On the west end of downtown Montreal, the Shaughnessy Village neighbourhood is a distinctive specimen of mid-century built form. While the area is full of broad, imposing concrete slab towers characteristic of the modernist era across North America, the community is distinguished by its unusually compact and street-friendly urban fabric. These are towers in the park — just without the park. Across the dense neighbourhood, tall, blocky buildings meet city sidewalks with eclectic street-fronting retail in lieu of cul-de-sacs and porte-cochères.

At street level, it makes for a surprisingly welcoming and intimate experience, although much of the density came at the expense of the city’s older Victorian and Georgian architecture. And looking up, the eye largely meets a sea of grey. For local designers ACDF, an addition to the high-rise context entailed a negotiation of the benefits of the last century’s simple, efficient high-rise forms with a contemporary emphasis on heritage preservation and human-scaled design.

They’ve pulled it off. On Lincoln Street, the 19-storey LINK student housing apartment tower is an intriguing hybrid of slab tower and sensitive placemaking. The project transforms a compact urban lot — hemmed in by older towers — previously occupied by a row of heavily dilapidated Victorian row houses. Unfortunately, the state of the buildings made full in-situ preservation extremely challenging. For the designers, it posed a dillenma.

“Did preserving only the façades necessarily mean that the project would be part of a so-called facadism approach, then rather denounced by the community? Would complete demolition, justified by the dilapidated state of the buildings, be a more appropriate intellectual and professional posture?” asks Maxime-Alexis Frappier, ACDF’s president.

Ultimately, ACDF opted to preserve the building frontages, with the body of the tower stepped back behind the historic entries. “Montreal is designated a UNESCO Design City, with a strong focus on architecture that interacts with the public realm,” says Frappier. “Establishing that dialogue was a priority, as well as creating a connection between the contemporary tower and the architectural language of Victorian-era Shaughnessy Village.”

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Across the apartment levels, meanwhile, a facade of windows and inset loggias is given further depth by a playful building envelope. Combining three colour-blocked hues, the exterior treatment frames each (bedroom and living room) window and loggia with a distinctive cutout, evoking the gabled roofs and rounded entryways of Montreal’s 19th-century vernacular — including the buildings at the tower’s base. Meanwhile, the tower’s scale and window rhythm also evokes its mid-century neighbours, a nod to context subtly amplified by the precast’s facade’s mineral texture. The result is an unmistakably contemporary high rise that maintains a dialogue with the two eras that surround it.