Derek Drummond, OAQ, FRAIC, William C. Macdonald Emeritus Professor of Architecture at McGill University, died on November 17, 2023, three days before his 85th birthday.

A Montrealer by birth, Derek studied architecture at McGill. He graduated in 1962 and soon co-founded the architectural firm Donaldson Drummond Sankey, which became well-known for the design of the Town of Mount Royal Library and a series of
innovative elementary schools.
He returned to McGill as a lecturer in 1964. For the next 40 years, without a single sabbatical or leave of absence, he taught in the School of Architecture while serving the university, the profession, and the community in a dazzling variety of roles.

Derek was appointed Director of the School in 1975, quickly established his credentials in the international community of North American Schools of Architecture, and completed two terms, stepping down in 1985. He was reappointed to a third term in 1990, and had started his fourth when Principal Bernard Shapiro invited him to join the University’s leadership team as Vice-Principal Development and Alumni Relations in 1996.

Derek was a gifted administrator—imaginative, wise, and compassionate—with a legendary sense of humour and a contagious laugh, often punctuated with a double thigh-slap that students and colleagues used as the basis for convincing impressions over the years. His sense of humour was usually characterized as irreverent, especially by senior university officials and the faithful attendees of the 75 Leacock Luncheons and other public events that he moderated over 25 years. However, those of us who worked with him every day saw it as evidence of his intelligence and creativity: a mechanism for establishing connections and a tool that he used with amazing dexterity to defuse a difficult moment in a conversation or a meeting.

His leadership style was simple. He was the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at the end of the day, and his office door was always open. He preferred hand-written notes to email or phone, and he used our offices, not his, for face-to-face meetings, especially if he was sharing bad news. He was unflappable, scrupulously fair, and never expressed anger or even raised his voice in a meeting or conversation.

The accessibility, grace, and interpersonal skills that made him so effective as an administrator also made him a great teacher. Throughout his career, including the years as Director and Vice-Principal, he never stopped teaching. He was best known for the first-year design studio and two popular elective courses, Civic Design and Site Usage, that attracted students from across the University. He attributed a large part of his success as Director to his commitment to teaching, especially the first-year design studio, because it gave him an opportunity to get to know every student in the program from their first days in the School. Almost all of the tributes shared by former students in the weeks following his death thanked him for having shaped their careers and in some way transforming their lives.

Derek was also able to maintain his involvement in practice, at least in the early years. He had a lifelong commitment to research, including through his association with the Livable Cities Group, an international consortium of academics, design professionals and municipal officers. His research, teaching, and many of his public lectures shared a single compelling theme: the city. He studied the use and abuse of public urban space, trends in urban and suburban design, and the behaviour patterns of pedestrians on our sidewalks and streets. His laboratory was the streets and neighbourhoods of Montreal and his methodology was to spend hundreds of hours in patient observation, with a fine-pointed pencil and pocket-sized notebook in hand.

American urbanist William H. Whyte shared Derek’s interest in the city and pedestrian behaviour. In his 1988 book City—Rediscovering the Center, he acknowledged Derek’s observational skills with a twinkle in his eye. “Another tough bunch of pedestrians are Montreal’s,” wrote Whyte. “They have much to contend with. On Ste. Catherine, the principal shopping street, the sidewalks are as mean as Lexington’s: twelve and a half feet. The sidewalk flows are prodigious: during the busy period, some 5,000 to 7,500 people an hour. Intersection behavior is understandably anarchic. Derek Drummond, director of the school of architecture at McGill University, has studied the pedestrians’ patterns extensively. ‘The most striking feature of pedestrian traffic along Ste. Catherine Street,’ he reports, with some pride, ‘is that so many people pay no attention at all to the traffic lights.’”

Not surprisingly, Derek’s concern for the quality of the built environment included active engagement in capital project development on the McGill campus. As a member of McGill’s Building and Property Committee and long-time Chair of the Architectural Advisory Committee, he was responsible for significantly improving the project review process, and raising the level of critical conversation about the design of our buildings and grounds.

Additional evidence of his lifelong commitment to community service is the long list of other organizations that benefitted from his time and wisdom in government, education, health care, industry, environment, and amateur sport. These include the Westmount Architecture and Planning Commission, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the McCord Museum, Marshall Drummond McCall, the McGill University Health Centre Foundation, and the Province of Quebec Society for the Protection of Birds, to name just a few.

In 2005, at a point in his post-retirement career when he was looking forward to writing, sketching (he was an accomplished watercolourist), and spending more time with his grandchildren, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse. He cheerfully assumed his last administrative position: Interim Director of McGill Athletics and Recreation. In his two years in that job, he attended the practices and home games of as many of the 49 varsity teams as possible, and quickly developed an enduring relationship as ‘team advisor’ to the women’s hockey program. When he stepped down in 2007, he observed that his time in Athletics had given him two of the most rewarding of his 50 years at McGill, and he continued to support varsity sports as an unofficial-but-expert photographer at the home games of the varsity teams.

Few of our colleagues have served the University, the profession, and the community with such distinction in so many different roles. Derek’s was a long, exemplary and impeccably balanced life, marked by his dedication to his family, his friends and colleagues, and public service.

Derek was predeceased by his wife of 60 years, Anne (Lafleur), and is survived by four sons, Colin (Jyoti), Gavin (Kate), Rob (Linton), and Louis (Vikki); nine grandchildren, Kayde, Grier, Charlotte, Francesca, Alice, Trinity, Veronica, Thomas, and Roxane; and his sister, Barbara Brodeur.

–David Covo

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PROJECT HEC Montréal Hélène-Desmarais Building, Montreal, Quebec

ARCHITECT Provencher_Roy

TEXT Olivier Vallerand

PHOTOS Ema Peter

Montreal-based Provencher_Roy has long demonstrated its aptitude for creating dynamic education facilities and university buildings, dating back to one of their breakthrough projects, UQAM’s J.-A.-De Sève building (1998). The lessons learned from this wealth of work are brightly visible in the Hélène-Desmarais Building, the new centre for Montreal’s post-secondary business school, HEC, in the heart of the city’s commercial core. 

Led by then-partner Alain Compéra, Anne Rouaud, and Gerardo Pérez, the architect team transformed an odd-shaped downtown site into a building that feels at once intimate and on-brand with HEC’s executive-oriented profile. The design takes inspiration from HEC’s role as an early-twentieth-century institution of the primarily French-speaking side of downtown: in 2000, its original building on Square Viger was transformed in the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec’s Archives Centre, by Dan Hanganu and Provencher_Roy. Since that time, the institution has operated from two buildings at the Université de Montréal campus, on the other side of the mountain—a Brutalist one designed by Roland Dumais and recently renovated by Provencher_Roy, the other a new-build by Dan Hanganu and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. The new space repositions the school closer to the economic centre of the city, in a historic setting neighbouring Saint Patrick’s Basilica.

The design process built on models of collaborative learning and experimentation developed by the business school itself, which HEC had iteratively explored in its previous buildings. Working in collaboration with HEC research group Mosaic, Provencher_Roy undertook a co-design process that included a full-day workshop with HEC faculty and students, neighbours (including church members), heritage experts and creative professionals, followed by regular discussions with these groups. This process allowed the team to understand neighbours’ fears about the occupation of an empty space owned by the basilica. They worked closely with stakeholders, as well as with engineers, city staff, and government representatives, to develop a shared framework and vision for a contemporary addition to the city that would be integrated in the urban fabric. 

The building occupies a comb-shaped site created by the combination of land ceded by the church and two privately owned lots. Throughout the design process, the team had to adjust their design, as HEC didn’t know which private owners would accept to sell their lots. Reacting to the building’s siting—anchored in the heart of a city block—the team imagined it as forming a campus with the basilica to the north, at the top of the comb. The teeth of the comb, popping out onto Beaver Hall, mask the service sides of adjacent buildings. A planned next phase of the lot redevelopment will redesign the basilica’s forecourt, resulting in better connections to both the new HEC building and De la Gauchetière Street. 

To further complicate the design, the site sits on a steep slope, with nearly nine metres (two full floors) of height difference between De
la Gauchetière to the east of the building and René-Lévesque Boulevard to the west. This is negotiated by introducing a main circulation axis that steps up from De la Gauchetière, dividing the overall massing of the building into two sections. These volumes were further refined by thinking of the roof as a fifth façade, visible from the tall buildings surrounding it. Mechanical elements are carefully screened, and the top of the facility treated as a landscape of green roofs and terraces accessible from different floors. More shaping occurred in response to the Church’s requests that views be protected, and neighbours’ access across the site preserved. The resulting sculptural form creates a diversity of viewpoints and experiences both inside and outside. This renders it impossible to fully comprehend the building at a glance—and yet, easily understandable as one circulates through it. 

The interior clarity is achieved by two horizontal circulation axes. These visually connect the interior to the city, and provide for clear views of the vertically stacked program elements: a restaurant on the lower floor, conference and lecture rooms above, followed by classrooms, floors dedicated to continuing education, and foundation and administration offices at the top. Throughout the building, circulation areas and informal collaborative working spaces are positioned along the façades. The composition is anchored by a monumental stair on the first floors, connecting to a more contained sculptural stair on the upper floors. Contrasting black and white walls on each side of the feature stair subtly divide the space. This constellation of events and nodes, all consistently linked to views of the city, make wayfinding easy, despite the building’s unusual shape.

