Bridging/Seuil - Place de l'Architecture
competition / Montreal / 1997

Awarded First Prize, ex aequo

This project was an entry for the RAIC Bridging/Seuil - Place de l'Architecture International Architecture and Urban Design Competition in Montreal. Our entry, titled “Urban Splicing”, was awarded first prize, ex aequo with two other entries.

The competition focuses on the consolidation and redevelopment of Montreal’s historic axis, St.-Lawrence Boulevard, which divides the city into its East and West sections, and the focal point where this axis manifests itself as a bridge over the Ville-Marie Expressway, tying Old Montreal to the contemporary city. Our scheme expands on the bridge to create new programmatic corridors which unite a variety of programs including outdoor performance space, public exhibition areas, a gallery, conference center, commercial retail and restaurants, and garden & park space.

As a threshold, the Place de l'Architecture is seen not in traditional figural terms as an object or symbolic figural presence, but as a gradient field of constantly mutating activity, subject to the flows of material and energy that define the contemporary city. Pedestrian and vehicular traffic, information, commerce, leisure and tourism shape and are shaped by the Place de l'Architecture. The project aims at a dismantling of boundaries between the activity of city life and its immediate environment, consolidating this multiplicity of flows and urban histories into a continuous urban landscape.

Rather than trying to force a logic of coherence from existing conditions, this project proposes a new urban typology which facilitates the merging or interfacing of multiple and often contradictory events, visual phenomena, and histories of the city. The strategy of urban splicing pursues the weaving together of programs, traffic, infrastructure, advertising and signage, information, passages and landscape into a new urban geography of connectivity. Tourist resources, outdoor performance space, public exhibition areas, a cafe, electronic information resources, garden and park surface, and a network of suspended/elevated pathways hover over the expressway. Elevated views of the Boulevard Saint-Laurent and a panorama of the surrounding context consolidate an experience of the site's significant position as a threshold and confluence of history, morphology, and urban events. The Place de l'Architecture of the twenty-first century will be characterized by its ability to absorb complexity, bridging disparate morphologies, programs, urban histories and agendas to produce a new platform for urban living.