National Post

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Delight at the end of the tunnel in Métro: Design in Motion

By the end of his long run as mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau had become secretive, autocratic, didactic, brittle and somewhat bitter; as a young journalist covering Montreal City Hall in the early 1980s, I felt no love for Drapeau.

Now, a hefty new bilingual picture book seeks to rehabilitate Drapeau by focusing on his masterpiece, conceived 50 years ago: the Métro de Montréal. The tome Métro: Design in Motion posits that Montreal’s rubber-wheeled subway, with its unique, slender blue train sets and network of bucolic, colour-saturated stations, stands as a poem in fibreglass and poured concrete: our most important legacy of Canadian-made industrial design.