Inside the Romanesque Revival parish, a portrait by American artist Jordan Eagles has painted the Saviour using fluid drawn from the vein of an HIV survivor. While the composition is a nod to Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi — which the wall text notes set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold — the medium evokes the belief that Jesus gave his blood for all of humanity. Standing before it, I find myself contemplating both the meaning of Christianity and the commodification of art — and then a more prosaic reality: This is no ordinary church.

At The Shepherd, only a weathering steel entryway signals the sensitive transformation within.

I’m not sure whether to call it a church at all. After closing its doors in 2016, the house of worship then known as the Good Shepherd Catholic Church sat vacant. While the congregation merged with another parish, the majestic building itself faced an inauspicious future. Situated in an inconspicuous pocket of the city between the affluent communities of Indian Village and Grosse Pointe, the church — which anchored a once-thriving neighbourhood — was surrounded by a landscape of vacant lots and soon-to-be demolished homes, reflecting the pattern of post-industrial divestment and depopulation that shapes much of central Detroit. In 2021, however, the 110-year-old structure was announced as a future home for gallerists Library Street Collective, led by Anthony and JJ Curis.

The central block of the Little Village campus is anchored bu The Shepherd, while the adjoining rectory house is now home to a non-profit supporting BIPOC artists, as well as a bed and breakfast.

Three years later, the former church sits at the heart of the nascent but fast-growing Little Village arts campus. Framed by a new public sculpture garden and an inviting urban park, the venue now known simply as The Shepherd is a 1,300-square-metre gallery, library and community hub. Carefully restored and adapted by Brooklyn-based architects Peterson Rich Office (PRO), the intervention retains both the building’s imposing bones and its delicately intricate interior details. On the exterior, only the weathered steel arch that frames the main entry subtly signals the transformation from a sacred setting into a secular one.

Peterson Rich Office (PRO) carefully inserted a pair of large volumes into the church interior, deftly respecting the older building’s textures and datum lines.

Past the front door, the metamorphosis is at once obvious and understated. The vestibule has been turned into a reception and a new gallery volume has been inserted into the back of the nave. From the entrance, however, the interior maintains a long open view to the altar, preserving a sense of spatial and spiritual order. Combining the minimalism of a white cube with subtle texture and patina, the room is one of two similar exhibition spaces slotted into the building, while another new gallery space is tucked into the cruciform interior’s north transept. Beyond the two rooms, exhibited art is subtly woven through the church interior; larger works rest on the open floor, and smaller pieces adorn the columns — where I encounter Eagles’s Vinci — and the restored altar. Meanwhile, the south transept is given over to the Little Village Library, a reading room and book collection curated by Black Art Library founder Asmaa Walton.

A new gallery space is inserted into the north transept.

Complemented by comfortable tables and private reading rooms (adapted from erstwhile confessionals), the eclectic yet accessible collection spans from rare and historic art volumes to children’s books. A long stone bookshelf anchors the space, inviting visitors to read, study and hang out. “In an art gallery, people don’t think they can touch the books; they think it’s part of the work. So it’s important to have these spaces where you can interact with the books, take them off the shelf and read,” says Walton. Meanwhile, the altar and retained nave create an open space for community events and performances. (Days after my visit, a panel discussion and orchestral tribute to John Coltrane activated the space.)

The Black Art Library occupies the south transept, creating a welcoming open community space that conveys the comfortable scale of a room.

The integration of art with public space and community-building is central to both The Shepherd and the surrounding Little Village community. “The planning and transformation of the church was very much grounded in the idea of bringing people together,” says PRO co-founder Miriam Peterson. It’s a deft architectural feat. While the mix of uses feels intuitive and uncluttered, it’s an unusual medley — facilitated by equally unconventional design strategies. “On some level, it’s kind of a weird and radical thing to do, to put such big volumes into an existing building,” says Peterson, explaining that the new exhibition spaces “support the technical program of contemporary art gallery, but without undermining the ability of the church to continue to function in the way that a church historically has in a community.”

Above the entry pavilion, visitors can gaze down the gallery oculus and get up close with the historic church interiors.

This spirit animates the whole of the campus, where a landscape designed by New York–based OSD conveys visitors through the block. Alongside ample new seating and greenery (composed entirely of native plantings), a prominent sculpture garden honours legendary Detroit artist Charles McGee, extending the art program into the public realm. And, as with the gallery, the visitors comprise a mix of regulars and curious tourists, as well as neighbours and Detroiters of all stripes, including a trickle of former parishioners. As Shepherd artistic director Allison Glenn puts it, “We thought of the whole building — and the block — as a canvas. It’s all an invitation to explore.”

Outside, The Shepherd’s programming is extended into the public realm with a sculpture garden honouring Charles McGee.

The varied setting – which also includes a skate park designed by iconic skateboarder Tony Hawk and artist McArthur Binion and a gently elevated rolling lawn (a subtle nod to the curved apse of The Shepherd) – is knit together by gardens and footpaths. The porous network of gravel walkways elegantly transitions into a flood-resistant permeable parking lot that, when free of cars, doubles as a seamless extension of the pedestrian space. The walkways are enhanced by the addition of red brick, the interplay of hues introducing another sinuous highlight; the crushed masonry, salvaged from a local demolished building, also pays quiet homage to architectural context. “This is a place with history and meaning, and it should be respected,” says OSD founder Simon David. “There’s beauty in repair and re-use.”

Alongside the sculpture garden, a skate park, seating and open lawns round out the public realm.

Between the skate park and the raised lawn, a pair of houses has been combined into one. The two homes — a handsome Victorian and a 20th-century Detroit duplex — were both likely to be razed under the municipal Detroit Demolition Program. Fortunately, Library Street’s Anthony and JJ Curis had other plans. The duo commissioned local architect and Undecorated founder Ishtiaq Rafiuddin to reimagine the homes as a commercial setting with a bakery and a restaurant. Ingeniously, they are joined together by a shared porch. “Detroit has a really strong front porch culture, and we wanted to extend that tradition — where neighbours hang out and spend time together — into more of a public setting,” says Rafiuddin.

Undecorated has joined together two abandoned homes with a shared porch. A bakery (right) and restaurant (left) are set to activate the buildings.

It’s one of several works in progress. Across the street from Rafiuddin’s BridgeHouse, Los Angeles–based Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects is leading the development of a new venue for Library Street’s Louis Buhl & Co. gallery, which is devoted to celebrating divergent practices and showcasing artists at all stages of their careers. Also in the neighbourhood, the Curises have purchased, restored and sold a handful of formerly vacant and slated-for-demolition homes while working with Rafiuddin to add a modest influx of new housing stock. So far, recent neighbours include Canadian designer Brian Richer, local gallerist Isabelle Weiss and fine art photographer and former Detroit Lions defensive end Romeo Okwara.

The skatepark alongside BridgeHouse was designed by Tony Hawk and McArthur Binion.

There’s plenty more to come. Alongside BridgeHouse, a rear annex to The Shepherd is set to be filled out by a cocktail bar playfully dubbed “Father Forgive Me.” In the meantime, the old rectory has already been converted into a small bed and breakfast (ALEO), and its top floor now houses the headquarters of Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, a non-profit providing mentorship and support to emerging BIPOC artists and writers, including an on-site artist residency program. A block to the south, Library Street has engaged OSD — and celebrated New York designers SO – IL — to reimagine an underused marina and boat storage complex as an extension of the cultural hub, stretching Little Village to meet the Detroit River waterfront.

Inside the former rectory house, the ALEO bed and breakfast is distinguished by its large communal space and eclectic art program.