Walking through all the informal working spaces is enough to make anyone jealous of HEC students—even before going into the classrooms. These are carefully planned, based on many years of experimentation in HEC’s other buildings, and informed by lessons learned during the Covid disruptions. The classrooms and formal meeting spaces integrate hybrid teaching and collaborative tools, including webcams and screens on every wall of many rooms. U-shaped fixed configurations and modular tables allow for close interaction between teachers and students. In addition to a traditional 300-seat main auditorium with glazed walls to the circulation spaces, the building includes a “deconstructed” auditorium designed to teach entrepreneurial communication skills, mimicking situations in which students might be asked to work during their professional careers. 

Throughout the building, shiny stretched ceilings and mirrored walls provide a visual sense of expansiveness. Fritted glass similarly creates continuity between walls and façades on the white side of the building. The fritted glass doubles as passive shading, playing a role in the building’s energy efficiency strategy—an important requirement from HEC even before the adoption of the most recent building code, with its more stringent energy-savings measures. Instead of curtain walls, highly insulated composite walls were designed and prototyped; the resulting modular system helped with the rationalization and constructability of the building’s sculptural form. A geothermal system results in smaller mechanical equipment needs, increasing the accessible areas of the building’s roofscape.

Subtle gestures are integrated throughout, connecting with both the history of the site and of the institution. For instance, maple links the new building to HEC’s other facilities in Montreal. Trees from the site, which had to be removed during construction, were reused in furniture for the facility. Outdoor furnishings were designed using stones from the former St. Bridget shelter, a building demolished in the late 1970s, whose foundations are inscribed on the ground floor of the new building. 

Provencher_Roy’s site-responsive design promises to become, with time, a central meeting point for the Montreal business community, and an important chapter in the school’s proud architectural history. Once again, HEC teaches here the importance of investing in architecture: both for fostering the collaborations that are at the heart of business, and for expressing the institution’s longstanding role as a civic leader.

Olivier Vallerand is an Associate Professor at the École de design, Université de Montréal.

CLIENT HEC Montréal | ARCHITECT TEAM Alain Compéra (FIRAC), Anne Rouaud, Gerardo Pérez, Claude Provencher (FIRAC), Henry Cho, Jonathan Bélisle, Olivier Chabot, Guillaume Martel-Trudel | STRUCTURAL/CIVIL Consortium SDK/MHA | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Pageau Morel/Bouthillette Parizeau in Consortium | LANDSCAPE Provencher_Roy | INTERIORS Provencher_Roy | WAYFINDING Arium Design | PROJECT MANAGER WSP Canada | CONTRACTOR Magil Construction | AREA 24,000 m2 | BUDGET $160 M | COMPLETION September 2023

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 105.5 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.46 m3/m2/year 

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PROJECT Laurent & Clark

ARCHITECT MSDL Architectes

TEXT Claire Lubell

PHOTOS Adrien Williams

The recently completed Laurent & Clark condominium building in Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles is perhaps the most ambitious—and certainly the most high-profile—of a string of collaborations led by Jean-Pierre LeTourneux, principal of MSDL Architectes, and Denis Robitaille, founder of developers Rachel Julien. According to LeTourneux, who has worked on projects with Robitaille since the 1990s, it takes an “audacious” developer to make good architecture—one who cares about details like, as LeTourneux points out to me, air exhaust vents seamlessly incorporated into a façade. The project as a whole has impressive presence: its first phase tower includes an array of colourfully partitioned balconies facing an urban park, while its second phase centres on a slim black tower.

But more than its striking façades, what distinguishes Laurent & Clark is how its massing intricately responds to the constraints of a complex site. The project occupies two-thirds of a very particular block, transformed several times since the 1960s through major projects that changed the urban structure of the city. If we look back to the early 2000s, the site was vacant and bisected by an arc of Boulevard de Maisonneuve, one of the main car-dominated arteries that traverses Montreal’s downtown, effectively making the area unbuildable. This was not the original urban grid, but rather an alteration born from the construction of the metro in the 1960s: below ground, a tunnel follows the same arc as the street. 

But after 2008, the grid was returned to its pre-1960s Cartesian organization, when the City of Montreal began to remake the area into the Quartier des spectacles. Boulevard de Maisonneuve was severed, liberating an open area opposite the site to become the Parterre—one of the main public parks that host concerts and performances during Montreal’s summer festivals—but also leaving two awkwardly shaped residual parcels at the corner of the re-directed Boulevard de Maisonneuve, which were too small to be developed. 

This remained the case until 2016, when Rachel Julien purchased both parcels from the city, and the larger adjacent parcel from the developer of Loft des Arts, the 1914 brick building (converted into condos in 2010) that occupies the other end of the narrow block. Together, the three parcels have now become one of the most visible developments in the city. 

The project’s fragmented massing is both pragmatic and contextual. On one hand, as LeTourneux explains, the project’s 356-unit count made it too large for the developer to easily build in a single phase. But more importantly, MSDL wanted to avoid an imposing and massive structure that would create deep, dark units. Moreover, they felt that it was important to acknowledge the mix of building scales and eras around the site. 

In fact, the surrounding city blocks epitomize the patchwork of much of Montreal’s present-day urban realm. While Boulevard Saint Laurent remains one of the city’s key commercial arteries and is historically important to many communities, the blocks on either side of Laurent & Clark are suffering from a noticeable decline. Just across the street are a series of small-scale shopfronts in historic brick and greystone buildings, some apparently vacant, and many in evident need of restoration. The telltale signs of gentrification are also visible along the block: a trendy bar, café, and restaurant have moved in beside a vacated tire and mechanic’s shop, whose prime corner lot now awaits redevelopment. The opposite corner was home to the legendary punk-rock venue Katacombes until 2019, and will soon be occupied by high-rise student accommodations, a project by social economy organization UTILE.

It is relevant to note that Laurent & Clark was initiated before city regulations mandating affordable units were in place, so the project primarily offers relatively small studios and one- or two-bedroom units, rapidly snatched up at market rates that were no doubt unattainable for many. So yes, the project inevitably marks a sharp divide between an existing context in transition and the sparkling newness of the Quartier des spectacles. But, to their credit, MSDL’s solution quite deftly mediates between the nine-times density allowed by the city and the competing priorities on either side of the block. Along the relatively narrow Boulevard Saint Laurent, a three-storey base avoids creating an overpowering and claustrophobic tunnel, and maintains the views from windows on the south face of the Lofts des Arts. In contrast, along the more open Boulevard de Maisonneuve and Rue Clark, the project presents two towers, one light and playful, the other dark and minimalist. Both towers have surprisingly slim profiles and are connected by footbridges made with discrete metal grate decks and glass railings.  

Aesthetics aside, achieving the effect of a reduced scale by breaking the project up into two smaller, thinner volumes was not a straightforward design solution. For LeTourneux, the first and most challenging condition to negotiate was the metro, because it forced a setback of the building’s vertical structure from Boulevard de Maisonneuve to avoid the tunnel below. To make up for the lost floor area, the dark-tinted glass tower has extended slabs that cantilever above, which in turn results in a somewhat awkward density of columns within the units on the southern end. On the positive side, the setback benefits the public realm by opening up a welcoming passage from Saint Laurent metro to the Parterre, and creates space for a corner café patio that is sure to become a popular spot. 

To complicate things further, the only pre-existing structure on the site—a small building housing electric equipment for the metro—had to be maintained. While it is discretely integrated into the facade, its presence interrupts what could have otherwise been a continuous ground-level of inviting commercial and social spaces spilling onto the Parterre. 

Another challenge was how to create passthrough units in the lighter building facing the Parterre, so that residents could enjoy concerts from their front balconies, but have a quiet area to retreat to. First, MSDL designed units with a floorplate that is only fourteen metres deep—much less than the standard eighteen metres. This allows for natural light to penetrate most of the space, notes LeTourneux. But the more important innovation is how MSDL did away with a central corridor, in favour of four single elevators for access, and an exterior passageway and stair for egress. Each elevator rises directly from the underground parking and, once past the fifth floor, gives direct access to either one or two units. While passthrough units and exterior egress stairs are quintessential to Montreal’s urban fabric—visible walking down hundreds of streets of duplexes and multiplexes on the island—the way this principle is applied to a 65-metre-high, 21-storey tower is uncommon and very well-resolved. In the two-sided units at Laurent & Clark, bedrooms give access to narrow exterior passageways, which lead to either the sculptural-but-utilitarian exterior egress stair, or, via a vertigo-inducing footbridge, to the core of the phase two tower. The ingenious solution allows the two separate towers to share egress stairs. (A temporary stair was in place while phase two was under construction.) 

The exterior passageways overlook the building’s central courtyard. LeTourneux says that this space, although accessible, serves primarily as a light well, akin to that of historic apartment buildings in Paris. This is not his only French reference. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation is mentioned as an inspiration for the passthrough unit design. Yet, in a sense, it is the dual-access elevators that serve the role of Corb’s alternating corridors. Laurent & Clark’s exterior passageways, connecting footbridges, and visible egress stair could perhaps be more closely connected to the brutalist housing classics of 1960s and 1970s England—consider Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower, or Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith’s Park Hill estate. But while those projects had front doors opening onto public pedestrian decks intended to function as “streets in the sky,” Laurent & Clark’s residents are not in the habit of using the passageways for circulation, out of respect for the privacy of their neighbours. Rather, they can make use of them in the summer, to enjoy the morning sunlight and the impressive views across eastern Montreal. 

Laurent & Clark responds to the demands of its complex site with an innovative and refined form. It draws on the past half-century
of change in its urban context to set a hopeful example for inventive, human-centered residential tower design for the half-century to come.

