Place des festivals is celebrating its 10th anniversary!
First stage of the Theater district development, Place des festivals celebrates its 10th anniversary. Daoust Lestage first imagined the public space, then developed the architecture of the Vitrine habitées and designed the street furniture. Place des Festivals have won eight architectural and urban design awards since 2009, including the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
The space used to feature a very wide Rue Jeanne-Mance and a slope at the top of which was a parking lot. The very large site (12,000 m2) used to degrade the urban dynamic of the Place des Arts grouping and put the sector in a state of advanced deconstruction.
The first changes refer to the use of recognized urban archetypes: definition of the perimeter of Place des Festivals by smaller streets with wider sidewalks to optimize pedestrian traffic in the Quartier. A large volume of earth was excavated to produce a gentle slope that allows the space as a whole to be linked, visually and mentally, from east to west, from built environment to built environment, and to produce a unified, coherent public space.
Referring to the engineering of the site and, more specifically the new vocation of the Quartier, the public square has been articulated with two large areas, one paved, the other grassy, emulating stage right and stage left in indoor theatres. Water curtains are placed at the heart of the paved surface, coloured red and white at night in the colours of the light signature of the Quartier des spectacles. Facing the blank, introverted, and inanimate façade of the Musée d’art contemporain on the east interface, the plan for the Place integrates two pieces of urban architecture offering windows on Place des Festivals called the Vitrines habitées.