Two blocks north of The Shepherd, the latest addition to the neighbourhood is Lantern, an adaptive re-use complex designed by OMA. Largely surrounded by vacant land, the building’s crisp white exterior — perforated by rows of cylindrical glass blocks — emits an almost otherworldly evening glow. I’m having a hard time believing that OMA — freakin’ OMA — really has a project at the corner of Kercheval and McClellan. But as I start walking toward it, I don’t know if I’ll like what I see. From a distance, the pristine, glowing white box is all austere spectacle and starchitecture, with little hint of community or local culture. Still, I can’t deny how cool it looks, and I find myself quickening my stride in excitement as I approach.

OMA adapted a former industrial bakery — and its white cinder block extension — into a mixed-use hub dubbed The Lantern.

Up close, the place tells an entirely different story. I’m charmed to find the gleaming surface dissolves into a simple array of cinder blocks, the paint chipping into the visible grout lines and the spectacle resolving into an honest and ordinary Midwestern beauty. “We found a builder who would cut even holes into the cinder blocks, and then used relatively inexpensive, standard, mass-produced rounded glass to fill in the perforations,” says OMA partner Jason Long. The glass apertures, which playfully adapt the solid CMU wall originally constructed as a low-budget warehouse addition to the commercial bakery that previously occupied the site, signal a new public presence while maintaining the site’s industrial simplicity.

Up close, the monolithic white form dissolves into a simple array of perforated cinder blocks.

The entrance is around the corner and through a sheltered inner courtyard. Here, a broad public stoop announces a 2,071-square-metre mixed-use complex. Within the white volume, the courtyard — which combines accessible circulation with ad hoc seating — slides into the interior of popular watering hole Collect Beer Bar. On a Friday evening, the joint is packed. In the older side of the building, meanwhile, the former bakery is now home to non-profit letterpress studio and education hub Signal-Return, as well as the Progressive Art Studio Collective (PASC), which is dedicated to supporting artists with developmental disabilities and mental health differences. The Lantern is also set to welcome a clothing store and a café.

Accessed via a sheltered courtyard, Collect Beer Bar, PASC and Signal-Return all share a broad front porch.

On the patio, I sit down for a drink with Anthony Curis. I’d been nervous about meeting him. While I’m used to interviewing architects, many of whom relish self-important, pretentious language, they’re rank amateurs compared to their counterparts in the art world. Much as I’m genuinely impressed by what Library Street Collective has accomplished, I’m bracing for something esoteric. Yet I’m relieved to find that the man sitting across from me sounds more like a plain-spoken Midwestern hockey dad than a heavyweight gallerist and property developer. “We’re not by any means saviours to the neighbourhood or anything like that,” says Detroit-born Curis. “And our goal isn’t to play landlord but to help others build equity. None of this is even a real estate play — it’s about creating interesting and welcoming spaces and finding new ways to celebrate art.”

Collect Beer Bar riffs on the site’s industrial heritage, with raw, simple finishes and OMA’s new sawtooth roof.

As Curis puts it, Little Village started with a new gallery — The Shepherd — and organically grew from there. “Instead of expanding to another city, we decided to double down in Detroit,” he says. Although the intent was never to build a neighbourhood, supporting a thriving arts community means more than renovating a church into a gallery. To bring people to the neighbourhood, whether as visitors or residents, you have to build new housing and hospitality venues, as well as green spaces and other public amenities. In the coming years, Library Street will also turn its focus to addressing more complex yet fundamental community needs, including a grocery market and non-profit artist housing. Throughout, the Curises have consistently partnered with — and celebrated — the Detroit community, from renowned artists to emerging voices.

The non-profit Signal-Return is devoted to uplifting the community and reviving traditional letterpress techniques.

These are good intentions. And good outcomes. Yet Little Village is also a reflection of Detroit’s uniquely depleted urban condition. Amid the demolition and depopulation, whole swathes of the city have been monopolized by individual actors. Prominent speculators, like Dennis Kefallinos, Matthew Tattarian, and so-called “blight king” Ernest Karr, have amassed dozens — sometimes hundreds — of properties, all while ignoring even the most basic maintenance and racking up a bevy of municipal fines and unpaid taxes as their property values rise. By some metrics, up to 20 per cent of the city’s real estate is locked up in speculation and the continued disinvestment it entails.

Across the street from The Shepherd, Lorcan O’Herlihy is transforming a half-demolished house into a new venue for Library Street’s Louis Buhl & Co. Gallery.

While Detroit’s more enterprising property developers offer a contrast — and sometimes a postscript — to speculative inaction, the results can be equally troubling. Over the past decade, businessman Sanford Nelson gradually purchased much of Detroit’s thriving Eastern Market neighbourhood — long a popular destination; these property acquisitions were followed by headlines proclaiming rising rents, store closures and perpetual conflicts with beloved local businesses. As Nelson himself told the Detroit News, some consider him “the devil incarnate.”

Immediately south of the Little Village campus, an underused commercial dock and warehouse is set to become Stanton Yards Detroit, a mixed-use destination master planned by OSD and featuring adaptive architecture by SO – IL.

Closer to Little Village, John Hantz vowed to transform Detroit’s lower east side into a utopian urban woodland. Although some 2,000 lots were cleared and thousands of trees were planted, the high-minded enterprise has produced little more than cover for simple speculation: As stretches of scraggly monoculture forest amounted to a half-assed attempt at beautification, the investor reaped the benefits of growing property values. And while Dan Gilbert (whose real estate firm Bedrock owns a large stock of downtown) has genuinely revived much of the urban core, fellow billionaire land baron Matty Moroun shamelessly consigned the iconic Michigan Central Station to decades of decay until its purchase and restoration by the Ford Motor Company. Even award-winning Core City developer Philip Kafka has faced well-publicized tensions with tenants and community members.

Featuring a master plan by OSD, Stanton Yards is poised to extend the Little Village public realm to the Detroit River.

In a more socio-economically healthy city, such real estate monopolies are all but impossible. While the results vary, those in Detroit carry inherent risks not found in other cities, where the caprices of individual landlords are balanced out by a more varied and competitive market. So far, Anthony and JJ Curis have made the right decisions. Still, as I walk back from the bar into the warmth of the late summer evening, I find myself wondering about the degree to which their vision — as genuinely altruistic and down-to-earth as it is — is shared by the wider local community.

I’m spending the night at ALEO, the church rectory lovingly transformed into a bed and breakfast. By the time I get into bed, the last of the lingering sun has disappeared behind the horizon. I worry about how well I’ll sleep, especially given how dead quiet Detroit can be at night. As a lifelong city guy, I prefer a din. And luckily, I get it. Outside, a group of casual revellers has gathered in OSD’s gravel parking lot turned community space. Their cars are parked with the doors open and music playing. I’m thankful for the noise, but more importantly, I’m relieved to see the place truly alive. They must have done something right after all.

In the morning, I awaken to a very different noise. It’s early on a Saturday, and I’m usually loath to leave bed on a weekend. But the peals of children’s laughter and the rolling thrum of rubber wheels on concrete pique my interest. I start to feel the excitement emanating from the crowd gathered at the skate park. Before I know it, I’m brushing my teeth and getting dressed. I can’t wait to see what’s up.

The post The Second Coming: A New Act for Detroit’s Little Village appeared first on Azure Magazine.

For starters, the late 19th-century corner building defied easy categorization. While elements of Renaissance Revival style broadly define the building’s aesthetic, the exterior ornamentation and colour palette reflects a bespoke — and unconventional — mix of Italianate, Iberian and central European influences. The designers studied the two-and-a-half-storey Edifício A’mar, discovering that the distinctive architectural expression was inspired by the original owner’s extensive travels and experiences around the world.

As the REM’A Arquitectos team learned more, their attention turned to paying homage to not only the original architectural style, but also the more intangible ethos of adventure and evolution that shaped it.

