Sid Lee Transforms Montreal’s Place Ville Marie – Azure Magazine
Planted in the coronary heart of downtown Montreal, Place Ville Marie is a mid-century icon. Intended by I.M. Pei and completed in 1962, the professional hub is an emblem of the Worldwide Fashion. Along with a 47-storey economic tower, an elevated general public plaza is built atop underground retail that sorts part of the metropolis’s expansive underground town. As element of an ongoing re-creation of the complex, design and style firm and creative agency Sid Lee have transformed a former lender corridor into their individual dynamic new workspace.
Located below Place Ville Marie’s pedestrian plaza, the 7,300-square-metre business office is a semi-subterranean space that spans a improve in elevation between two downtown streets. With an expansive skylight as the only supply of normal illumination, the architects took on the challenge of developing a mild-filled, present-day business although honouring the plaza’s modernist bones.
To make the most of an unconventional place, the designers opted for a straightforward yet dynamic format that attracts organic light from higher than deep into the multi-degree workspace. Nicknamed the “Biosquare,” a white grid-like composition of staircases —and communal seating — is woven by way of the heart of the place. Accented by lush greenery, the gentle finishes and open layout make an airy, energetic ambiance in what may well otherwise be an enclosed, underground area.
Sid Lee revitalized the inside although preserving significantly of the current infrastructure. For illustration, peeling back again the carpet discovered travertine flooring — which was restored to honour the unique inside. In the meantime, the skylights ended up similarly stripped and enlarged in purchase to brighten the house with as substantially purely natural lights as possible.
Re-interpreted as social areas, the stairs that weave by the area blur the difference from a single level to the following, fostering a unified ambiance within. The unconventional structure also presents occupants overall flexibility to obtain new and ingenious strategies to use their surroundings. With no cubicles or assigned places of work, Sid Lee workers can pick out their have functioning ecosystem — irrespective of whether that is a common desk, a more substantial shared desk, a sofa or a café table.
To distinction with the bright white working stations, meeting rooms choose on a stark stark black ambiance, create a serene and immersive ecosystem separate from the communal areas. In lieu of compensating for the lack of windows in assembly rooms and non-public spaces — including the bogs — the designers opted to emphasize the darkness with a luxe, moody ambiance.
As Sid Lee co-founder Philippe Meunier puts it, the job is an exercise in bringing the firm’s “entrepreneurial spirit to downtown Montreal and producing an accessible collaborative hub for the city’s innovative and business enterprise communities.”
The new workspace also kinds element of a much larger transformation of Place Ville Marie and its environment – all led by Sid Lee. Together with a complete renovation of the neighbouring Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Resort, the designers have also sensitively re-formed the plaza that surrounds the office, introducing new plant life and greenery when transforming a parking garage entrance into a community staircase and promenade. As a final result of the drastic transformation, the community square has found a spike in pedestrian exercise, introducing a welcoming new vitality to what continues to be a handsome modernist showpiece.