Claire Lubell is a designer and editor with an international background in architecture and urban design, and has guided print, digital, and open-access publications of several major research projects. She was a long-time editor at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and now works in heritage and territorial research at the Montreal cooperative L’Enclume.

CLIENT Rachel Julien | ARCHITECT TEAM Jean-Pierre LeTourneux (FRAIC), Anne Lafontaine, Gaetan Roy, Marie-Eve Ethier Chiasson, Vincent Lauzon, Yien Chao, Sami Jebali, Pierre Gervais, Guy Rousseau, Mahindar Youssef, Martin Radisson, Nicolas Maalouf, Gaétan Roy, Nils Rabota, Marie-Eve Ethier Chiasson, Mehand Aziz, Jean-François Jodoin, MacGregor Wilson | STRUCTURAL CIMA + | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL BPA | LANDSCAPE Projet Paysage | INTERIORS MSDL Architectes (Sabrina Lareau) & Gauvreau Design | ACOUSTIC SNC Lavalin | SURVEYOR Le Groupe Conseil T.T. Katz | CIRCULATION Aecom | CODE GLT+ | WIND RWDI | ELEVATORS JMCI | CONTRACTOR Rachel Julien | AREA 36,700 m?| BUDGET $110 M | COMPLETION Fall 2023

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 135.6 kWh/m2/year

As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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PHOTOS Ziechen Zhou

In recent years, housing has returned to prominence as an acute issue for Canadians, rising in salience in our municipal, provincial, and now federal politics. Across North America, the sense of a housing crisis and its proposed remedies have proved capable of both hardening and fissuring existing socio-cultural coalitions, with “gentrification,” zoning reform, “gentle density,” the “fifteen-minute city,” and greenbelt development provoking heated reactions. The sense of urgency around these issues was exemplified by Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA)’s “Not for Sale!” campaign, the latest iteration of the Canadian Pavilion at last summer’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

For many Canadians, these debates often revolve around access to housing as a government-sponsored savings vehicle or an aspirational consumption product—in other words, matters of abundance. But the rising numbers of unhoused persons living in our cities, together with increasing awareness of desperate housing conditions in many First Nations communities, have also focused attention upon housing needs requiring immediate rectification—matters of scarcity.

Whatever the cause of such anxieties and failures—speculative market overreach or sclerotic regulation, population growth or declining household sizes, increasing wealth or economic precarity—they are now central issues facing Canadian architects, linking debates from the Global North and South in our current world of uneven and unsteady globalization.

Curated by McGill professors Vikram Bhatt and Ipek Türeli, and doctoral candidate Ariele Dionne-Krosnick, a recent exhibition at the Peter Guo-Hua Fu School of Architecture charts their university’s Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) and its five decades of sustained research into the scarcity side of this wicked problem. Presented last fall, Design for the Global Majority showcases a plethora of ground-up, low-tech, participatory approaches developed by the MCHG to address housing and related issues within their local contexts, all under conditions of extreme material and financial constraint. These efforts, with their underlying humanist imagination—an offshoot of 1970s critiques of modernist dogma and functionalist overreach—retain their salience today as approaches to dealing with constrained resources and growing ecological emergency.

While the figures involved in creating and sustaining the MCHG are fascinating—Álvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, and Vikram Bhatt have directed the program in turn since its founding in 1971—the exhibition wisely focuses upon the group’s experiments and output, not its leaders’ biographies. In keeping with the MCHG ethos of sustainability and cost-minimization, the exhibition is built using donated, recycled, and second-hand materials where possible. Densely filled with remarkable objects and documents, Design for the Global Majority offers a humble manifesto for iterative, incremental change. It’s an affirmative response to Le Corbusier’s challenge of “Architecture or Revolution?” set out in Towards an Architecture (1923).

The exhibition is organized in five thematic groupings, each illustrated with multiple examples from the MCHG’s praxis. UPCYCLE presents the group’s early experiments with material recuperation and reuse, especially attempts to develop sulphur-based concrete as a usable building material. Widely available as a waste product of petroleum refining (as well as in areas of volcanic activity), sulphur was used by the MCHG to make interlocking concrete blocks, colourful tiles, and waterproofing agents. The concept was tested with the ECOL house built on McGill’s MacDonald campus in 1972 (a visiting Buckminster Fuller gave the two-room structure its moniker), in a community structure for the Cree National in Saddle Lake in the Amiskwacīwiyiniwak region of central Alberta, and with the Maison Lessard, a fully winterized building in St-François-du-Lac, Quebec. While the sulphur blocks’ poor insulative value and flammability prevented their widespread adoption, the MCHG’s experiments belong to a rich vein of 1970s experimentation with material reuse.

HARNESS addresses issues of hygiene, showing MCHG’s initiatives to conserve precious fresh water while offering DIY sanitation systems built with off-the-shelf hardware and locally available materials. Solar water purification equipment, garbage bag solar water heaters, and mist showers were all intended to provide bodily dignity without increased water use. One of the MCHG’s most successful publications, Save The Five Gallon Flush! (1973) provided instructions for building composting toilets.

With PLAN, the exhibition shifts scale from building and sanitization techniques to urban development proposals in India, China, and Mexico. Working with institutional partners, the group meticulously documented the architecture and spatial practice of informal settlements and their inhabitants. MCHG’s collaboration with Balkrishna Doshi exemplifies this way of working. The group’s study of Indore in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh was published in How the Other Half Builds (1984–90), and then applied in Doshi’s Aranya low-cost housing project, for which the MCHG designed a 200-house neighbourhood. 

In China, the MCHG studied rural inhabitants’ housing needs, leading to demonstration projects in Sichuan province and Chongqing city; this research was published in Housing a Billion (1993). The MCHG’s approach took the form of “village upgrading”—an alternative developmental approach intended to house farmers and support rural development. A similar concern for collaboratively improving challenging conditions is evident in the MCHG’s project for La Esperanza in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Entitled “Fingers of Hope,” this analysis of an informal settlement for migrant workers takes its title from the steel rebars extending skywards from dwellings, ready for upward expansion when resources permit.

LEVERAGE explores the MCHG’s research into urban agriculture through rooftop and container gardens in Montreal, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Argentina. Locally, the group played a role in the growing popularity of urban food production as a means of greening the city and addressing food insecurity. Many visitors to the McGill campus in recent years will have seen the “Edible Campus” project, a 120-square-metre container garden on a disused concrete terrace, built in partnership with Montreal’s Santropol Roulant Meals-on-Wheels program. Decades earlier, the “Rooftop Wastelands” demonstration garden (1974) topped a Montreal community centre. In a strange repurposing of one of Le Corbusier’s five principles, here, the “wasted” space (and frequent heat island) of the urban roof became a socially meaningful and ecologically productive oasis.

HACK presents more recent MCHG research in collaboration with First Nations and Inuit communities in northern Ontario and Quebec. This research focuses on the improvisational building cultures developed by these nations in the face of systematic exclusion and atrocious housing conditions. One case study looks at the Cree village of Chisasibi in the Eeyou Istchee territory, which was created after the displacement of communities to make way for Hydro Québec’s James Bay project—the very energy wealth which makes possible the material and ecological excess of lives in Canada’s south. Other projects in this section include the Kuujjuarapik Planning Workshop, which developed a masterplan with culturally resonant housing layouts, and the Kuujjuaq Hackathon, at which an outdoor pavilion was built from materials salvaged from the village dump.

Across these five themes, research is presented as an iterative process of making. In each case, a chain of collaborative experiments is generated from—and tested in—specific contexts. Design for the Global Majority joins with exhibitions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas (2007), which featured the MCHG’s ECOL House, to argue that many answers to our present crises lie in the past, not the future. Or, to be more precise, that low-tech solutions derived from current practices often provide the best solutions to our many challenges.

How convincing is this argument? When contemplating the MCHG’s 50-year span, the exhibition visitor is faced with contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, the ethos and knowledge produced by the MCHG are more relevant than ever: if the planet’s available resources are diminishing, then surely they must be used judiciously and shared equitably. On the other, the biggest challenges to the MCHG’s proposed solutions come from the massive increase in living standards achieved by the “global majority” since the research group was founded. While very welcome, the rising affluence in countries of the Global South such as India and China—alongside accelerating wastefulness in the Global North—has exacerbated many ecological challenges, as greater numbers of global citizens enjoy more prosperous, energy-intensive, and resource-intensive lives. There are no easy answers, but the MCHG’s research approach, grounded in observation and iterative design, offers a mode of inquiry with which to articulate the right questions.

Architectural historian Peter Sealy is an Assistant Professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.

 
As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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PROJECT Îlot Rosemont, Centre de services de l’Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal + Résidence des Ateliers, Montreal, Quebec

ARCHITECT Lapointe Magne et associés

TEXT Odile Hénault

PHOTOS David Boyer

Emerging from Montreal’s Rosemont subway station, these days, one may be in for a bit of a shock. Where there used to be a small pavilion with direct access to the subway system—and a generous turning loop for buses—there is now the strong presence of an L-shaped complex, eight storeys high along Rosemont Boulevard and ten storeys along St. Denis Street. This recent addition to Montreal’s highly eclectic urban fabric epitomizes the city’s progress towards promoting mixed-use, urban densification, and public transit. Translated into reality, this means a subway station-topping complex that offers affordable housing for 200 seniors, as well as holding the headquarters of the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM)—a not-for-profit responsible for the management of some 880 buildings and close to 21,000 social housing units across the metropolis. 