Alongside a careful restoration of the colourful and expressive façade, a small addition was inserted at the back of the building. At once understated yet assertive, the streamlined new volume — which is stepped back along the second storey to open up a small private guest terrace — is a pared down composition, adorned by simple vertical slats and a bold earthy red hue.

On the ground floor, a corner-facing commercial space has been restored to service as a flower shop, while the upper storey and attic now comprise four intimate guest rooms catering to tourists and longer-term visitors. While the retail entrance animates the prominent corner frontage, a compact garage is discretely — and almost invisibly — tucked into the addition’s monochrome façade, and the guest entrance is situated along a side street.

Inside, the lodging house interiors were re-made with an interplay of bold colours and subtly irregular geometries against a crisp white palette. Simple, spatially efficient guest rooms are finished with minimalist private bathrooms and a shared kitchenette — spaces which are deftly accented by solid colours and an elegantly irregular, staggered interplay of Portuguese ceramic tiles. (In this respect, REM’A Arquitectos channels a pragmatic poeticism reminiscent of Portugal’s Álvaro Siza, as well as contemporary local practices like Fala Atelier.)

Animated by a sense of playfulness and expression, the bold hues, oblique geometries — particularly along the central yellow stair — and unconventional finishes create a spirited dialogue with the building’s history. While the place was explicitly not returned to its 19th century condition, a feeling of adventure once again defines an eye-catching local landmark.

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Opened to the public on April 14, the museum and event venue replaces a former industrial building with a welcoming public hub. Designed by Copenhagen-based architects Henning Larsen, the 22,000-square-metre World of Volvo is immediately distinguished by its circular, wood-clad form. Made from glulam and cross-laminated timber, the expansive structure takes inspiration from Swedish forests to create a sort of urban canopy held up by the “tree trunks” of three massive timber columns.

The trio of columns is paired with a sleek, glazed building envelope, amplifying the sense of openness within. From outside, the space is bathed in warm light — and rendered cozier by the exposed timber structure and indoor greenery. The relatively open interior accommodates a marquee display of Volvo designs through the brand’s 97-year history, including the tractors, boats and trucks that have formed Volvo’s diverse portfolio.

Of course, the company’s slate of current — and upcoming — electric vehicles also takes pride of place, underlining the car-maker’s commitment to more sustainable future mobility. (In 2021, Volvo announced it would transition to an all-electric portfolio by 2030).

While the vehicle displays are an obvious highlight, World of Volvo is designed to host a wide range of events, talks, exhibitions, conferences and activations. Able to accomodate up to 1,100 people in all, the facility also features a pair of restaurants, as well as a variety of smaller meeting rooms and informal gathering spots.

Anchored by a central open space that can be configured to suit a variety of settings, the main floor is framed by a tiered terrace of seating and circulation, making for a flexible interior — albeit one compromised by inaccessible stadium-style “bleacher stairs” as a central feature. Atop the “canopy,” a roof garden also welcomes visitors.

According to Henning Larsen associate design director Martin Stenberg Ringnér, the space — which can be divided into free and ticketed settings — is designed as a reflection of Volvo’s democratic values. “As a brand Volvo is rooted in a Swedish pride for producing and manufacturing quality for everyone. This is highlighted and spotlighted at World of Volvo,” says Stenberg Ringnér. But it’s a point made tactfully. In contrast to aggressively branded automotive spaces, World of Volvo is as much a civic venue as an ode to the car.

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Situated in Laval (a city just north of Montreal), the two-storey, 3,900-square-metre office is the latest addition to the long MONTONI history of construction. And while the light-filled space feels welcoming and resolved, SLA’s expressive use of raw concrete, aluminum and exposed structures hints at an industrial, unfinished aesthetic — a motif underlined by powder-coated orange accents.

“We drew inspiration from the codes of the construction industry in creating the new offices,” says Jean Pelland, Architect and Senior Partner at Sid Lee Architecture. “Guided by the builder’s innovative approach, every aspect of our design reflects our commitment to crafting offices that are unique, and to honouring our client’s legacy.”

Greeting visitors, a striking curved aluminum counter — custom designed by SLA — sets the tone for the spaces to come. In the upstairs kitchen (a showpiece of the space), for example, a sculptural lighting installation by Lambert & Fils evokes the choreography of scaffolding, anchoring — and gently illuminating — the sociable counter below.

Here, vivid orange stools nod to Montreal’s ever-present construction cones, with the eye-catching hue paired with more understated walnut islands and aluminum counters. Framing the kitchen, sleek, reflective dark blue cabinets create a soothing yet hygienic backdrop.

Alongside the kitchen, a sociable “agora” hosts larger gatherings and meals. The space is outfitted with understated furnishings in matte black and olive tones. And throughout the two-level MONTONI office, a soft yet industrial palette of material finishes is paired with ample greenery, amplifying a feeling of openness and breathability. Not bad for a construction site.

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The strategy has worked like a charm. His redesign of Shanghai Book City – with its gleaming perforated-aluminum façade, its plaza-like glazed entrance and its jaw-dropping interiors – has already garnered raves (online, of course) including by the city itself. “The bookstore is becoming a cultural landmark with a smart green concept, and is a successful case of urban renewal,” reads the municipal government’s website.

Anyone even remotely familiar with Wutopia Lab would expect nothing less than a complete reinvention. The firm creates dreamlike worlds that burst with playful forms and vibrant hues and has made a specialty out of turning libraries and the like into storybook settings. For Shanghai Book City, part of the initial brief was to update the 12,000-square-metre structure itself, which allowed for no more than 10 per cent of the building’s footprint to be given over to newly introduced safety measures, such as more evacuation stairs and washrooms. (The limit was also a challenge for Yu, who turned it into an opportunity: unable to remove a beam across what would become a fifth-floor atrium, as it would exceed the 10 per cent change allowed, he turned it into a skybridge.)

But the bigger vision was to flip the place from a “mere bookstore” into a “cultural complex” with various uses. “This cultural complex is a specific, nuanced, abstract vertical city, an idealistic representation of Shanghai,” says Yu. “It grows from the old bookstore, not severing ties with history but using books as the foundation for a new city.”

That is a lofty ideal – and Shanghai Book City aims to meet it from first approach. The glazed, double-height ground-floor entrance merges with Fuzhou Road (Yu sought to bring about the road’s revival as a cultural street) to establish a public square. Steps gently rise from street level to the entrance, which is also accessible via a ramp.

Inside, book lovers are immediately immersed in what Yu has called the Book Mountain, a bold-red shelving system and stage in one that can be used for book launches, exhibitions and other events. “The red Book Mountain becomes the first focal point in the pedestrian’s line of sight. From here, one can transition through escalators into the bookstore, which functions as a vertical city.

Whereas before the renovation, Shanghai Book City felt cavernous – the higher up you went, the darker it became – it is now suffused with light. Wutopia Lab’s masterstroke in this audacious redesign was to stack a staggered trio of atria that funnel sunlight all the way down to the centre of Book Mountain through skylights, generous apertures in the facade and glass floors.

Reached via zigzagging escalators, the double-height atria also carve out their own niches: as the square, the auditorium, and the theatre, respectively. Contrasting the glass floors, warm-timber bookshelves that soar to the ceilings and cut-away views across rooms evoke an Escher-like, labyrinthine sensation. Levels two to six house the reading area, the first and seventh floors serve as storage areas, and the eighth floor is dedicated to storage and cover displays.

This city, as Yu characterizes it, is wrapped in a 10,000-metre-long bookshelf, accommodating 470,000 books, that appears as a continuous façade. Outside of this wall are commercial enterprises ranging from tea houses to galleries and a gift shop to an art furniture store. “I have no fear of commerce, and my requirements for shop owners are akin to those established in ancient cities – they must respect the continuous façade of books in my city,” says Yu. “This ensures that different businesses are embedded in my city. This is what it means to build a city with books.”

