knew where they were going, but they didn’t seem to be looking for anything.
Through my Toronto Baha’i friends, I met a circle of young Montreal Baha’is. Diane Robinson and her mother, Isabel, lived in Old Montreal. Through Diane I met Cathy Ferri. She had an angelic aura, a calmness, and a quiet strength. She was an artist who danced. She loved children.
Pieter had moved into a loft over a pool hall on St. Laurent Street near St. Catherine, Montreal’s red-light district. The pool hall was run by Joe Parish who also served steamed hot dogs. Piet was on the top floor; a space 30 meters deep and 8 meter wide with windows at either end. Two large skylights lit up the central area. He furnished his apartment with found items from sidewalk refuse piles and demolished buildings. Guests, such as me, were provided a bed, accessible by ladder, up in the skylight. An evangelical church, whose mission was the infamous street below, occupied the second floor.
Cathy Ferri, my first wife. Photo 2000
One snowy night the flakes were especially large, like flying saucers-on-fire tumbling to silent, soft landings on muffled streets; and I spoke to their occupants as they cruised by. My toque slowly collected a mushroom cone. I had just left from a visit with Cathy Ferri; and in love, landed, late at night, at Piet’s door. I rang his bell and he threw the keys down. “Carter-man, something’s happening,” he said.
In December 1973, in Piet’s kitchen, Colin Munro, a fellow architecture student, who, more than any of us, pursued architecture with a social agenda, helped me cook turkeys and make salad for the wedding in Rawdon, Quebec. It was a Baha’i wedding. Diane Robinson decorated the marriage spot with tree branches at one end of a hall in the local United Church. I admired their flexibility, letting this tiny religious minority use their church for the wedding ceremony of a different denomination. My parents did not object to the marriage but did not attend. Rawdon had only a few Baha’is and did not have an Assembly. The Assembly of my home community, Pointe Claire, conducted the wedding, with the chairman, Ron Stee, officiating.
My employer, John Schrieber gave us a generous wedding gift - two return airline tickets to Paris. We asked him if we could exchange the tickets for a trip to Haifa, Israel. Cathy and I wanted to go on pilgrimage to see the Baha’i World Center. He agreed and we arranged a trip for November 1974.
Both of us wanted to move. There were two resonating forces: the hippie doctrine of “return to land” for a more natural, less materialistic, way of life; and the Baha’i pattern of moving from larger to smaller centers.[ Baha’i International Community, Statement on Baha’u’llah, 1991. “During the earlier decades of this century, this development [of the Baha’i Faith] was relatively obscure. Bahá'u'lláh's writings forbid the aggressive proselytism through which many religious messages have been widely promulgated. Further, the priority which the Bahá'í community gave to the establishment of groups at the local level throughout the entire planet militated against the early emergence of large concentrations of adherents in any one country or the mobilization of resources required for large-scale programs of public information.] Although, today, the Baha’i global population is only around 6 million - less than 0.1% of the world’s population - it has spread into almost every country and ethnicity in the world, and is recognized as the second-most geographically widespread religion after Christianity.[ Encyclopedia Britannica (2002). "Worldwide Adherents of All Religions by Six Continental Areas, Mid-2002". ]
The majority of Baha’is used to belong to other faiths. It may have the highest percentage of people who have crossed old boundaries. A lot of welding across many of the world’s divides. In the map below, the larger circle shows the percentage distribution of faiths around the world. The Baha’i Faith is hidden inside a thin black line called “Other”. It only becomes visible when that black line is expanded.
Chart of World Religions by Population
Cathy and I sat on a bench in a Montreal park wondering where to go. Normally, to advance our careers, we should go to cities even larger than Montreal and mingle with our profession’s cutting edge. However, the forces mentioned above were stronger. We both preferred a smaller city, a place more natural, more rural, but with a college where Cathy could continue to study. An abandoned woman’s magazine sat beside us. The wind blew the pages open to an article on St. John’s, Newfoundland. We took that as a sign and in January, 1974, we were there.
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