A complex context

The building sits at the border between the Plateau Mont-Royal and Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, central boroughs which span either side of a long, curving CPR freight line. For decades, the 40,000-square-metre site to the north of the rail line was occupied by municipal works yards and workshops, which were gradually demolished over time. In 2006, a new Master Plan was adopted to redevelop the city-owned area, with an emphasis on both market housing and social housing, as well as on public amenities essential to support a new neighbourhood. During the following years, the area saw developments including Bibliothèque Marc-Favreau (Dan Hanganu architects, 2013), Quartier 54, a thoughtfully designed eight-storey condominium complex (Cardinal Hardy Beinaker architects, 2012) and the Coopérative du Coteau vert, a three-storey social housing project built around a central garden (L’Oeuf, 2010).

The last site on this major lot was earmarked for affordable and social housing. In 2013, Lapointe Magne & associés was mandated to design the project, which by then had grown in size to include the OMHM headquarters. One of the architects’ main challenges, apart from the actual building design, was to secure and harmonize the labyrinthine movements of pedestrians, bikes, buses, cars, and emergency vehicles gravitating on and around the site. To top it off, bordering the parcel is an underpass heading south, and an overpass going east. A strong urban gesture was needed. 

Shaping Îlot Rosemont

The architects’ mandate to renovate the existing subway access and integrate a bus terminal and turning loop was to have a major impact on the structure and the overall shape of the complex, as well as on its visual identity. Approaching the site, one is struck by the unexpected presence of giant V-shaped supports, zigzagging along the building’s perimeter. They form part of the intricate structural solution found by the engineers and architects as they looked to accommodate the large spans required by the public transit program, without compromising on the number of affordable units above. 

The 193-unit Résidence des Ateliers occupies the upper five levels of the complex’s east wing and the upper seven levels of its west wing. The exterior volume of the overall complex is softened by the introduction of balconies and loggias, which reveal the presence of its occupants. Most of the units are one-bedroom apartments, which were designed with care despite the strict budgetary constraints attached to subsidized housing: the Résidence des Ateliers is the 11th initiative of a city-sponsored program called Enharmonie, which targets low-income seniors. As it happens, Lapointe Magne was the first architecture firm to be hired when the program was launched, designing the Résidence Jean-Placide-Desrosiers (inaugurated in 2006; see CA, Feb. 2007), and later commissioned with the Résidence Alfredo-Gagliardi (2008), located above the busy Jean-Talon subway station. 

Given Îlot Rosemont’s peculiarly shaped site, the architects were able to avoid conventional, identical apartments and come up with almost 34 different unit types, all universally accessible. The lack of lavish budgets was compensated for by great attention to the treatment of spaces within the units and in commodious corridors with whimsical, oversized wayfinding graphics. Particular emphasis was put on light-filled communal and dining spaces. These were placed at the wings’ junction point in order to take full advantage of the obtuse angles generated by this irregular site. 

These gathering spaces are also found on the office floors, where light abounds thanks to an open plan and high ceilings with exposed mechanical and structural elements, which are particularly impressive at the third level. The communal rooms, such as the south-facing cafeteria on the third floor, offer generous views of the immediate surroundings and of Mount Royal in the distance. The OMHM’s double-height reception area is directly accessible from St. Denis Street, in a spot some neighbours would have preferred to see given over to a more glamorous function. The choice made by the OMHM was to offer its equity-deserving clients a space with dignity, defying the possibility of NIMBY sentiments. 

A strong urban presence

Îlot Rosemont is a robust, unexpected object in the landscape. And it does take some getting used to, despite the looming presence across the road of a far bulkier structure built in 1972 for a then-rapidly expanding textile industry. Lapointe Magne’s response to this condition was to integrate the brutalist building by making it part of a symbolic gateway to an area of the city that is still undergoing major changes. In an effort to soften the transition towards the massive concrete volume, a dark brick—interspersed with subtle aubergine inserts and ochre finishes—was selected for the west wing of Îlot Rosemont. For the east wing, a contrasting white brick was adopted in homage to the much gentler Bibliothèque Marc-Favreau.  At ground level, the soffit and bus loop that run underneath the raised building are clad with ochre-colored perforated aluminum panels.

Key to understanding this latest urban intervention is the eclectic nature of Montreal’s streetscapes. A certain appearance of unity is given by the residential neighbourhoods with their regular, orthogonal grid and their two- and three-storey-high rowhouses, known locally as duplexes and triplexes. Attempts at building anything that breaks away from tradition are often met with scepticism. Nonetheless, the need to densify the city around subway stations—and on any of Montreal’s innumerable vacant lots—creates valuable opportunities for planners and architects to propose new formulas.

What has been built in Rosemont-La-Petite Patrie since 2006 can definitely be called a success. In less than twenty years, a new urban environment has sprung up here, anchored by some 800 housing units, more than half of which are affordable or cooperative housing.  It is an exemplary showcase for the urban densification so often called for as a response to urban sprawl. Municipal leadership should be applauded for leading the way, by demonstrating how its own properties can be developed in ways that embrace complex programs and sites, as well as promoting affordable housing. Furthermore, the Îlot Rosemont and its immediate neighbours constitute a unique illustration of what committed, talented architects can contribute to their city—if and when there is political will.

Odile Hénault is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.

CLIENT Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM) | ARCHITECT TEAM Lapointe Magne & Associés: Frédéric Dubé, Katarina Cernacek,  Pascale-Lise Collin , Alain Khoury,  Olivier Boucher,  Isabelle Messier-Moreau,  Esther Gélinas, Alizée Royer,  Frédérick Boily, Yves Proulx | STRUCTURAL  Tetratech | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Norda Stelo | LANDSCAPE VLAN Paysages | INTERIORS Lapointe Magne et associés | CIVIL AECOM | CONTRACTOR Pomerleau | SIGNAGE/WAYFINDING Pastille Rose | AREA 24,560 m2  | BUDGET $91.2 M | COMPLETION November 2022

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 151.2 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.55 m3/m2/year

 
As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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Entremise – OBNL en aménagement, recently put together an open letter discussing concerns about the upcoming vacancy of the îlot voyageur located at 505 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Est, in Montreal.

The letter begins by stating that Mayor Valérie Plante has revealed the timeline for the upcoming real estate project on the l’îlot voyageur, the former Berri-UQAM bus station, during a press conference.

According to the letter, the proposed timetable sets the beginning of construction in spring 2025. The letter notes that this timeline is “overly optimistic” given the recent history of delayed real estate projects within the Ville de Montréal.

The letter noted examples including the social housing project at the former Projet Young site in Griffintown, the Hippodrome Blue Bonnets, the redevelopment of the Saint-Sulpice library, and the ongoing negotiations for 4000 rue Saint-Patrick following the C40 competition in 2021.

According to the letter, no measures or recommendations have been implemented to prevent the sizable 25,000 sq.ft. building from remaining vacant until its future, yet unidentified, owner takes possession. The letter also noted that this is an ongoing situation despite the housing crisis and land pressures, and emphasized the need for proactive measures.

The letter noted that the city has taken steps beyond identification by implementing regulations such as the recent building occupancy and maintenance by-law (23-016), that came into effect on October 24, 2023. This by-law strengthens regulations for property owners who abandon their buildings and demonstrates the municipality’s attempt to actively combat the problem.

The letter noted that this effort aligns with the city’s broader commitment to the circular economy, as outlined in the September 2023 recommendations report, “Vers une Feuille de route montréalaise en économie circulaire.” The report underscores the approach of transitional use of spaces and buildings as a means to manage urban resources and establishes a relationship between solving the housing crisis and promoting a circular economy within the city.

The letter noted that as landowners, they advocate for the city to transition from recommendations to tangible actions, setting an example by not overlooking vacancy issues during the planning stages.

The letter made recomendations such as emulating the practices seen in projects like the Grandes Locos initiative overseen by the Metropole de Lyon. This proactive strategy not only set expectations for the developer but also encouraged future partners to follow suit, minimizing the period of vacancy for the site and its structures.

“It’s particularly perplexing that the current conditions of sale lack such measures, especially when a transitional project is already underway in the building in question,” reads the letter. “Significant investments have been made to facilitate organizations operating in the circular economy to occupy the premises, enhancing the safety of the site’s environment. However, despite these efforts, they have been asked to vacate the premises by October 2024.”

The letter went on to state that instead of allowing the space to fall into disuse, they advocate for the consideration of the community’s potential benefits.

They also suggested that the vacant space could serve as an exhibition venue for students, a food counter for organizations, a logistics hub, or even a refuge for the homeless.

Ultimately, this letter serves as a call to action, emphasizing the necessity for an approach aligned with the city’s commitments to the circular economy and responsible urban planning.

“We firmly believe it is imperative to foster collaborative decisions regarding the vacancy of this site and the retention of its occupants. We are open to collaborative efforts to devise innovative and inclusive solutions in the best interests of the community,” concludes the letter.

“We extend an invitation to all stakeholders in the field to respond and reflect on this issue collectively. Let’s collaborate to cultivate cities that are fairer, more sustainable, and resilient.”

Note: Currently, the open letter is only available in French.

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In late October, hundreds gathered by The Ring at Montreal’s Place Ville Marie’s to commemorate the life of landscape architect Claude Cormier, who died at age 63. We assembled around the hot pink casket that Claude had asked his friend Jacques Bilodeau to design: he meant his friends and colleagues to smile, even at his memorial.

