MEMORY AND CITY
The evolution of St-Laurent Boulevard and the history of the Jewish community are intrinsically intertwined, and even today the physical and emotional traces of this shared past can be felt on the site selected for the new Montreal Holocaust Museum. Our project for the museum refers to this history through an architecture that speaks of continuity while acknowledging the rupture that the Holocaust constitutes. The two existing buildings on the site are preserved and restored, their commercial windows lending themselves well to the needs of the boutique and services for research and documentation. The characteristic urban morphology of the Plateau Mont-Royal, composed of repetitive rectangular lots, informs the geometric configuration by which the museum plan is organized. The site is requalified by a new three-storey stone façade, a template that recalls the lofts that once housed Montreal's then nascent garment industry. It also evokes some of the institutions that were being built at the time, such as the Monument-National, an important symbol of the cultural history of the Jewish and Francophone communities. This new facade, made of ashlar, displays on the street a watermark of texts and engraved patterns, reminders of places, personalities or significant events: a palimpsest in short, called to be completed as time goes by and in echo to the mission of the museum. On St-Laurent, the façade of the Museum is both an urban figure and a memorial engraved in stone. It forms the threshold of a museum that could be read as a ruin invaded by vegetation and a structure in perpetual re-construction. An urban fragment that symbolizes the immeasurable loss of the Holocaust as much as the irrepressible resilience of the human spirit; the rebirth that followed 1945 as much as the lessons we have yet to learn.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
The jury expressed serious reservations about the architectural design, particularly the façade on the St. Lawrence, which does not contribute to the animation of the street and gives the museum an outdated image. However, the jury appreciates the great symbolic power of the architectural references to the Holocaust, such as the six trees in the garden, the commemorative stones and the twenty chimneys on the roof, and underlines the quality of the project text.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
8 scanned / 8 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Perspective
- Perspective
- Perspective
- Section
- Axonometric Drawing
- Reference Image
- Reference Image