As for the façade, Yu says, “I hope the bookstore can be read. I used a symbolic approach to create the façade, which is formed by stacking countless book spines.” The patterns inside the spines vaguely hint at “the changes on both sides of the Pujiang River. The past Bund represents the present Pudong, and even further, represents the imaginative future of Shanghai.” Lit from within, the perforated aluminum panels make the building glow like a “Crystal Palace,” the moniker that citizens first gave the bookstore upon its reopening, and that has stuck ever since.

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Brian MacKay-Lyons, founder of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects (MLSA).

In December 2022, MacKay-Lyons was appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of his contribution to this dia­lectic between the modern and the traditional. And though he’s retired from his professorship at Dalhousie University, where he taught and influenced innumerable East Coast archi­tects for 37 years, he’s more active than ever, designing buildings (from houses to entire villages) and writing books; MLSA is currently at work on its latest title, Dwelling. The firm has two outposts in the U.S., one in Oregon and one in Massachusetts, and MacKay-Lyons orbits around its three Nova Scotia offices, in Shobac, Lunenburg and Queen’s Marque. Azure’s editor, Elizabeth Pagliacolo, met up with him at these three unique places that he has had a continuous role in evolving.

Queen’s Marque — a new commercial, residential and cultural development on the Halifax Harbour — exudes a materiality and attention to detail that recalls Brian MacKay-Lyons’s best work. A granite slipway leads directly into the water; visitors have been known to dive right in. Photos, here and top of article, by Nic Lehoux.

From any vantage point at Queen’s Marque, you can enjoy a full view of this new commercial and residential hub. On a rainy morning, enshrouded in the maritime fog, people dart from one end of the campus to the opposite, taking refuge in the passageways that connect its buildings to the city beyond; the boardwalk is drenched in the same tone as the Muntz metal that clads the underside of those portals. On a sunny afternoon, from the grand Rise Again staircase, you can observe children splashing in the water at the base of another staircase that leads down into the Halifax Harbour a few metres away, their parents anxious and bemused. Yoga mats are being unfurled for an open-air class and tourists congregate on the restaurant patios.

“It’s like a theatre — you’ve got all these roof terraces that look down like balconies onto the boardwalk. And then Rise Again is a very theatrical bleacher. So it’s meant to be a ‘people space’ and it’s full of people all the time,” says Brian MacKay-Lyons, the architect whose firm, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects (MLSA), designed the development in collaboration with FBM Architects. Shane Andrews, a partner at MLSA, was project architect.

In essence, the 41,800-square-metre complex hugs the Harbour with a mixed-use, somewhat U-shaped assemblage of structures. Anchoring the western perimeter of the site is an eight-storey sandstone building, supported by glass prisms, that houses apartments; jutting out from either end of it, two Muntz-clad volumes step down in height and taper in width as they approach the water. One features commercial office space, and the other is home to Muir — a resplendent five-star hotel. In between these two buildings, which are reminiscent of ships docking at the pier, are the two staircases. Rise Again is both artwork and infrastructure: It houses a soon-to-open restaurant by DesignAgency at its base and is crowned with a shimmering totemic installation by Ned Kahn, Tidal Beacon, at its apex. The sense of peaks and valleys, of ascending and then stepping down, of passageways in and out, gives the entire place an uncommon dynamism, aesthetically and experientially.

Some of the big moves feel cosmopolitan. Both the water stairs (which have sparked concern among people with disabilities) and the passageways hint at Venice, while the hospitality aspect is big-city chic. But the textures are of the place. MLSA sought to achieve a “fine-grained pier–building fabric,” and in this sense, Queen’s Marque reflects a city-scaled application of the attention to genius loci that MacKay-Lyons has honed in the smaller works — mainly houses — that first brought him international praise. Both the sandstone and the Muntz connect the development to its surroundings, including the art deco Dominion Public Building; the Muntz is also the stuff of seafaring vessels. In the passageways, the hand-patinated panels are tattooed with a historic narrative of the transatlantic trade that shaped the site.

Queen’s Marque’s tactility at the human scale is the most successful aspect of the biggest project that MLSA has completed in the urban realm. The parti — a blown-up version of which is mounted on the wall of the firm’s Queen’s Marque office — emphasizes the movement of people with loops and squiggles that anticipate how they’ll traverse the place. MacKay-Lyons praises the developer, Armour Group, and its CEO, Scott Armour McCrea, for the project’s expansiveness. “I would say that, in a way, he’s the architect, just through his commitment to doing things properly. This development is 70 per cent public open space. That’s the key to it. It’s not a building at all: It’s a district. And it’s a public experience.”

In fact, the development — which sits on 400 piles and 200 rock anchors and includes two levels of underground parking — almost doubles the area’s public space, to 9,270 square metres. McCrea tells me that he sought to create a setting “that could be meaningful and iconic” without the star-architect or shiny-object factor. “We wanted a fabric development, and to build something that is true and authentic to its roots, as opposed to something that could be anywhere,” he explains. He also considered a sense of inclusivity. “How do you make the public space not feel as if it is kind of a protected area for the wealthy who might be above it? We have had a lot of deep conversations about democracy of place.”

A slice of the campus at Shobac, in Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, captures the Troop Barn, Schoolhouse, Enough House, four cottages and The Studio, which sometimes serves as a satellite office. Photos of Shobac by James Brittain.

Perhaps oddly, MacKay-Lyons compares Queen’s Marque to the project that has amounted to his life’s work: Shobac. “I like to think that, when we’re talking about Shobac and how the buildings aggregate, it’s a similar ethic, even though it’s a very different kind of project. But there’s that urbanist kind of approach to architecture.” Situated on land that he has sculpted in Upper Kingsburg, Shobac is an architectural menagerie of elemental houses that are both rugged and elegant, mainly wood-framed, gable-roofed volumes on robust bases, with wondrous hearths at their centres.

It all started with the renovation of an 18th-century house. In 1986, after completing his graduate studies at UCLA, and after having travelled and worked throughout Europe, MacKay-Lyons and his wife, Marilyn MacKay-Lyons, bought a 1750s dwelling and restored it. Despite his family’s long history in the region, it was a difficult place and a difficult time to set up a practice. And then the house won a Governor General’s Medal. “And we thought, Okay, this is our big break, we can stay and keep trying.” (That house is now the home of one of his daughters; she’s a veterinarian and tends to the horses of Shobac. Another daughter is an engineer who collaborates on some MLSA projects, while his son is an architect with the firm.)

Shobac occupies the site where French explorer Samuel de Champlain first made landfall in 1604 (its name derives from the original land grant of Christian Shoubach), but it was a seasonal settlement for Mi’kmaq peoples for millennia before that. The landscape is characterized by majestic verdant drumlins formed by glaciers. MacKay-Lyons started out by working the land — returning forested hills back to their agricultural origins — and then began to build on it with structures old and new, rescued and invented. “We bought all these little fish lots and cleared the land, but the land got expensive — we had to buy it, protect it and sell some of it to people who wanted to have the architecture,” he explains. “So, we do this architect–developer thing. What do out-of-work architects do? Become developers.”

Some of the early structures came out of Ghost Lab, the two-week design–build workshops that MacKay-Lyons began with his students in 1994. These gatherings evolved to include eminent peers like critics Kenneth Frampton (who notably developed the term “critical regionalism”) and Juhani Pallasmaa, and Pritzker Prize–winners Glenn Murcutt and Francis Kéré. Burkina Faso–born, Berlin-based Kéré helped MacKay-Lyons retrofit a rescued barn on the site. “We almost died together,” MacKay-Lyons recalls. “We were up on a beam together and it broke. We went down together on this beam, like surfers, and almost died.”

