The floating blade reunites the old Montreal with downtown while gracefully shifting the topography, lifting the site from the Champ de Mars ground plane to the Old Port’s entrance. It is one of the Place des Montrealaises’ successes, as it has redesigned its panoramic vistas through its raised elevation. The field of flowering perennials is the monumental landscape that will re-green the area. According to the Design Jury at the time of the project’s awarding, the pre-flueri is the ‘engine of the project’. It conceptually unites other green parks in a string, or, as the City phrases it, ‘a green necklace’, creating a continuous park running through Montreal’s urban core. There are three symbolic architectural components at the Place des Montrealaises: conceptually, Verre Écran is a found object, Montréalaises Miroir is a transformed object, and the stairway or L’Emmarchemant at the centre of the meadow is a newly created object. These three elements relate to each other and establish a path of connections.
The found object, Marcelle Ferron’s 1968 stained glass Verre Écran , wraps the architecture of the Champ de Mars metro station. Ferron described her work as a love match between art and architecture. Montréalaises Miroir commemorates twenty-one women, selected to represent all women; it is the transformed object which masks an granite shed on site, a component of the subway infrastructure. The Montréalaises Miroir is a highly polished arc divided into two distinct moments of remembrance. On the south side of the Montréalaises Miroir , seven female pioneers from different eras and fields are honoured: Jeanne Mance, Myra Cree, Agnès Vautier, Jessie Maxwell-Smith, Ida Roth Steinberg, Idola Saint Jean, and Harriet Brooks. On the north-facing side, the mirror honours the fourteen victims of the 1989 École Polytechnique Massacre acknowledging its root cause of misogyny. In the poetic strands of letters, the full names emerge and disappear in shifting legibility. The perennial garden honours the twenty-one women with twenty-one species of flowers and wild grasses. In a balance between presence and absence, the women’s names, fragments of letters, perforate the stainless-steel mirror. Their names are fully rendered only once on Miroir , a pattern of presence that pays tribute to each woman. While each name is legible on the mirror, the freefall of letters suggests other names — a matrix of absence, less about specificity and more about other possible names and identities.
34 on site review 47 :: standing still
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