City Fibres
City Fibres brings to life the spatial, conceptual, and performative possibilities of three-dimensional weaving. It is a proposal to translate material into space, movement into form, and reuse into ecological design.
This urban development project aims to reuse cables from the Montreal Olympic Stadium to build a woven outdoor structure where art, movement, architecture, design, and urban life converge in a single place.
Weaving has always brought generations together. It is a shared and collaborative activity traditionally performed by women. Throughout the world and across history, it has been a means of artistic expression. In this project, repurposing the stadium's roof cables integrates weaving into the very design of the public space.
The installation of the woven structure utilizes all of the Olympic Stadium's cables and optimizes the 14 kilometers of steel wire using structural knots to connect the 6.0-meter segments together, thereby providing shade over an area of 1,500 m². A varied density of cables filters the light and forms a series of cool, shaded areas in the heart of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (HoMa). This arrangement of semi-transparent screens and canopies is set against a backdrop of short grass, transforming a rarely used parking lot into a 10,000 m² green corridor near the neighborhood's markets and shops. This development further contributes to improving residents' quality of life and reducing large paved areas.
This weaving introduces a new materiality in architecture and allows Montrealers to reclaim the stadium in the form of a flexible urban park for informal leisure, recreation, and gathering. Spanning between Hochelaga Street and de Rouen Street, the cables intertwine along Bennett Avenue and unravel toward the south, thereby strengthening the connection between residents and the river.
The structural integrity of the tensioned systems in the stadium's roof inspires the concept of weaving. The framework of the structure utilizes the diversity of cable diameters to serve its form and stability. This project celebrates the traces of the past and recalls the German Pavilion at Expo '67, designed by Rolf Gutbrod and Frei Otto, an iconic symbol of architectural innovation in Montreal.
The goal is to understand how to invite people to experience the public realm in a different way. This design explores a lightweight architecture that expresses the resulting plurality of construction methods. The process of three-dimensional weaving as an architectural design tool proposes the articulation of a filamentary network where each thread is a negotiation between interior and exterior, beauty and utility, private and public, art and design.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