Ghost culminated in the 2011 conference Ideas in Things, which was an attempt to capture this moment — or even this movement — focused on the local and human-built as an alternative to the anywhere architecture contrived by the flattening forces of globalization. Yet, writing in Azure, critic (and present-day director of McGill’s architecture school) David Theodore wondered if the ideas in question were past their best-by dates. In a world where architects are increasingly expected to train their expertise on tackling the gnarly problems of urbanism, spending this much energy on notions of the single-family home felt passé. “I’m struck by how the representations of the Ghost ethos — local architecture is good architecture — are for the most part finely wrought, poetic single-family residences, built for individuals rather than communities,” Theodore wrote.

For MacKay-Lyons, the house will always be culturally relevant — and architecture cannot disavow it. “It’s a blunt instrument to say that houses don’t matter, when 70 per cent of the world lives in them,” he says. And his work has always hewed to modesty, economy and even (a compliment, to him) banality.

The conferences came to an end, but the Ghost internship continues (interns work on projects in the Lunenburg office and are helping with the new book), and MacKay-Lyons’s vision and expansion — for Shobac and beyond — was just beginning. As his houses garnered ever more international press and accolades, blue-chip clients began their approach and more luxury-leaning projects followed. In the past decade, MLSA has designed numerous residences and villages that bear his signature around the world, including a barrel-shaped home that embodies stealth wealth and an elite ski village of cedar-clad chalets, both in Utah, among other places that aspire to what MacKay-Lyons describes as a “utopian” ideal.

The Enough House is a 65-square-metre prototype exploring the idea of “economy as ethic.”

Utopia is a paradise on Earth; Alvar Aalto felt that its creation ought to be the ultimate goal of the architect, and practitioners like Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Moore and Paolo Soleri set out, in their own particular ways, to show it could be done. Today, as the exigencies faced by urban centres take on increasing import, the desire to create utopia in a rarified pocket of the world might feel to some like the preoccupation of a bygone era.

And yet its appeal is eternal.

When it comes to Shobac, the utopian intention is manifested in the harmony expressed between landscape and built fabric. You cannot help but marvel at its beauty. In the foreword to Robert McCarter’s Economy as Ethic monograph, Pallasmaa writes of this place, where the buildings seem “self-evident,” that “instead of the presence of architecture, we are made conscious of the earth, gravity and climate. The [architectural] language also reflects the mental power of the archetypes of timeless human constructions, and as a result the buildings place themselves in a historical continuum, making us sense the presence of time.” Last year, author Larry Gaudet wrote a book about Shobac called Skyroom — named after a granite-lined sunken space for star-gazing that MacKay-Lyons created over one of the many building ruins on the land — that conjures its Indigenous–colonial history and mythologizes its present-day caretaker. MacKay-Lyons, for his part, prefers wholesome characterizations: He often refers to himself as the “village architect”; he signs the inside cover of my copy of Gaudet’s book with “welcome to Mr. Rogers’ neighbourhood.”

MacKay-Lyons created the Skyroom, a restored ruin dating back to the 1500s and a sunken space for star-gazing at Shobac. Photo by Matthew MacKay-Lyons.

As we toured the campus in the whipping wind one afternoon, the sheep baaing in the background and the highland cattle grazing on the drumlin, the participants of a yoga retreat had taken over the 1830s schoolhouse and a set of four identical cottages. Next to the schoolhouse stands Enough House, an experiment in building as compactly and affordably as possible without eschewing beauty and comfort that won an AZ Award in 2016. This prototype, on its own, represents for MacKay-Lyons the utopian dimension as much as anything else he’s done. Another structure — an elongated “tin can” that serves as a satellite office for the firm — also communicates a sense of modesty in materials and form. Its wedge-like silhouette, which has just been further extended, is a celebrated form of his that is most evocative in a similarly shaped creation — the Hill House — that emerges like a rectilinear landform atop the drumlin.

The most recently completed abodes occupy a plot called the The Point, where they have been placed at an angle cut to the road. The Smith House, for a family that enjoys vacationing on the Atlantic coast, is perhaps the most compelling example of how a house can embody placemaking: It consists of three Corten-clad pavilions that are supported on a stone plinth constructed of local granite, a favoured material. A deck between them serves as an open living room and the buildings’ low eaves frame the landscape. Everything is a sensory experience. “Dwelling in the landscape, dwelling in the cosmos,” MacKay-Lyons intones, paraphrasing Pallasmaa. “These are research projects that allow us to study the landscape, to study the cosmos.”

A postcard come to life, Lunenburg is the site of MLSA’s B2 Lofts, whose gable and gambrel roofs fit in with the local character. Photo by Matthew MacKay-Lyons.

Lunenburg is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the most authentic intact representation of a British colonial settlement in North America. A postcard come to life, it is populated by brightly painted buildings, and MLSA’s two B2 Loft buildings, one of which houses its Lunenburg office at ground level, riff on this traditional language with their respective gable and gambrel rooflines. The project is named after the course that MacKay-Lyons taught for 37 years at Dalhousie on creating infill housing in the town. “We used Lunenburg as the vehicle to teach manners to architecture students. If you’re building in a historic context, you’ve got to develop some good-neighbour manners.”

Even in Lunenburg, or especially here, housing is at a premium. So the town has hired MLSA to propose a plan for developing Blockhouse Hill, a beloved public space, with new buildings, including affordable units. Lunenburg locals have raised concerns about how the development will do away with much-needed green space and whether it will adhere to the character of the town — both concerns around which MLSA has convened community engagement sessions. “We walked into the propeller of an airplane” when taking on the project, MacKay-Lyons concedes. “It’s contentious.” MLSA will provide four or five urban development options, integrating feedback from these gatherings, as well as learnings from best practices exemplified around the world. “Out of that will come a process where the town will decide what to do.”

At this point in his career, MacKay-Lyons is taking on projects under greater scrutiny, like Queen’s Marque, Lunenburg and other sensitive commissions, and also having fun — he jokingly predicts he’ll “die in the saddle.” He runs his firm, with partner Talbot Sweetapple, as an apprenticeship; students, like Sweetapple himself, often become partners and clients often become friends. In a business that he’s based largely on relationships, he’s been working with some patrons for so long that he’s now designing their headstones. But, at 69 years old, he himself is not going anywhere: He wants to retain artistic control, and he needs to do the parti drawing that kicks off a project’s conception.

A village of elegant cedar-clad cottages makes up MLSA’s Horizon Neighbourhood on Powder Mountain in Utah. Photo by Doublespace.

In fact, MacKay-Lyons is currently working on what he hopes will be his best project yet: El Aleph, just a few kilometres away in Port L’Hebert. “There’s three saltwater promontories and we’re building a constellation of buildings that speak across the kilometre of water to one another.” The residence is for a New York client, and the site, he explains, is a spiritual one for Indigenous people. The guest house, a lead–copper cube on stilts over the ocean, has just been completed. It represents the courtyard that has been plucked from the centre of the main house, a kilometre away, which will be shaped like a Scottish broch, an ancient fortress-like roundhouse. “So it’s very highly conceptual, right? It’s not like most of what you see in magazines, and it’s not fashion. It’s about an idea that the client got excited about.”

The singular house on the field, the promontory or the mountain, and the possibilities for its connection to both the firmament and the terra firma, still holds meaning for MacKay-Lyons, and always will — even as he and his practice embark on affordable housing, including units in Lunenburg and an entire village around a former racetrack in Cape Breton. These, too, are predicated on making those symbolic relationships; he’s excited about the Cape Breton project’s potential to feel like Rome’s Piazza Navona and that “regular people will have an amazing address on an amazing ellipse made of modest little houses.”

