The des Carrières and Dickson incinerators represent a major investment in public infrastructure, akin to the city's iconic megastructures of Expo '67 and the Olympics, raising the question:
If you could redistribute this much built volume already within the public's hands, what programs would you allocate it to?
A tale of two sites
The incinerators, used in the 20th century to process the city's waste, today lack meaningful connection to their spatial and historical context. Yet they remain a testimony to Montreal's public industrial architecture and are of interest to their respective quartiers and the city as landmarks. Both sites are rooted in histories of resource extraction, the exchange of goods, and the deindustrialization of Montreal. Reading them together results in a spatiotemporal tale of gathering, processing, disposal, and re-use. The primary motif and the urban opportunity shared by both sites is the partnership of the service yard (cour) and their massive interior volumes. This proposal positions these volumes as integral to the experience of the industrial heritage of the incinerators, reimagining them as indoor public squares and atria that allow for urban continuity with the cours. The incinerators contain two primary vertical interior spaces: the former fosse à déchets, or garbage pit, and salle des fours, or oven room. In the former fosses à déchets, the movement of waste is replaced by the energetic life of the public realm, containing the buildings' primary circulation and connecting their halves. The former salles des fours become indoor public squares well-suited to cultural performances, informal markets, and exhibition areas, due to their height and lack of sunlight. Additions are distinguished from the historic building through the use of colour, exaggerated openings, and metal panels contrasting the rough interiors.
The cultural factory: A social raison d'être
Our approach to heritage conservation prioritizes reconciling historic architectural richness with present social needs. The two sites and the sequence of connected public spaces knit together the extant architectural heritage of these sites with the city's living society; the public programming housed within establishes a social raison d'être. Rather than waste management, the proposed programming privileges not only economic vitality and exchange of resources between people, but the sharing of ideas, lives, culture, craft, and collective memories. Our proposal asserts Montrealers' right to the city with intensive public access to these sites; our investigation is a search for congruence between public programming and the spatial characteristics that imbue the buildings with architectural and urban heritage value. Conceptually, this calls for a programmatic fit that is tailor-made to the building typology, given their shared characteristics. There are two elements to the proposal, operating at the scale of the sites and the city: the appropriation of each building and its cour, and the connection of each site through pedestrian and cycling routes. Both utilitarian and sublime, the cavernous interior volumes of the incinerators host a spectrum of proposed uses. Each contains an exhibition and café area connected to their atria, for Montrealers to learn about the history of the architecture and its former purpose as a waste facility. At des Carrières, the proposed use ties the incinerator to its existing neighbour, the Ecocentre, via a burgeoning culture of repair and reuse. Bicycle repair workshops, stonemasons' and carpenters' ateliers, artists' workshops, and digital fabrication labs make up single storey and mezzanine areas. Performance and practice areas for theatre and dance animate its larger volumes. This investment in cultural infrastructure follows recent public amenity investments in the area, such as the Rosemont library. It stands in contrast to private proposals such as the infamous pitch to reuse nearby industrial heritage as a luxury hotel. The cour cements the historical connection to quarrying in Montreal by tying it to the public cycling route Réseau-Vert. It provides a loading area via the ramp for the ateliers and moving theatrical set pieces. Consultation of the MHM plan for Dickson outlines the community's interest in preserving the natural wooded areas adjacent to the site to improve access to greenspace and alleviate health challenges caused by heat islands. Leveraging its existing connections to forested sites, soon to be the Parc-Nature MHM, this site focuses on outdoor recreation and activities tied to the Parc-Nature: woodworking, gardening, urban agriculture, and sharing food. The cour becomes a young forest, bringing resource growth and harvesting closer to processing and craft. The ramp moves materials up to the ateliers.
Stitching together Montreal's industrial and architectural heritage
While the des Carrières site is surrounded by popular cycling and pedestrian routes, Dickson lacks connection. Enlivening the incinerators through public programming will contribute to the connectivity of the city, creating a thoroughfare that connects Montrealers, who will traverse the city along the Réseau-Vert rail path, through the layers of industrial development. Key connections in this network are the Stade and Parc Olympique, allowing cyclists and pedestrians to experience a sequence of megastructures that are now transformed into recreational facilities, and positioning the incinerators as cultural factories claiming their titles as landmarks in the Montreal of today and the past.
(From competitor's text)
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- Presentation Panel
- Cross-sectional perspective
- Cross-sectional perspective
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