 I first met Claude after writing my earliest freelance article for Canadian Architect, back in 2003: a thought-piece on kitsch in Quebec design, accompanied by a photo of Claude’s Lipstick Forest in Montreal’s Palais des congrès. Shyly, I knocked at his home-turned-office in the Plateau with a copy of the printed magazine in hand. The door was immediately flung wide: “Perfect!” I recall him saying. “We need a writer for a proposal we’re working on, you can help us!” 

Claude’s positive energy uplifted so many. His wit, joy, and ability to create places with universal appeal was evident in works like the pink (and later rainbow) balls that hung above St. Catherine Street’s Gay Village for nearly a decade, the dog fountain of Berczy Park in Toronto, or the split-in-half fountain of Dorchester Square in Montreal. He was also involved in dozens of other projects that paired architecture with landscape: from the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa with Daniel Libeskind and Edward Burtynsky, to the multi-layered streetscapes of The Well in Toronto.

In a time when design is increasingly concerned with collaboration, Claude’s way of working offers lessons for all designers. He galvanized people around the strength and clarity of his ideas, and simultaneously created space for others to exhibit their talents. One of the last times I spoke with Claude, before knowing of his illness, was interviewing him about The Ring. I remember pressing him: a ring is such an open symbol, what was his core idea? In that firm, but kind way that he had, he told me: he’d done his job in creating the idea as a physical piece in the world. It was my job, as a writer, to articulate the idea in words. 

“Yes, the work environment was intense; Claude never stopped until things were perfect,” writes landscape architect Marc Hallé, who began working with Claude as an intern in 2003 and is now a co-president at the firm founded by Claude, now rebranded as CCxA. “But for those who knew him, he radiated light with a positivity and a proactive outlook that kept clouds far at bay. He took every measure to make sure it never rained on our picnic. Although his sunshine came with its fair share of heat, it also motivated people to be their best.”

At the centre of that positivity was a love for the work itself, and a desire to make places that embodied his philosophy of “serious fun.” “It was never about Claude when you spoke to him, and not about you either, but about the work and the joy it brings to others,” writes landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburg. “His designs remind me of the inherent optimism of our field, which goes hand in hand with Claude’s attitude about life. While some insist that the members of a landscape architect’s ensemble stay in their assigned roles, Claude celebrates the anomalous and the episodic: a painted stick standing in for a blue poppy, or an exuberant 50-foot catalpa suddenly endowed with equal parts whimsy and gravitas as it is captured in a perfect, circular, tree-sized island. Claude empowers plants (and people) to do their own thing—the way that he has always done his.”

Claude’s positive energy continued to the end, when he was dying from complications of Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that predisposes carriers to multiple cancers. “I want you all to know: Guys, I’m OK!” he wrote to friends, through a mailing list managed by a close group helping him through palliative care. “I’ve lived a life much longer than I ever expected. Since I was a teenager, I always knew I would die young. My father died at 44. My sister died at 52. I’m 63. I never expected so many years. It was always hanging over my head. All my relatives on my father’s side, 12 of them, all died of cancer. Plus many of my cousins. So I feel very fortunate. My life has been PHENOMENAL. Je suis un homme excessivement privilégié!”

“I feel the love you’re sending me from all over the world—big time! That’s why I’m at peace. Keep sending it! It reinforces all the achievements I’ve had, but I was never really aware of, because I was too busy working to see it all clearly. So keep sending the love. I want to give it back to you!”

The love is still coming, Claude—and the legacy of your projects, and of your way of being, will continue to give so much love back to the world, for decades to come.

See all articles in the November issue 

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“Under Louis Kahn’s care, I had become immersed in a world that had everything to do with the conception of buildings and also with the craft of building,” writes Moshe Safdie in his memoir, If Walls Could Speak. “Without this immersion, short as it lasted, I could have never led an inexperienced team of young architects to realize Habitat 67.”

Habitat 67—with its stacked concrete habitation modules, flying walkways, and rooftop gardens—was, by Safdie’s own admission, difficult to translate into a constructable proposition. Safdie, who in the early 1960s conceived what would become Habitat 67 as his university graduate thesis, relied on model-making as a principal tool to demonstrate his vision.He piled and stacked hand-cut wood blocks, and later Lego, into various configurations, trying to determine the optimal design for a building conceived as a radical solution to the crisis of urban housing.

The version of Safdie’s vision constructed for Expo 67 became Canada’s most iconic brutalist construction, but it was just a shadow of his original vision. Safdie’s interest in what Habitat might have been evidently persisted throughout the last five decades, with traces of the original scheme found throughout the architect’s portfolio.

Digital tools have now, of course, made it possible for Safdie Architects to realize a comprehensive virtual model of the original Habitat scheme, and they recently unveiled just such a model, created in collaboration with Epic Games and Neoscape. Dubbed Project Hillside, the VR environment demonstrates the sophistication of modern modelling tools—the model was created on Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics engine used by video game designers—permitting a photoreal immersion into an environment far more ambitious and fantastical than the real-life Habitat.

The Hillside model—which is based on the pyramid-like frames of Safdie’s thesis, intended to act as artificial hills—includes 1,200 dwellings, floating above a hotel, school, offices and other commercial spaces. All of these are linked with separated vehicle and pedestrian passageways, and unified through shared gardens and water features.

Though the original vision for Habitat is unlikely to ever be realized, the virtual model has the potential to inspire a whole new generation of architects all around the world, even if they never set foot in Montreal. Here at home, policy makers and those interested in finding long-term solutions to the housing crisis may also find inspiration in Project Hillside, and consider that affordable housing doesn’t necessarily have to be bland and unappealing. The presence of an immersive 3D model makes the aspiration for higher-density, highly integrated urban living tangible—if still not necessarily constructable in the exact form proposed by Safdie as a university student. If Habitat 67 asked 50 million Expo visitors ‘what if?’, Project Hillside demands to know ‘what are we waiting for?’”

Taylor Noakes is a freelance journalist and broadcaster based in Montreal.

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Following the tragic fire that affected the Bon-Pasteur monastery in Old Montréal, the executive committee of Héritage Montréal met to take measures aimed at ensuring the continuity of the activities of the organization.

The major fire affected the entire monastery and its multiple occupants, including the Heritage Montréal Foundation which has been headquartered in the building since 1981. It significantly affected their premises as well as their computer equipment and documents.

As a result of the fire, the archives center, an important and unique collection of documents on Montréal’s heritage and the actions to safeguard and enhance it, were also significantly affected.

“We would like to inform the public that despite this hard blow — which occurred the day after our Annual General Meeting — the activities of Héritage Montréal are continuing with determination. As a result, our metropolis guided tours, which are currently in progress, will continue to be offered, as well as our next edition of ArchitecTours, which will take place as planned this summer, offering a unique opportunity to discover the city’s rich Architectural Heritage. An announcement will be made at a later date to specify the details,” reads a release.

“We would like to express our deep gratitude to the City of Montréal fire department for its quick and dedicated action in the fight against the fire. Their professionalism and their courage made it possible to limit the damage to the building and to safeguard a precious part of our Montréal heritage. We also express our solidarity with our neighbours who have also been affected by this tragedy, both the residents of the Sourire à la vie housing cooperative and the Maison Aurélie-Cadotte and the other cultural organizations housed at Bon-Pasteur.”

“Heritage Montréal is currently working with its partners and other stakeholders to find the necessary material and financial resources that will ensure the sustainability of its mission and its operations, on the way to its 50th anniversary, in 2025 and beyond,” concluded the release.

To assist with relocating their new offices and archives, Heritage Montréal has just launched a campaign in hopes of raising funds. Donations will go towards the relocation as well as setting up a document digitization program in addition to replacing the affected material and equipment.

For more information or to make a donation, click here.

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Winner of the 2023 RAIC Gold Medal

The late architect Claude Provencher was co-founder of one of Canada’s most significant architecture firms. He has long been recognized for the quality of his realized projects, as well as for his profound sense of commitment. Considered among the trailblazers of the new urban architecture movement of the late 1970s in Canada, he enriched Québec’s built urban heritage with many major projects. 

Born in Plessisville, a rural community near Trois-Rivières, Provencher graduated from the Université de Montréal in 1974 and began working with Papineau, Gérin-Lajoie, Leblanc Architectes, where he met Michel Roy. In 1983, the two co-founded Montréal-based firm Provencher_Roy. Throughout his career, Provencher approached his adoptive city, Montréal, with a sharp eye. This metropolis, with its distinct seasons and ever-changing St. Lawrence River backdrop, remained an inspiration throughout his career. 

Provencher distinguished himself early on through his avant-garde proposals. He would self-initiate projects, then persuade funders and clients to join him in his pursuits. For instance, in the late 1980s, he began reflecting on the fate of an abandoned block occupying a strategic site in Old Montréal, imagining how the existing alley could be transformed into a long, linear court, with heritage buildings to its two sides and a skylight overtop. The idea of revitalizing the site in this way eventually came to fruition, with the opening of the unifying World Trade Centre Montréal in 1992. 

Architect Norm Glouberman, a close collaborator since that time, remembers that for Claude, “good architecture was not simply creating designs that would get published in magazines, but ones that fully met all project requirements. At times, this strong commitment was at odds with clients or authorities, but his passion, persistence, and collaborative approach—backed up by credible arguments—usually overcame any objections.”

The World Trade Centre became a major milestone in the development of the neighbourhood that is today known as the Quartier international de Montréal. As the area’s first sizeable rehabilitation of a set of historic buildings, it became among the city’s most important projects of the 1990s. Because of the multitude of programs and services contained in the “horizontal skyscraper” form, it also contributed to reviving business life in the district.

