Lemay Unites Architecture, Art and Landscape Design at Place des Montréalaises

It’s interesting because while the goal started with developing a transdisciplinary landscape project, we felt it was fundamentally more about moving the project out of that definition and into being an act of place making and public space that looks at commemoration, the stories we tell ourselves, the history of our city, the landscape—all of these things—and converging them equally into a single and balanced experiential entity.

That’s what makes the universally accessible inclined plane so integral as a solution. Instead of users having to take crooked paths on busy streets from downtown to the old city, it generates one seamless, haptic space that gently crosses the lacunas of the site with not only a concrete passerelle, but a place centered on pedestrians that’s made verdant through landscape which corresponds to provocative and interactive commemorative art, and vice versa.

We often talk about how the Place des Montréalaises represents a convergence of landscape architecture, architecture and art because that’s what it is. The design of complex projects like this one requires extensive crossovers in disciplines, and that’s perfectly in keeping with Lemay’s focus on transdisciplinarity. As opposed to siloing our designers and collaborators off from one another, they enter creative and nuanced feedback loops that begin as early as the conceptual phase.

It’s a project that developed organically from early on, where each element—engineering team, Angela Silver’s art, Patricia Lussier’s landscape team and my architecture team at Lemay—collaborated to achieve cohesion. While we’ve personally and professionally learned much from it, it will also create a rich, multifaceted experience for whoever steps foot on the site once completed.

That there’s an inclusionary intent that can be embedded in all design processes, and that our transdisciplinary design process is something that can inherently and radically be inclusionary in ways that say this is for everyone to be a part of, whether that’s symbolically, for universal accessibility, or through visibility. In this way, the practice is the project, a tool based on the lessons it learns in the process.

The process was, in effect, an exercise in recalibrating the process itself by embedding elements from intensified research strategies into the overall design, from landscape strategies around the project’s 21 species of plants and how they can intermingle and interplant to how the project used research on commemoration strategies and how different phases of feminism changed the way cities look at women.

Place des Montréalaises represents the future of Lemay. It shows the power of deep and meaningful research in the making of important work and represents a commitment to design as activism, pointing to the power of practice models like FLDWRK’s. Fundamentally, the firm now orients itself around its radically transdisciplinary process of idea-driven design as opposed to being a place of siloed and nonetheless specialized disciplines.

It’s a new way of working for us, demonstrating our ability to bring together collaborators to critically engage major public stories that surround space both public and private. Matters of representation through culture and identity, of values shared and personal, of perspectives both local and global; they all can and should be hypotheses and catalysts that inform and shape design, responding to all manner of societal issues that we face with positive impacts on our collective future.