Why does Edward Hopper's picture of postwar isolation look so similar to early 21st-century prosperity?

At the northeast corner of St. Denis and Rachel, there’s a billboard advertising the condo-lofts that will go in on the upper storeys of the Le Château building there. It shows a computer-generated artist’s rendering of what the apartments will look like once they’re finished: a bare floor, Bauhaus knock-off chairs, a stainless steel fridge, a stainless steel gas stove, an HD tv built into the wall, a man on a sofa, a woman in a pyjama-bathrobe combo.

This billboard—it’s a tarp, really—has been stretched across the side of this building for quite a while now. Much longer than you’d expect in Montreal’s grab-what-you-can-get housing market, where old factories, train stations and churches are gutted, restuffed and sold to whoever has enough money to buy a housing unit inside the transformed corpse.

Maybe, like a good number of condo projects, construction has stopped on this one thanks to a developer gone belly up, and those people who “invested” in an unbuilt home are left licking their wounds and wondering if they’ll ever get their $100,000 back.

But the graphic designers who dreamed up this open concept living space, and the passers by who briefly pictured themselves in it, agree on one thing: that this imagined spot would be a nice place to live. The man reclines on the loveseat, turtle-necked and relaxed. If you follow his eyes, you’ll notice he’s not looking at what’s on tv, but at some fascinating fixed point in the corner. He seems to show the same lobotomized interest in his girlfriend. His girlfriend appears content to admire the immaculately unfurnished square footage of their floor, while—like a housecat—she demurely soaks up the sunshine pouring in through the huge windows.

The American painter Edward Hopper used lighting like that—and to the same chilling effect as the designer who Photoshopped our loft space rendering. In 1953, he painted a scene called “Office in a Small City.” It shows a pale office worker staring into the beating sunlight, losing his mind in a daydream.

Hopper said a few words about an earlier office painting that I think apply to this one: “My aim was to try to give the sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air, with the office furniture which has a very definite meaning to me.”

When it comes to this particular painting, the words “isolated” and “lonely” seem too soft to describe the feeling I get when imagining being that poor little guy. You get the sense that there are no other people in those windows across the street, no cars beeping through the streets below. Hopper’s small city is as sterile as a hospital hallway.

And, when you try to make sense of that quote, the other part of it is a bit frustrating. Hopper says that office furniture holds “a very definite meaning” for him. Of course, being an artist and all, he sure as hell isn’t going to tell us what that very definite meaning is.

The furnishings in the small city office look a lot like the geometric building blocks that make up this city itself. All those big rectangles—the enormous flat desk he sits at, the other one almost poking into his back, the blank white wall of the building across the street and to the left, the blank white wall of the one he’s actually in—make the scene appear more like an urban planner’s diorama than a likeness of a living city. It’s as if he’s at work in the concrete frame on an unfinished high rise, like those simple polygon structures that stood in for military complexes in the videogame, “Doom.” (If you were a 13-year-old boy in 1994, you’ll get what I mean.)

Few would disagree that more than “we are what we eat,” we are where we live. For the small city office worker, the very colour of his complexion, hair and even clothes is as drab as the town, street and room he finds himself in. There is no colour in his figure that isn’t found in some object within his immediate view. In other words, he’s defined by his environment.

As for that sexless couple in the St. Denis lofts, their surroundings also take on “a very definite meaning.” This home is supposed to be the perfect spot for ideal leisure time as imagined by our age. No responsibilities, no disruptions, no thoughts, nothing to perceive with those fussy senses.