Cit? Multim?dia - Phase 8
Montreal, Quebec
Menkes Shooner Dagenais/Dupuis le Tourneux Architects

A translucent veil of patterned glass signals an industrial district?s high-tech future

© Marc Cramer

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Rhys Phillips

Cité Multimédia is a major urban redevelopment initiative in Montreal’s Faubourg des Récollets district. Located west of the city’s old town and immediately north of the now-restored Lachine Canal, this historic industrial area bustled during the 19th and early 20th centuries, then slipped into decline. In 1998, however, the city’s public land development corporation formed a partnership with the Quebec government’s public-investment fund and the Quebec Labour Unions’ Economic Development Fund to redevelop the area as a business-incubator hub focused on high-tech media. To date, eight buildings have been realized within an urban plan, by Groupe Cardinal Hardy with Provencher Roy and Associates, that retains both the district’s historic industrial buildings and the Faubourg’s intimate street scale and low-rise building pattern.

Phase Eight, designed by Dupuis Le Tourneux Architects in partnership with Menkes Shooner Dagenais Architects, is the second of three planned buildings intended to form a protective screen in front of the freeway. Given its location below the elevated bend of the off-ramp, the city demanded an architectural "billboard" signaling the presence of the Cité Multimédia and a clear gateway to the downtown core.

Equally important, the design had to respect and enhance the area’s remarkably intimate urban fabric of narrow streets and relatively low buildings while providing marketable, flexible, and humane working space.

The architects first convinced the city to abandon its initial requirement for a 12-story tower and return to the urban design plan’s idea of compact, linked volumes. They convinced officials that a lower building could, with another planned building on the west side of the highway, create the powerful emblem the city desired.

Dupuis and Le Tourneux split the complex into two parallel slabs pushed out to the street edges. On the eight-story wing, facing west, a glass-screen facade seems almost to float above the highway like a giant suspended plasma screen animated by the profiles of workers moving behind its ceramic-frit, patterned glass.

The scale and materials of the lower wing, a five-story, Minimalist, brick-and-zinc box punched with large windows, reflects the scale, simplicity, and materiality of its historic industrial neighbors.

Because long north–south blocks dominate the Faubourg, Cité Multimédia buildings have been careful to introduce a secondary grid of east–west pedestrian lanes. With Phase Eight, the architects sliced back the north end of the shorter wing and the south end of the larger wing, echoing the diagonal of nearby Rue Wellington. Imposing, bladelike corners result, extending a semienclosed court across one street as well as beckoning strollers from a broad entry plaza across Rue Brennan at the edge of the canal. Into the gap between the street-hugging slabs, the design team inserted a five-story glass connecting atrium.

By breaking down the two volumes into relatively narrow, staggered slabs, the architects ensure no occupant is more than 33 feet from natural light as well as picturesque views of Montreal’s skyline, canal, and harbor.

See the June 2003 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project

Formal name of Project:
Cit? Multim?dia - Phase 8 www.citemultimedia.com

Location:
Montreal, Quebec

Gross square footage:
35 000 sq meters

Total construction cost:
$33.8 million

Owner:
Société en commendite Brennan-Duke
50, rue Queen
Local 102
Montreal (Quebec) H3C 2N5

Architect:
Menkes Shooner Dagenais/Dupuis le Tourneux Architects
1134, Ste-Catherine Ouest
Local 1100
Montreal, Quebec, H3B 1H4
Tel :(514) 866-7291
Fax :(514) 866-8539