Was the Design of the New MET Airport a Missed Opportunity?

The arrival of Montreal’s new airport this summer has been good news for the most part. The Montreal Metropolitan Airport or MET opened in Saint-Hubert on June 15, giving the region its second commercial airport for the first time since 1940. Porter flies coast to coast out of it, with twelve routes in the first week alone. The building runs almost entirely on electric power, and the whole experience was designed as a deliberate antidote to Trudeau: calm, low-stress, easy to move through.

After years of watching YUL strain under more passengers than it was ever built to hold, a second option feels less like a luxury than a relief. Nobody is arguing Montreal didn't need this.

So this isn't a knock on the airport. It's a question about how it looks.

In the eye of the beholder

When the first photos went around, they revealed a clean and competent terminal, almost entirely drained of colour with profusions of pale wood, soft greys, and Nordic restraint. By every reasonable measure, it is a perfectly nice airport.

It is also, argues the innovation consultant Iain Montgomery, one that could be dropped into almost any mid-sized city in the northern hemisphere without anyone noticing the difference. For a city that sells itself to the world on festivals, murals, and a certain refusal to be tasteful (or at least manicured) about any of it, that’s a strange choice.

While not an architect, he's someone who spent years working out how to get people to do things, ranging from how to bank on their phones or play the lottery by text. Then he turned that drive on cities instead of screens.

Through Challenger Cities, the podcast and project he runs, he thinks about why some cities punch above their weight while others simply copy the ones that already have. He has worked on the future of train stations and airports, he is currently deep in a procurement process with LAX, and by his own admission he has "a few too many opinions on airports." He also moved to Montreal less than two years ago, which makes him more or less exactly the person the MET was built to greet.

His objection starts with what an airport is for, beyond logistics.

"An airport is kind of like a welcome mat," he says. "It's the first thing you see and the last thing you see in a city, and it sort of sets the tone."

He points to an older civic instinct that airports seem to have misplaced: "If you look at train stations of the past, everyone was trying to build the biggest, the grandest, the most interesting station, so it said something about the city."

Montreal already has proof of this a few kilometres away, in the murals at either end of Central Station. "Those are genuinely beautiful," he says. "When they were put in, they were making a statement about the city." A terminal in a city with Montreal's design reputation, he figures, could have reached for the same thing. "I'd have expected them to call Sid Lee, or another one of Montreal's great design agencies."

What the MET reaches for instead is a look Montgomery struggles to separate from a certain contemporary blandness. Call it the millennial grey of real estate. He goes a step further. "There's almost a tech-bro vibe to it, stripping out any sense of texture," he says. The logic, he suspects, is operational.

"If you run an airport, you're looking at it going: how do we make sure this is cheap to clean?"

That instinct could have a cost

Montgomery had read Thomas Heatherwick's Humanize, a book whose central claim is that boring buildings actually make us ill.

"You need texture in a place, something that makes people spend a bit more attention, a bit more time looking at it," he says. An airport is the ideal place to try, because the audience isn't going anywhere. "I might get through pretty quickly, but I might also be spending half an hour having a coffee before I leave. There's a chance to do something a little more interesting."

The obvious defence is that the MET was going for calm, and calm it is, but Montgomery doesn't accept calm as an excuse. "Calm doesn't have to mean bland. A pub can be a really relaxing place; it doesn't mean you paint the walls white. I've got white walls at home."