Place des Montréalaises

In order to create a poetic and inclusive experience, the names of 21 women became the conceptual material and the framework for the development of the Place des Montréalaises. Through a process of distillation, names, fragments of abstraction of names and letters, an homage is paid to the history of Montreal women including the past, present and future.

The gestures fluidly and harmoniously merge architecture, landscape architecture and art creating a series of celebratory moments highlighting the contribution of women, whether through their impact on the development of the city through the Pioneers, or by calling attention to the memory of injustices done to women through the Duty of Remembrance for Marie-Josèphe-Angélique and the 14 victims of the Polytechnique feminicide.

The suspended architectural armature becomes a flowery garden meadow of 21 Indigenous plants that will flower sequentially with the changing seasons, each one representing a female Montrealer of great influence. The names of these famous women are also inscribed on the plane’s integrated staircase that invites sitting and socializing: an accessible, intimate, and evocative space. The inclined plane re-frames the fracture in the cityscape left by the 1972 construction of a sunken east-west expressway, effectively separating Old Montreal from its downtown counterpart.