Even when he’s working with his more affluent clients, MacKay-Lyons has never been what he refers to as a “$1,000-a-foot architect.” And despite it being perhaps the most expensive of his “cheaply made” houses, he sees El Aleph in Port L’Hebert as akin to the satellite office in Shobac — the corrugated-metal one-room-deep dwelling that is being expanded with a studio. They are not objects — but participants in the landscape. “We’re raised on bread and water,” he says, “and we bring that attitude of restraint into everything we do.”

The post Mister MacKay-Lyons’ Neighbourhood appeared first on Azure Magazine.

As the pandemic ground offices and commutes to a halt, the urban housing crisis accelerated, reflected by surging rents and financial insecurity. It raised a provocative idea: Could all those empty and underused commercial spaces be transformed into housing? While a modest yet growing number of office towers are now being adapted into residences, the excitement was quickly tempered by a messier reality. For starters, the deep, boxy floor plates of most commercial buildings don’t lend themselves to easy residential conversions, where direct access to natural light is paramount. Moreover, the cost and complexity of new plumbing stacks and mechanical equipment — not to mention the regulatory complexity — means that such adaptive reuse is far from a silver bullet. At Montreal’s Place Ville Marie, however, designers Sid Lee Architecture have quietly ushered in another kind of transformation.

The redevelopment Place Ville Marie seen from the south, looking over Esplanade PVM and the 47-storey office tower. PHOTO: David Boyer.

Led by architects Jean Pelland and Martin Leblanc, the local firm has gradually re-shaped Place Ville Marie’s public realm — as well as the retail and hospitality program — with an inviting new presence that attempts to knit the office complex into the city’s pedestrian-oriented urban fabric. Since 2016, Sid Lee Architecture’s thoughtful reinvention of the mid-century complex has charted a new path for high-rise downtown office space, inviting new creative industries and hospitality destinations into what was previously a staid, white-collar setting.

It was also an International Style icon. Completed in 1962, the commercial hub combines extensive subterranean retail with an elevated public plaza topped by a 47-storey office tower alongside four smaller buildings. The landmark project was among the first built works by architect and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners co-founder Henry Cobb, who designed the complex with I.M. Pei. At the time of its construction, Place Ville Marie stood at the vanguard of Montreal’s nascent commercial core, staking a strategic position between the city’s central train station — as well as two metro lines — and the McGill University campus. By placing retail below grade, it also helped spur the development of Montreal’s underground city.

Built as the global headquarters for the Royal Bank of Canada, Place Ville Marie also held the title of the tallest building in the Commonwealth. Over 60 years later, the elegantly streamlined cruciform tower remains both a local landmark and a canonic North American skyscraper. Yet, the complex emerged from an urban economy — and a moment of civic optimism — that would soon fracture.

An archival view of Esplanade PVM. PHOTO: City of Montreal archives.

In the years after Place Ville Marie opened and Expo 67 brought the metropolis to the eyes of the world, Montreal gradually lost its status as Canada’s most populous city and economic engine. In the early 1960s, Toronto surpassed the Quebec metropolis as Canada’s largest city, with the shift of population reflected in the flows of capital. Mounting political tensions between Quebec’s English- and French-speaking communities resulted in the 1977 passage of the controversial Bill 101 — a language law that established French as Quebec’s official language and complicated the use of English in commerce and civic life. And when Quebecers voted whether to legally secede from Canada three years later, banks and financial institutions like Sun Life and The Bank of Montreal had already moved their headquarters to Toronto or elsewhere. By 1986, the city’s population declined by over 200,000 people from its 1960s peak.

For its part, the Royal Bank of Canada relocated its corporate headquarters and key functions to Toronto’s new Royal Bank Plaza in 1976, though the head office formally remains at Place Ville Marie. And even though the property’s owners Ivanhoé Cambridge consistently invested in maintenance and renovation, Montreal’s downtown core as a whole never quite supported the kind of economy — or, at least, financial sector — for which its soaring mid-century office towers were built. Yet, it’s now becoming home to a more eclectic, creative milieu.

The renovated Fairmont Queen Elizabeth sits at the foot of Place Ville Marie. The angular glass of Sid Lee Architecture’s Espace C2 addition is visible on the building’s roof. PHOTO: David Boyer.

For Pelland and Leblanc, the Place Ville Marie transformation started indirectly; via the renovation of the adjacent Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth hotel. Although situated immediately south of the office complex itself, the hotel (also an Ivanhoé Cambridge property) forms part of a continuous public realm. And like its neighbour, it’s also linked directly to Montreal’s underground city and the Bonaventure transit hub. Re-opened to the public after a year-long closure in 2017, the International Style hotel — built in 1958 — now meets the street with a more welcoming and assertive urban presence. Framing the lobby, a restaurant, café and cocktail bar animate the perimeter of the building with new transparency, with additional street-level entrances subtly introduced to invite greater porosity to the sidewalk. As Pelland puts it, “the hotel literally opens onto the city. One of the principal goals of the renovations was to create stronger connections with the street, and make the hotel more a part of Montreal.”

At the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, new hospitality spaces have a much more open relationship with the city and sidewalk. PHOTO: Stéphane Brugger.

Designed by Sid Lee Architecture and executed in collaboration with Architecture 49, the project also introduces an elegant new rooftop event venue (a sleek glass volume dubbed Espace C2) as well as updated meeting rooms and business spaces. For the storied hotel — which famously hosted one of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 “Bed-Ins for Peace” — the introduction of a varied but coherent design sensibility breathes vital new energy into a venue that had drifted towards a bland corporate aesthetic. The hotel feels reinvented, though the project entailed neither adaptive reuse nor significant structural alterations: Programatically speaking, it was a relatively straightforward renovation.

Sid Lee Architecture added “Espace C2” event venue to the Queen Elizabeth’s roof, expanding the range of programming hosted at the hotel. PHOTO: Adrien Williams.

A similarly light yet transformational touch has shaped Place Ville Marie. At the heart of the office complex, the 14,000-square-metre Esplanade PVM plaza stacks a marquee public space on top of a bustling subterranean network of retail and hospitality spaces. Situated at the foot of McGill College Avenue, the block-long public square is slightly elevated — both to negotiate the site’s varied grade and to accommodate the nexus of Montreal’s vast underground city below.

In 2014, the redevelopment began with a study of the site — as well as consultation with Henry Cobb himself. Working with local firm Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux (who collaborated on the project’s execution and build-out), Sid Lee Architecture sought to re-integrate the elevated square into its urban surroundings. Drawing on the modernist principles of free pedestrian flow, a repeating grid, and rigorous material unity, the designers reworked a previous 1980s renovation, which had transformed the urban platform into a park via a half-realized “garden city” motif. And though vibrant pockets of greenery remain, the plaza’s urbanity has been restored. Most importantly, pedestrians are welcomed in.

Looking north at Esplanade PVM. In the foreground, new stairs create a far larger ingress onto the square. PHOTO: David Boyer.

While Esplanade PVM itself always maintained hints of its original modernist elegance, its connection to the city was perpetually lacking. From the south, the 1980s renovation saw the elevated plaza framed by greenery and plantings beds, and accessible only via a small staircase that channelled pedestrians through a narrow walkway across the square and into the underground city below. And at the north end? A sprawling parking garage entry stood at the foot of McGill College Avenue, dominating one of the city’s most iconic vistas and abruptly cutting the flow of a bustling street. It was a painful concession to the automobile, one that relegated pedestrian movement to the stairs and doorways flanking either side of a four-lane garage entrance.

The central staircase was originally a parking garage entrance. PHOTO: David Boyer.

