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Industrial materials redefine the shotgun house in a former Montreal winery
On St. Urbain Street in the industrial part of Little Italy in Montreal, sits a building that once sheltered a wine warehouse. Although this building lacked the industrial cachet found in some urban modernist structures, the large open spaces offered immense potential for renovation especially since the neighborhood was going through a major transformation.
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The particularities of the existing building—the 12-foot-high ceilings, the concrete block walls, the existing steel structure with long spans, and the industrial character of the street and area—helped architect Henri Cleinge determine how to divide the spaces. The existing building was already partially divided in three areas of about 25 by 80 feet. Each of the three residential units (two 2300 square feet, and one 3000 square feet) now housed in the building features an open loft-like area on the ground floor and closed-off bedrooms on the second floor. The existing structure also led Cleinge to explore the “Shotgun” type house in Quebec: in the Plateau and Little Italy districts of Montreal there are continuous blocks of buildings on narrow lots with openings in the front and back only, to the street side and an alley, with both sides of each unit closed off without any light or views.
In this project, Cleinge questioned the typology of the shotgun house in the context of an industrial Montreal neighborhood. Given the fact that the front and back views were not necessarily attractive in the area, and that the central space in such a narrow building is often dark, the challenge was to find an alternative approach to create an exciting living space, and to bring light to the middle. The solution came from creating central spaces open to the sky. In two of the units, these spaces are exterior courtyards. For the third space, Cleinge designed an interior atrium with a 220-square-foot skylight.
The project also expresses a design language faithful to the industrial architecture of the area. The three houses became a tribute to the theme of recycling and reuse of materials in their rough and natural state. The epoxy concrete floor; the use of weathering steel panels; the hot and cold rolled steel; the mill deck in red pine; the exposed steel beams that were purposely partially oxidized; the custom made galvanized steel windows—these are the elements which once dictated the aesthetic appearance of the surrounding streets and now, transferred to a residential setting, define these three houses.
Formal name of project: 6747-6759 St-Urbain Street
Location: 6747-6759 St-Urbain Street, Montreal
Gross square footage: 7400 sq.ft.
Completion Date: October 2006
Total construction cost: $851,000
Owner: Henri Cleinge
Architect:
Henri Cleinge, architecte
24 avenue du Mont-Royal Ouest, bureau 803
Montréal (Québec) H2T 2S2
telephone 514 842-3283 fax 514 509-4183
www.cleinge.com
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