“Claude and I shared the idea of using the architectural cause as a vehicle for offering citizens a better environment,” writes Georges Adamczyk, professor at the Université de Montréal’s school of architecture. “Claude Provencher’s obsession with interior public spaces (atriums, passages and holistic spaces) in his projects has often been noticed, which brings to mind the allegory of the ‘good architect,’ represented in artist Philibert de l’Orme’s wood block print. Faithful to his friendships, faithful to the architectural cause, and faithful to the public: a simple definition of a ‘good architect’ in the 21st century.” 

In each of his projects, Provencher positioned users at the heart of the work, making sketches filled with people, and favouring spaces conducive to spontaneous meetings, connections, and exchanges. Rather than adhering to a particular style, his architectural language was lively and nuanced, responding to the contemporary concerns of a cosmopolitan city. 

Provencher’s interventions at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) over a period of 30 years are another key example of his visionary approach. In the late 1980s, Provencher dissuaded the Museum from building an annex across town in Old Montréal. Instead, guided by Provencher’s advice, they decided to consolidate the intended expansions in the museum’s original setting along Sherbrooke Street, using an underground concourse to connect between pavilions. 

In 2008, his practice was awarded the mandate to design the museum’s new six-storey Claire and Marc Bougie Pavilion to house Quebec and Canadian art, and to rehabilitate the Erskine Church as a multi-functional theatre and concert hall. At the forefront of the design was the desire to integrate the new building into its existing urban context, and to ensure continuity and fluidity between the various pavilions located on both sides of busy Sherbrooke Street. The expanded underground passage connecting the museum complex was designed to transcend its role of functional link, becoming a museum element in its own right: broad, well-lit, and with room to host exhibitions, allowing visitors an uninterrupted experience of art. At street level, Claude continued the theme of fluidity by opening the museum onto the street, maximizing inclusion and accessibility. A sculpture garden anchors the cultural centre in public space and opens it onto the neighbourhood. In the summer, the Avenue du Musée becomes a lively pedestrian zone and outdoor gallery for temporary installations and events, infusing the space with a renewed public vocation. 

Committed to environmental responsibility in the urban context, in 2014, Claude Provencher collaborated on the masterplan for Technopôle Angus, aiming to attain the highest possible sustainable development standards in the revitalization of this large tract in East Montréal. “The development of Phase 2 of the Technopôle Angus project in Montréal emerged from a common vision shared by Claude and myself: to create a unique mixed-use living space favouring connections with the surrounding community,” says Christian Yaccarini, President and CEO of the Société de développement Angus. “The mandate was developed to support the construction of ecological buildings, the creation of quality employment, the development of a social economy, and accessibility to property and housing at an affordable cost. As a project that has received numerous awards and obtained LEED ND Platinum certification, today, Technopôle Angus Phase 2 is cited as a reference for responsible development in various political, academic, and socio-economic spheres.”

Provencher_Roy continues to take a holistic approach to sustainable development, conceiving projects that minimize environmental impact, reinforce local economies, enrich communities, and maximize the value of existing infrastructure. 

Claude Provencher was a committed professional, but also an engaged citizen and philanthropist in Montréal, Quebec, and Canada. An active member of various professional associations, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 2000 for his exemplary contributions to the profession. He was also named a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 2014 for his community leadership role, and Knight of the Ordre national du Québec in 2021 for his profound sense of commitment, ambition, and passion for his work. 

In addition, Provencher served as Vice President of the Urban Planning, Design, and Real Estate Development Advisory Committee of the National Capital Commission in Ottawa (1999 to 2011), Curator and Member of the Board of Directors of the Commission des biens culturels du Québec (2008 to 2022), and Member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Arts Conference of Heritage Montréal. His long-term contributions to architectural development were felt throughout the country, through the advice he provided to major players in his field on significant projects. His involvement on expert committees enabled him to assist with shaping the architecture of tomorrow, while conveying the importance of his art form in the daily lives of his contemporaries. 

The practice Provencher co-founded lives on today, thanks to a new generation of partners who share his commitment and values.

Jury Comments: A pioneer in Canada of modern urban architecture, the late Claude Provencher contributed not only to the physical environments of his beloved home city of Montréal, but also to the idea of what a city could and should be. With a multidisciplinary approach to project work, Provencher is known for his ambitious pursuit of large-scale projects that combine architectural innovation with a sensitivity to site. His community-mindedness infused his work, and his generosity of spirit was reflected in both his thoughtful, often lyrical designs and his open-hearted support of generations of students and young practitioners. 

In parallel to Provencher’s exemplary professional practice, which he developed over more than forty years, he demonstrated an exceptional level of service to the architectural community and the Canadian architectural profession. Provencher’s promotion of the role of the architect and of the profession in a time of tremendous change, along with the progressive positions he adopted regarding heritage, have fostered the contemporary practice of architecture in Québec and Canada. 

The jury recognizes Provencher’s generosity and involvement with several important committees for the development of quality architecture, including in key roles with Heritage Montréal, the Canadian Conference for the Arts, and at several universities, where he put in place strategies for prioritizing architectural quality. The jury particularly appreciates his work with the Association des Architectes en pratique privée du Québec, the Conseil du patrimoine culturel du Québec, and the National Capital Commission’s Advisory Committee on Planning, Design and Realty. 

Claude Provencher—architect, teacher, mentor, colleague—elevated the quality and awareness in architecture in Montréal, Québec, and Canada. He demonstrated a lifelong commitment to building and to advocacy for improvement in the conditions, recognition, and opportunities of the profession. His legacy of built work and advocacy will have a lasting impact on the profession of architecture in Canada. 

The jury for this award included Stephan Chevalier, Juan Du, Francine Houben, Bruce Kuwabara, Michael Leckie, and Janna Levitt. 

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Care+Design is a new transdisciplinary initiative launched by architecture and design firm Lemay. Created to connect architects with healthcare professionals, researchers, policy-makers, frontline workers, and patient communities, it seeks to activate key conversations and meetings that can shape a better future for tomorrow’s care environments through design.

Today’s healthcare space struggles with being outpaced by accelerations in technology, climate crises, service, and resource scarcity, applying uniform ideas to diverse contexts and populations, as well as many other challenges. As a response, Care+Design seeks to create an exploratory space for dialogue around generating ideas and conceiving designs around what the healthcare sector needs.

From hospitals and rehabilitation clinics, to long-term care facilities, this platform aims to reconnect medical environments with both people and the environment through innovative, sustainable, inclusive, and easily deployable ideas formed with the communities they affect. Through this participatory approach, disciplines like architecture and urban planning will be able to propose environmental, operational, and social solutions that can benefit society’s health and well-being.

“Discussion is the drafting table where the positive changes we need can begin. Care+Design represents a confrontation of ideas, concepts, and viable solutions for the future of healthcare design,” says Antoine Buisseret, design director and Lemay’s Director of Market Intelligence in Healthcare. “Together, our collaborative approaches can reimagine what ‘hospitality’ truly means, coming together to reimagine tomorrow’s environments of care.”

This mandate of discussion and ideation between healthcare and design professionals will span a wide scope, from exploratory dialogues of thought leadership and published works on the future of healthcare, to panels of expertise, roundtables, and collaborations. Lemay aims for this platform of connection, research, design and healthcare communities to have the opportunity to adopt and reinforce the concept of built space as a way of healing, ensuring that healthcare’s professional networks, patients, and communities are an integral part of the design of tomorrow’s care environments.

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In the west end of downtown Montreal, an area densely packed with residential highrises, the appearance of a new apartment tower is not usually a cause for fanfare. But Link, a building designed by ACDF Architecture for developer Brivia Group, sets itself apart with a playful design that is carefully calibrated to stand out, while fitting in.

“It’s an awkward context,” says ACDF principal Maxime-Alexis Frappier, noting how the street is relatively narrow for the height of its buildings, and buried in the middle of a densely packed downtown neighbourhood. Two Victorian townhouses, at the base of the building, were remnant from a century ago, when the neighbourhood was named the Quartier des Grand Jardins for its villas and many religious institutions with large, verdant, grounds. In the 1950s and 60s, swaths of the area’s fabric of Victorian homes were demolished to make way for brutalist office and apartment towers. Now, it’s one of the city’s most densely populated areas, including a substantial number of students who attend nearby colleges and universities. 

ACDF’s client had originally planned to demolish the debilitated rowhouses on their site, too—they had no heritage designation, and constructing from a tabula rasa is much easier—but Frappier and his team argued for saving them. “The street has nothing else, we needed to find a way to keep it,” says Frappier. He knew that retaining only the front elevations to form the building’s entrance, as his design proposed, would mean facing accusations of facadism—but, he reasoned, “for most citizens, they are really glad if you can keep a portion [of the historic fabric], and it contributes to the street life.”

Above the rehabilitated façades, ACDF’s design continues to pay homage to the area’s rich history. The tower is a quilt of openings, shaped as archways, gables, and rectangular dormers to reference the shapes that characterized the area’s historic homes. Some of these are windows, while others are enclosed balconies for the building’s 122 dwellings. The composition is presented as a work of art, framed by a dark granite surround.

A variety of grey tones are chosen for the precast concrete façade—a dark grey that matches the heritage slate roofs, a lighter grey to tie the building in with the neighbouring concrete towers, and a white that reflects light back into the narrow street. From the street, the patterned façade lends a whimsical touch to the neighbourhood. The shaped openings screen the clutter that often accumulates on balconies, while also affording additional privacy to residents.