The connections have been reimagined. A broad yet gentle stair now opens up the plaza’s south end, inviting pedestrians into the square, which features a pleasant balance of open space, ample public seating, and shaded greenery. On the north side, a more emphatic transformation has taken place. The garage entrance has been replaced by an eye-catching central stair, punctuated by a ribbon ramp reminiscent of Arthur Erickson and Cornelia Oberlander’s iconic — though often criticized — accessible ramp at Robson Square in Vancouver.

It’s a new addition, but the design language is of a piece with its mid-century surroundings, which makes it feel like it’s always been there. At once respectful and subtly radical, the plaza’s redevelopment evinces a loving negotiation with the graces and shortcomings of modernism. And the compromises come at the expense of the right thing; the automobile. “Driving is definitely the least convenient way to get here now,” says Pelland. Although motorists have been relegated to a smaller back-of-house garage entrance, the redevelopment makes Esplanade PVM a place to be as much as a place to pass through.

Inside the striking glass pavilion, a new food hall and beer garden welcome in pedestrians from the plaza. PHOTO: David Boyer.

Shortly before his death in 2020, Henry Cobb himself expressed support for the work-in-progress, which restored the spirit of the mid-century design. “The Esplanade revitalization has been thoughtfully conceived and brilliantly imagined. This work will greatly enhance Place Ville Marie’s contribution to the civic life of Montreal, fulfilling the promise of our original vision,” said the architect.

The Ring at night. PHOTO: JF Savaria

Of course, the delicate rhythm of Pelland and Leblanc’s grace notes never risked upstaging Claude Cormier. Above the plaza’s new northern entryway, a striking circular art installation — dubbed the Ring — is one of the late landscape architect’s final gifts to his hometown. Thirty metres in diameter, the steel hoop is suspended between two of Place Ville Marie’s smaller office buildings, framing the views of Mount Royal looking north — and the complex itself looking south. It creates a visual and symbolic link to the broader city, suggesting that its civic heart resides on either side of the circle.

It takes more than a revitalized public realm to bring life back to the commercial core. At the very least, you need to throw in a good meal. Fortunately for Ivanhoé Cambridge, Esplanade PVM was built atop an underground mall. Below the plaza, a retail arcade complements the grid of subterranean passageways, with a food court situated directly under the square. Still, the dark, aging space was far from a destination, serving only the functional daily needs of commuters and passerby without a sense of place — or enjoyment. Here, too, Sid Lee Architecture and Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux teamed up with A5 Hospitality to overhaul the 3,250-square-metre space — and re-introduce it to the city.

Le Cathcart Restaurants et Biergarten at Place Ville Marie. PHOTO: TARMAC – Damien Ligiardi.

For the designers, the food hall revamp followed the same principles as the space above. Served by the plaza’s streamlined and accessible new entry points, the culinary hub — dubbed Le Cathcart Restaurants et Biergarten at Place Ville Marie — replicates the variety and cadence of a city street. Featuring 15 kiosks and bars as well as three full-service restaurants, the food hall (operated by A5) is kitted out with an eclectic mix of fixtures, finishes and textures.

The food hall and beer garden feature’s Sid Lee Architecture’s trademark melange of textures and finishes. PHOTO: Patricia Brochu.

As at the Queen Elizabeth hotel, the diversity of design elements makes for a bold statement — and risks a potential jumble. To the designers’ credit, the gestures are driven by a coherent philosophy and connected by a central motif, allowing the space to maintain a sense of unity. The introduction of a striking glass skylight — and the ample indoor greenery it supports — anchors the central dining room and bar. One of the largest glass structures of its kind on the continent, the remarkably transparent pavilion (supported by 18 glass beams) punches through the concrete of Esplanade PVM, blurring the boundaries between indoor and outdoor space and fostering intuitive movement and pedestrian flow. On a wintry Montreal day, the sunken oasis almost redeems the warren of underground tunnels around it.

Like wooden joists in a house, 18 glass beams support the pavilion roof. PHOTO: TARMAC – Damien Ligiardi.

Like the nearby square and the hotel, the project is — on its face — more or less a makeover. Yet, the combination of an expressive but contextually attuned design language and a sensitivity to the rhythms of urban life elevates cosmetic renovation into placemaking. “When we work on interiors, we still try to think on an urban scale,” says Leblanc, describing a through line from Sid Lee Architecture’s work across landscape, architecture, and interior design. “So we take all of the same factors — like circulation, flow, and connection to the city and our surroundings — into account as we resolve the finer details.”

Alongside the marquee food hall and beer garden, an extensive public art program animates the adjacent underground spaces, extending all the way into the Queen Elizabeth hotel. Moreover, the Place Ville Marie complex itself also provides a temporary home for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) as it undergoes renovations. (The complex was previously also home to the museum during a brief spell in the 1960s).

The cruciform Place Ville Marie tower seen from the roof of the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth. PHOTO: Stéphane Brugger.

Then there’s the Place Ville Marie tower itself. On the three uppermost levels of the 47-storey skyscraper, Sid Lee Architecture and A5 have designed a pair of restaurant and bar venues that deftly integrate boardrooms and meeting spaces into a showpiece hospitality setting. On the 44th floor, the recently opened Rose Orange rooftop bar is a verdant al fresco venue, bringing a relaxed — and surprisingly casual — Mediterranean refinement to the top of a bank tower.

Rose Orange is a relaxed summer retreat on the tower’s 44th floor. PHOTO: Alex Lesage.

Upstairs, the 45th and 46th levels are home to Hiatus, a bar and restaurant that incorporates unique venues for meetings and workplace events. Situated alongside the restaurant tables, the boardrooms can be discretely separated with curtains and sound-proof glass panels, seamlessly creating a professional venue within a hospitality space. It’s a subtle design move, but one that meaningfully expands the possibilities of a bar and restaurant in a commercial setting, all while maintaining a distinct sense of place that’s rarely expressed in similar corporate settings.

Hiatus bar and restaurant. PHOTO: Alex Lesage

Throughout, wood panelling and repeating grid motifs pay subtle homage to the building’s International Style design, while assertive contemporary details — including marble and limestone finishes, bold floral motifs, greenery, and standout custom lighting by Montreal’s acclaimed Lambert et Fils — round out the two-floor Hiatus.

The bar at Hiatus, with an unparalleled view of Mount Royal. PHOTO: Alex Lesage

The panoramic drama of rooftop dining may draw the eye, but most radical part of Sid Lee Architecture’s transformation is back at the tower’s base. Fronting Esplanade PVM, a pair of concrete clad podium volumes — which previously served as a banking hall — have been reimagined as Sid Lee’s own offices. Completed in 2022, the 7,300-square-metre project transforms an erstwhile bank branch into a pair of delightfully unconventional workspaces.

Sid Lee’s “Biosquare” offices are housed within the windowless podium volumes of the 47-storey tower. PHOTO: David Boyer.

The imposing volumes are home to a pair of connected offices for Sid Lee Architecture as well as their sister company, the eponymous global creative agency. And this was no mere makeover. Within these concrete bunkers, rooftop skylights provide the sole source of natural light, making for a challenging conversion. Playfully dubbed the “Biosquare,” the design firm’s own office is a surprising, verdant oasis within a largely windowless — albeit decidedly graceful — mid-century concrete bunker.

Inside the “Biosquare.” PHOTO: Maxime Brouillet.

Pelland, Leblanc and co. made a virtue of an inherent shortcoming, organizing their new multi-level interiors around the available natural light, with its sociable central stairs (and plenty of plants) reaching up towards the sky. The design deals in light and lightness. In contrast, private meeting rooms and washrooms are finished in sumptuously dark finishes, playing up the drama and contrast. The crisp white finishes and biophilia convey a sense of energy and optimism, while the geometric grids — of stairs, structural supports and lighting fixtures — wink at the original mid-century design.

PHOTO: David Boyer.

