McGill College Avenue
McGill College Avenue
Mandaworks AB
LOCATION
Canada
CATEGORY
Landscape+Planning › Master Plan
McGill College Avenue marks Montreal’s hyper-center, intersecting with downtown’s famous commercial artery Sainte-Catherine Street.Stretching along the promenade connecting the Mount Royal to the Saint-Laurent River, the Avenue connects McGill University Campus to the North and Place Ville Marie to the South, acting as a physical and symbolic link between the city’s institutional and commercial cores.
It runs between large pebbles, a collection of pieces of furniture that are both enigmatic and precious - sometimes seating, sometimes brazier, sometimes fountain - which offers moments of intimacy and places for physical and visual interaction with the new avenue.
The esplanade is a canvas for new urban life, bordered with terraces, public art, performance spaces, and mature trees framing views of the Mount Royal like a large living painting which visitors can rediscover season after season.
The proposal put forward by CIVILITI + MANDAWORKS is first and foremost an elongated piece of the Mount Royal, the ancestral forest, stretching along a generous esplanade traced on the historical axis forgotten in the ever-denser city grid of Downtown. It meanders through public life,carving clearings, passages,and four season lounges at the edges of the woodland