The name of the development—Link—is a riff on Rue Lincoln, where the development is located. It also refers to the developer’s plan for the rental units, which includes the option to rent a single room in a three-bedroom apartment as an affordability measure for the area’s students. The architecture adds to the analogy, linking between the area’s past and present. 

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PROJECT Montauk Sofa Montreal, Montreal, Quebec

ARCHITECT Cohlmeyer Architecture

PHOTOS Nanne Springer

In the summer of 2021, Montauk Sofa discreetly inaugurated its new flagship showroom on Montreal’s well-known St. Laurent Boulevard. The three-storey structure is barely noticeable among the heterogenous mix of buildings, which line what was once The Main for successive waves of European immigrants. Today, amid grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and businesses of all kinds, Montauk Sofa’s disconcertingly quiet presence conveys a timeless message, refreshingly at odds with its surroundings.

Five years in the making, the 1,200-square-metre showroom is the result of an intense collaborative effort between Montauk Sofa co-founders Tim Zyto and Danny Chartier, Cohlmeyer Architecture, and HETA landscape architect Myke Hodgins. The flagship replaces the company’s first store, opened in 1995 further up St. Laurent Boulevard. Like Montauk’s later showrooms in New York, Chicago, Vancouver and Calgary, several of which were designed with Cohlmeyer Architecture, the present commission involved the transformation of an aging structure, with the architects taking the lead in carefully uncovering an industrial backdrop and accenting it with understated contemporary interventions.

The Montreal showroom is in the heart of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, known for its narrow streets, lined with century-old, low-scale buildings. The charm of this lively, pedestrian-oriented neighbourhood, which has become one of the most popular areas in the city, comes at a high price for architects and designers called in to upgrade existing properties. The procedure to obtain a building permit—even for as basic a request as replacing a window— can last for months. Needless to say, it was a real challenge to get permission to tear down part of a building, insert a garden between the retained façade and the building’s remaining portion—the latter reclad with a minimalist glass wall—and to lower the basement, including consolidating the foundations on poor quality clay subsoils. 

Complying with fire code requirements was another major issue for Cohlmeyer Architecture and their engineers. The solution found—concealing fire curtains in the ceilings—was key to the whole project. The result is four gallery-like areas, open to natural light from front to back, displaying comfortable sofas placed among plants and beautiful objects. As architect Daniel Cohlmeyer notes, “It would have been atrocious to put an enclosed exit stairwell in this space and ruin the showroom’s effect of total openness.” Adds owner Tim Zyto, “In this particular building, we have a lot of space. We like to use it, not to cram a lot of furniture in, but rather to let it breathe.”

Architecturally speaking, there is no grand gesture here, but something perhaps more rare: an amazing ability to see a building’s hidden potential and to come up with inventive ways of revealing it. This vision was not about adding, but about subtracting, removing, stripping. The interiors, still showing traces of the past, were left bare. Mechanical, structural, and electrical components were concealed in sculptural, sawtooth-like ceilings—designed by Daniel’s father, firm founder Stephen Cohlmeyer, before his untimely passing in 2021. 

Special attention was given to the basement, a low, dingy space that required extensive work before it could be turned into a fourth showroom floor. Once it was excavated—and less spectacular technical problems, such as redirecting and properly insulating water and sewage lines, were solved—natural light was brought in using a 10-foot-wide exterior lightwell running along the front façade. In the centre of the composition, a storey-tall waterfall cascades from the ground-floor garden to the lower courtyard. Creating a magical effect was paramount for Zyto, who recalls initially wanting the waterfall to be the width of the entire façade. “For our client, vision is more important than budget,” says Daniel Cohlmeyer. “It is very rare.” 

While trendy, of-the-moment architecture is frequently celebrated, anonymous, nondescript buildings often reflect the soul of our cities and neighbourhoods. Montauk Sofa’s revamped new home embraces a sense of quietness, retaining the spirit of the original place. The various landscape, architecture and design awards lavished on this project are a remind­er that sometimes, simplicity is the best answer. And at a time when biodiversity is becoming ever more important, small, improbable gardens may point the way to the future.

Montauk Sofa may be heralding a new era for St. Laurent Boulevard. Slated to be built a few doors south of the showroom, the new Montreal Holocaust Museum, as designed by KPMB and Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, also takes a sober, yet entirely contemporary, approach. Hopefully, Montauk Sofa and the future museum, each in its own way, will set new standards for St. Laurent Boulevard—as well as for other Montreal locations that have much to learn from these two exemplary projects.

Odile Hénault is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.

CLIENT Montauk Sofa | ARCHITECT TEAM Daniel Cohlmeyer (RAIC), Matthew Vanderberg, Emmanuelle Guérin, Czesia Bulowska, Stephanie Shaw, Stephen Cohlmeyer (FRAIC) | STRUCTURAL NCK Inc. | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Ambioner | CIVIL | LANDSCAPE HETA | INTERIORS Cohlmeyer Architecture | CONTRACTOR Rampa Construction Co. | ACOUSTICS MJM Acoustical Consultants Inc. | AREA 1,672 m2 (INCLUDING FRONT COURTYARD) | BUDGET $3.2 M | COMPLETION January 2021

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Architect, planner, educator, and author, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel has been a leading figure in modern architecture for more than sixty years.

She passed away peacefully in Toronto on October 20, 2022, at the age of 98. She is survived by her two children, Brenda and Marc.

In 1957, Lemco van Ginkel and her husband, H.P. Daniel (Sandy) van Ginkel (1920–2009), co-founded in Montreal their architecture and planning practice, van Ginkel Associates, a firm that became known for bold, modernist design and a sensitive approach to urban planning. With a steadfast focus on circulation, the firm campaigned for the conservation of historic districts, sustainable solutions, and pedestrian-friendly environments long before these concerns became popular.

Blanche Lemco was born in London, England, in 1923. At age thirteen, she moved with her mother and siblings to Montreal. Her father had been in the garment industry in England, where he owned a small factory, and both her parents were actively interested in the arts. At first, she favoured stage design as a profession, but owing to limited opportunities for theatre education in Montreal in the early 1940s, she chose to pursue architecture instead, drawn to its potential to change the world.

In 1940, she enrolled at McGill University with a scholarship. She was one of the first women students admitted to McGill’s School of Architecture, and in 1945 with a Bachelor of Architecture degree and several prestigious student awards. She continued her education at Harvard University, obtaining a master’s degree in city planning in 1950.

After graduating from McGill University, Blanche Lemco worked in municipal planning in Windsor, Quebec (1945), and in Regina, Saskatchewan (1946); in architecture for William Crabtree in London (1947); for Le Corbusier in Paris (1948); and for Mayerovitch and Bernstein in Montreal (1950–51). While working in Le Corbusier’s atelier, one of her projects was the rooftop terrace of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France, in particular the two iconic concrete ventilator stacks and the nursery. She recalled the experience with humour and clarity nearly seventy years later:

“I designed the form of the ventilators (which appeared on initial sketches as a single column), proposing a trefoil plan because I was told by the engineers that there were three extractor fans. When I showed this to Le Corbusier, explaining my proposal, he said. ‘You young people are such purists.’ I refrained from saying, ‘Where do you think we learned that?’ However, my initial drawing proposed that the ventilators be modestly splayed, which would have been more descriptive of exhaling.”

The design for the rooftop, modeled on a town square, made use of van Ginkel’s urban design education: “I designed the children’s play area and the high parapet around the running track/edge of the roof. The idea was that the roof was like the square of a small town, with its usual facilities, and that one saw the Alpes Maritimes in the distance as one would over the house roofs. This is why the parapet is relatively high.” In Le Corbusier’s office, she met several influential architects and planners, including Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, Jerzy Soltan, and André Wogenscky, an experience that informed her later involvement in the Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

In 1951, Blanche Lemco moved to Philadelphia, where she practiced architecture and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. There, with her colleagues Siasia Nowicki and Robert Geddes, she initiated the Philadelphia CIAM Group for Architectural Investigation (GAI). Lemco van Ginkel represented the group at CIAM 9 Aix-en- Provence in 1953 and at CIAM 10 Dubrovnik in 1956.

From 1951 to 1957, Lemco van Ginkel taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she, Nowicki, and Geddes were the first full-time appointments made by G. Holmes Perkins, Dean of the School of Fine Arts. She taught at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University in 1958, 1971, and 1975 with Josep Lluis Sert, the GSD’s Dean from 1953 to 1969. In Montreal, she developed the first courses in urban design at the Université de Montréal (1961–67 and 1969–70) and at McGill University (1971–77). Van Ginkel joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1977 after a tumultuous chapter in its history, becoming Dean of the School of Architecture (and in 1980, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Architecture), continuing to teach there until 1993. For four decades, she was active in architecture education organizations across North America, serving on accreditation committees and on the board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), and was president of the ACSA in 1986–87.

Lemco van Ginkel’s career is closely linked to that of her husband, Sandy (H.P.D.) van Ginkel, whom she met in 1953 at CIAM 9 in Aix-en-Provence, where they were both involved in the early discussions that would lead to the formation of Team 10. They married in 1956, and in 1957, they formed a professional partnership, van Ginkel Associates, opening an office at 4270 Western Avenue (now Boulevard de Maisonneuve) in Montreal. The practice operated in Winnipeg from 1966 to 1968, when it moved back to Montreal, then to Toronto in 1977.

