Located at the base of Montreal’s Mount Royal and just outside the campus of McGill University, the proposed Drummond Residences by ACDF Architecture is a 12-storey apartment complex on the tree-lined Drummond Street. Its tiered, setback design brings the neighborhood’s disparate architectural styles together.
Drummond Residences has a pale exterior with gridded windows framed in porcelain, and a protruding front entrance in a shorter, 4-story volume with gentle, quarter-moon curves. The project’s shapes are pure, combining straight lines with subtle angles or very soft and inviting curves. It highlights the Victorian house next door that serves as the Italian Embassy, but it also is a reflection and reinterpretation of the neighborhood’s broader architectural character of tall apartment buildings from the 1960s and shorter, historic structures in stone and brick. The north and south facades are enlivened with a checkerboard-like system of protruding balconies with frosted glass railings, while the west facade acts as a clean canvas adjacent to the consulate.
Currently, the site accommodates an 8-story brick apartment building, and priority will be given to the dismantling this existing building to avoid the end-of-life of materials that can be reused. Brick and stone will be dismantled, cleaned and transported to a local resale point. The result is an air-tight, highly efficient apartment building constructed with the highest energy standards, including triple-glazed windows, green roofs, landscaping, solar panels, and thermal breaks at balconies to reduce heat transfer during Montreal’s frigid winters.
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