From a distance, it’s not the type of place you’d imagine a boutique architecture firm (or, for that matter, a creative agency) to occupy. Even among the multi-national behemoths, these are industries that trade their reputations on the fickle markets of cultural capital and creative cachet, which is anathema to a building occupied by hedge fund managers and financial analysts. By the same token, it’s the perfect proof of concept: As legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs famously observed, “new ideas need old buildings.” In decades past, the axiom was frequently applied to abandoned warehouses turned artist lofts, or shuttered factories transformed into startup offices. Today, it means something very different.

In Montreal, the city’s unique economic turbulence presaged the pandemic-induced transformation now unfolding across the continent. In 2023, none of our downtowns really have the in-person economies they were built for. And if converting all those old office towers into homes remains a lofty — and even occasionally misguided — ambition, re-imagining these buildings to serve more diverse, vibrant, and creative industries and work cultures is a much more modest goal.

A luxuriously moody “Biosquare” meeting room. PHOTO: Maxime Brouillet.

It’ll take a lot more than good design. At Place Ville Marie, the complex was historically bolstered by its unique urban position. “One of the reasons why the place always maintained activity is because it’s well connected to transit, so everyone passes through,” says Pelland. Indeed, the adjacent metro lines and Bonaventure rail hub are have recently been ameliorated with the first phase of Montreal’s Réseau express métropolitain (REM), a landmark commuter rail project that knits together the greater urban area.

As mass transit continues to expand, the city has emerged as a North American leader in building new cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, all while supporting “missing middle” urban density. A short block from Esplanade PVM, for example, the busy Sainte-Catherine Street has been partially pedestrianized, inviting greater foot traffic and commercial activity into the urban core. Such investments in quality of place and urban equity are fundamental steps that every city ought to be taking — least of all because they predicate the viability of a place like Place Ville Marie. In this regard, Montreal is an enviable model for North American cities to follow. (Conversely, a recently announced provincial policy will see sharp tuition hikes for Quebec’s English-language universities, likely stifling their substantial cultural and economic presence).

For all that, Place Ville Marie remains a surprising home for a design firm like Sid Lee Architecture. And maybe that’s the point. “This is the last place anyone would expect us to be,” says Pelland. “That’s exactly why we’re here.”

The post Montreal’s Place Ville Marie and the Future of Downtown appeared first on Azure Magazine.

From a distance, the crisp white stripes of the Adidas logo immediately draw the eye against the clean and understated vertical lines of the building’s dark frontage. Yet, the simple, functional form reveals surprising complexity: The storefront’s sleek glazing is paired with a corrugated aluminum facade combining solid and perforated surfaces.

Subtly inspired by local vernacular architecture — similar aluminum is traditionally used for roofing across a wide variety of housing types — the combination of opaque and translucent surface treatments lends the storefront an inviting presence while maintaining a sense of aesthetic cohesion, and mitigating solar heat gain. In the evening, LED lights illuminate both the Adidas logo and the ridged aluminum surfaces, accentuating a sense of depth and tactility across the facade.

While the storefront is a sleek and assertive addition to the streetscape, the design also carefully integrated a small existing on-site building into the complex. Alongside the two-storey storefront, a 1970s concrete building — initially constructed as a single-family home before being converted into commercial use — has been adapted for the store’s back-of-house facilities. Oshinowo Studio’s carbon-conscious approach also saw a solar power system and sewage treatment plant — which allows waste water to be reused for irrigation — integrated on-site.

Alongside the retail space, the Adidas flagship incorporates a small outdoor basketball court, which allows the brand to host activations and events. Across the basketball court and throughout the interior, the space also introduces graphics and murals by contemporary Nigerian artists Chinelo Ezewudo, Osa Okunkpolor, Dennis Osadebe, and Ayoola Gbolahan. (Meanwhile, the landscaping plan also preserved the site’s 25-year-old royal palm trees, which soar above the two-storey frontage.)

According to Oshinowo Studio founder Tosin Oshinowo, the Adidas flagship combines an international brand with a celebration of distinctly local culture. “We have relished the opportunity to create a scheme that combines our love of Lagos and of Nigerian contemporary culture, with our global perspective and approach,” says Oshinowo. “Our design is inspired by the city ’s resilient, adaptable and go-getter resolve, building a place of convergence for sports and culture.”

The post Oshinowo Studio Unveils a Lagos Flagship for Adidas appeared first on Azure Magazine.

Taken on its own – and apart from its relationship with the High Line – the Spiral is impressive. Located at West 34th Street between Hudson Boulevard and 10th Avenue, it presents a fresh approach to commercial high-rises. “Every floor of the tower opens up to the outdoors, creating hanging gardens and cascading atria that connect the open floor plants from the ground floor to the summit into a single uninterrupted workspace.”

Select floors offer a double-height amenity space and the “option to connect adjacent floors via a grand staircase.” On the 66th floor, the building hosts the ZO Clubhouse, with a private lounge and open-air terrace where tenants can gather and recharge. (These tenants include Pfizer, Debevoise & Plimpton, HSBC and Turner Construction, which built the Spiral for developer Tishman Speyer.)

With about 1,200 square metres of outdoor space, the Spiral sets a precedent in Manhattan. Each level features specific plant species: those native to the American prairie, and therefore resistant to high winds and droughts, on the ground; a second layer of shrubs and taller bushes are added to the upper levels; and single- and multi-stem trees that flower as early as February at the top of the building.

Photo by Tommy Agriodimas

The building tapers as it rises, following the site’s zoning envelope, its stepped architecture visually linking it to icons like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. The interiors enjoy generous ceiling heights and diffused sunlight thanks to the facade’s specially coated exterior glass. The lobby incorporates seven different metals to honour the area’s industrial history, and floor panels measure to the exact dimensions of the precast concrete planks the span the High Line.

The tower also features a water management system that collects rainwater and redistributes it for nourishing the tiered landscapes. This new icon of the New York City skyline brings a new twist to commercial high rises in form and function and it continue’s BIG’s exploration of sustainable hedonism.

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Completed in 2019, the Livesport office’s first phase introduced a colourful athletic track.

Known for creative, narrative-driven design and placemaking, the Prague-based architects have translated Livesport’s vibrant sporting spirit into a one-of-a-kind office. Completed in 2019, the first phase of Studio Reaktor’s design introduced the contours and lanes of a multi-coloured athletic track into a 680-square-metre workplace, making for an unmistakable office setting. Four years later, a new floor adds 980 square metres of additional space for the growing company — as well as a refined new aesthetic.

In the 2023 addition, a more muted and luxurious ambiance defines the new wing.

In lieu of the bold chromatic symphony that defined the 2019 design, the new spaces are more understated and luxurious. Framed by jet black ceilings and sumptuously textured grey carpeting, the space is defined by a carefully balanced palette of warm wood, greenery, exposed concrete, and elegantly mottled accents of gold and pink. Throughout, the floor’s subtler athletic track motif waves the space together, with an oval form framing the welcoming communal kitchen island that sits at the heart of the office.

While the notion of an athletic track carries over from the older floors, Studio Reaktor opted to evoke a wider array of sports, reflecting Livesport’s impressive gamut of scores, statistics and news. The simple interplay of curved and straight white lines alternately evokes a tennis court, basketball’s free throw circle, or the technical area at the side of a soccer pitch.

Meawhile, a more sinuous light fixture along the ceilings and walls evokes something fundamental to any sport; movement itself. Punctuated by the “X” shapes drawn by coaches on a tactics board, the kinetic lighting makes for an expressive statement piece within an understated space. Yet, look carefully, and further sporting metaphors abound. At Livesport, even the lowly storage locker’s perforated metal walls transform to frame a meeting room and a coffee counter. After all, tracking the scores can be a sport in itself.

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