Her architecture and urban planning are marked by a deep social purpose and a desire to produce comfortable modern environments, emphasizing cultural and collective values. As she has stated, “Architecture is a cultural pursuit and those who practice it, or are allowed to practice it, reflect our culture, our mores, our attitudes, in Canada as elsewhere.” Drawn to urban planning by its new ideas, Lemco van Ginkel imagined that it might be more open to women. Her collaborations with Sandy van Ginkel on architecture and urban planning projects manifest an early interest and expertise in designing for urban traffic patterns.

The van Ginkels are credited with saving Old Montreal, which is now one of North America’s most successful heritage districts, by running an urban expressway under the neighborhood rather than following the original plan of building it at ground level and demolishing its historic buildings. The success of that project led to the founding of urban planning as a profession in Canada, when she co-authored legislation for the first Quebec Provincial Planning Commission in 1963–67. The firm’s other major projects include the design of Bowring Park in St. John’s (1958– 65), which they presented at the last CIAM conference in Otterlo, Holland, in 1959; the vision and preliminary plan in 1962 for Montreal’s Expo 67; the protection of Montreal’s Mount Royal, saving a larger area of it from development; and a study of urban circulation in Midtown Manhattan in 1970–72. The van Ginkels’ emphasis on pedestrian movement and on public transportation anticipated the environmental movement by at least a decade. A particularly interesting outcome of the work commissioned by the City of New York was the Ginkelvan, a hybrid-electric minibus designed to alleviate congestion in the core of the United States’ largest city. Later purchased by the city of Vail, Colorado, its bright orange color referenced modernism’s bold colors, as well as the pop sensibilities of the era.

Film and filmmaking were especially important in Lemco van Ginkel’s career: she frequently used film and exhibitions to communicate research results and design ideas. During World War II, she worked at the National Film Board of Canada; and while living in Philadelphia in the 1950s, she wrote the film, It Can Be Done, commissioned by of the U.S. State Department. In 1956, she presented it at the International Federation of Housing and Town Planning Congress in Vienna, where it won the Grand Prix for Film. In 1960, she was consultant to the National Film Board and appeared in the film, Suburban Living. During the 1960s, she was involved in organizing the Montreal International Film Festival and the Winnipeg Film Society.

Lemco van Ginkel is a giant among modernist planners of the 1960s. She achieved a number of firsts (or near firsts) as a woman in the architecture profession: She was the first woman to serve as a Dean of an architecture school in North America; the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC); the first Canadian and first woman to be elected President of the ACSA; the first woman to teach at the University of Pennsylvania (with Siasia Nowicki); the first woman elected to the council of the Town Planning Institute of Canada; and the first woman architect elected as a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. She has also helped disseminate information about the history of Canadian women architects through her published articles and speaking engagements on the topic. She was open about her own experiences, as, for example, when she attributed the rarity of women students in Canada in the 1940s “to the social climate of Quebec, where my mother could not sign a contract and where women were disenfranchised until 1940.” In 1986, she co-curated an important exhibition, “For the Record: Ontario Women Graduates in Architecture, 1920–60,” at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Architecture; the records of that exhibition were donated to Virginia Tech’s International Archive of Women in Architecture (established 1985).

Lemco van Ginkel received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science by McGill University in 2014. She won the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal in 2020. Lemco van Ginkel’s life and work was featured in the 2018 documentary film City Dreamers and was honoured in the 2020 symposium For Her Record: Notes on the Work of Blanche Lemco van Ginkel.

Van Ginkel had a quick wit and a sharp intellect and was also quick to point to women’s accomplishments as architects as more significant than their gender; as she said in 1991, “Numbers are not all, and distinction in the profession is more important.”

Adapted from an article by Annmarie Adams and Tanya Southcott, originally prepared for the Beverley Willis Foundation’s Pioneering Women of American Architecture site, co-edited by Victoria Rosner and Mary McLeod:.

At her family’s request, donations may be made to the Professor Blanche Lemco van Ginkel Admission Scholarship at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture, and Design. For more information, please contact Stacey Charles at 416-978-4340 or stacey.charles@daniels.utoronto.ca.

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PROJECT The Ring, Place Ville Marie, Montreal, Quebec

DESIGNER Claude Cormier et associés

TEXT Elsa Lam

When Place Ville Marie opened in downtown Montreal in 1962, the design, by Henry Cobb working with I.M. Pei, included an elevated grand plaza, bookended by equally grand staircases. One of those stairs—facing McGill Avenue and leading to the gates of McGill University—was displaced, for over 50 years, by an entrance to the complex’s underground parking.

In 2018, the current owner, Ivanhoe Cambridge, set out to revitalize the raised esplanade, working with Sid Lee Architecture to add massive skylights connecting the plaza to the restaurant spaces below, and restoring the north staircase as it had been originally designed. To cap off the $200-million project, the owner asked local landscape architecture firm Claude Cormier et associés to create an installation that would complete the space above the new grand stair.

“We came up with the idea quite easily,” recalls Claude Cormier. His team wanted to reference the modernist grid of Cobb’s design, but offer a fresh take on it. A circular ring was the perfect fit for the space, fitting snugly in the 30-metre-wide opening, while providing enough clearance below for pedestrians to walk under it easily.

The Ring frames some 200 years of history, says Cormier. “At the end of the axis, we have McGill University, founded in 1821; in the back, we have Olmsted’s Mount Royal Park, from 1874, with the white cross, put up in 1950 to commemorate Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal.”

The preservation of the visual axis along Avenue McGill College also encompasses a more recent history, says Cormier. In 1984, Phyllis Lambert blocked a large mixed-use complex from being constructed in front of Place Ville Marie, he says. “She fought her own brother [the developer] to create this iconic moment in downtown Montreal.”

“For me, that’s what building a city is about—one thing after another, they all work together in resonance. Phyllis Lambert had a vision in her mind of something that was bigger,” says Cormier. “The Ring is trying to showcase that all together.”

The artistic installation also looks towards the future. The city’s central train station is nearby, and the Ring sits atop the location where a new set of underground municipal rail tracks will enter the station. Following the construction, Avenue McGill College will be reconstructed as a forest-like linear park designed by civiliti + Mandaworks and SNC-Lavalin.

To create the Ring, the design needed to respond to many constraints, including minimizing impact to the newly renovated heritage towers. To achieve this, the team engaged NCK’s Franz Knoll—the structural engineer that had worked on the original Place Ville Marie, as well as landmarks including the Louvre Pyramid. Knoll devised a solution that touches the towers in just four places, pinching the building’s structure at its strongest points to support the 23,000-kilogram Ring.

Knoll also advised on the structure of the Ring itself, which takes shape as a self-supporting stainless steel cylinder, with 9.5 mm-thick walls on top and bottom, and 16 mm-thick walls at the sides. It was created in six segments, with connecting flanges hidden behind access doors. Inside the cylinder, 1,800 linear metres of heating cables assure that the installation will resist ice and snow accumulation. The 1-millimetre joints of the structure are virtually invisible, giving the resulting design the appearance of a pure, single form.

The project “has created a love interest in the media since it was unveiled,” says Cormier. But not all of that attention has been positive—its $5-million price tag has also been the subject of hot debate.

“Some people were really offended by this, doing something with no purpose,” says Cormier. But he says that while the Ring may not be strictly functional, it does indeed have purpose: “It creates identity, a notion of place, taking care of our city, investing in our city,” he says. “We were busy enough in making it work, but we had the feeling it was right.”

Client Ivanhoé Cambridge | Landscape Architect Team Claude Cormier et Associés: Claude Cormier, Sophie Beaudoin, Damien Dupuis, Yannick Roberge | Fabrication and Installation Advisor Claude Bernard – Formaviva Inc. | Lighting Designer Gilles Arpin – Ombrages / EP Éclairage Public | Structural Franz Knoll – NCK | Industrial Design Advisor Michel Dallaire | Masonry and Sealing COHÉSIO Architecture | Mechanical/Electrical Stantec | Technology Integration The Attain Group | Machining/Fabrication/Assembly Marmen Inc. | Tube Bending Bendtec | Building Work JCB Construction Canada | Wind RWDI | Electricity  Patrice Blain Entrepreneur Electricien | Blasting Sablage au Jet 2000 | Budget $5 M | Completion September 2022

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The Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM) is proud to reveal the architectural design of its new downtown Museum, opening in 2025 at 3535 Blvd. St-Laurent. Created by KPMB Architects + Daoust Lestage Lizotte SteckerArchitecture, the winning design was selected following an international architectural competition.

Based on the pillars of memory, education, and community, the new building will contain multiple exhibition spaces, classrooms, an auditorium, a memorial garden, and a dedicated survivor testimony room. Construction on the new Museum will begin in the fall of 2023.

The MHM is moving from its current Cote-des-Neiges location in response to growing demand for its educational programs about the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights. Facing a rise of racism, antisemitism, and discrimination, the new MHM will have a broader impact in galvanizing communities throughout Quebec and Canada to fight all forms of hatred and persecution.

A fundraising campaign has raised $85 million for the $90 million project, with generous contributions from Heritage Canada ($20 million), the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec ($20 million), the City of Montreal ($1.5 million), the Azrieli Foundation ($15 million) and numerous private donors.

“We are delighted to share the design of our new Museum, which will be an important space of learning, action, and coming together,” said Daniel Amar, Executive Director of the MHM. “The brilliant design succeeded in creating a space of powerful architecture that remains respectful and sensitive to the difficult history of the Holocaust and its human rights legacy, that will be transmitted within its walls.”

The 32 projects received in the first stage of the architectural competition are available in the Canadian Competitions Catalogue.

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