Lemay holdings
The City’s design-focussed response to the representation of women in Montreal’s memorial culture was initiated by the Conseil des Montréalaises, who saw the revisiting of the Ville Marie Expressway as an opportunity to reimagine the area as the city’s new reunified centre with women as its protagonists. In 2018, for phase one of the competition’s two stages, the Lemay team, led by design principal Andrew King, proposed a perennial meadow built on a structural blade over the site — designed as a sculpture and engineered as a cantilever. When King and the Lemay team was shortlisted for the second phase of the competition I was invited to join the Lemay team to help shape their commemorative strategies. This stage for inscription led to text-based strategies generated from my artistic practice.
Place des Montréalaises, floating above the Ville-Marie Expressway, can be considered a recycling project. The site has had many lives, and its latest iteration is a floating blade over the two-hectare site at Champ-de-Mars in Montreal. This forward-looking public urban project repairs the division caused by the 1974 building of a two-level superhighway which erased a robust and vital neighbourhood between the Old Port and downtown. This new public space reunifies Montreal with its historic port. In 2015, the province of Quebec, as a gift to the city to commemorate its 375th birthday, covered a portion of the Ville-Marie highway. As Montreal is a UNESCO City of Design, it turned to design to restore the site by issuing, on July 4, 2017, an international multidisciplinary competition for the Place des Montréalaises. The City approached the workings of historical and present conditions of inclusive spaces as a social and cultural problem that could and would be addressed through the design process. The competition brief had two key mandates: reconnect the two historic quarters and address the lacuna of women commemorated in the public spaces of Montreal. One of the key challenges of the site is the Montreal subway infrastructure located below ground at the Champ de Mars metro station; anything designed above ground has structural implications below ground.
33 on site review 47 :: standing still
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