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  1. Je vais déménager à Manhattan au mois d'Août. Je garde un pied-à-terre à Vancouver et reviens fréquemment à Montréal. Je viens de voir cette nouvelle toute fraiche. Je vais habiter tout juste à côté de Washington Square, et ce nouveau développement m'intéresse au plus haut point. J'esssaierai de vous en faire part régulièrement. Voici l'article du Wall Street Journal: First Look at NYU Tower Plan University Wants 38-Story Building on Village Site; Critics Fret Over Pei Design By CRAIG KARMIN New York University on Thursday expects to unveil its much-anticipated design plans for the proposed 38-story tower in Greenwich Village, one of the most ambitious projects in the school's controversial 25-year expansion plan. Before and after: The space between two towers designed by I.M. Pei, above, would be filled by a new tower, in rendering below, under NYU's plan. The tower, sight-unseen, is already facing backlash from community groups who say the building would interfere with the original three-tower design by famed architect I.M. Pei. Critics also say the new building would flood the neighborhood with more construction and cause other disruptions. The concrete fourth tower with floor-to-ceiling glass windows would be built on the Bleecker Street side of the site, known as University Village. It would house a moderate-priced hotel on the bottom 15 floors. The 240-room hotel would be intended for visiting professors and other NYU guests, but would also be available to the public. The top floors would be housing for school faculty. In addition, NYU would move the Jerome S. Coles Sports Center farther east toward Mercer Street to clear space for a broader walkway through the site that connects Bleecker and Houston streets. The sports complex would be torn down and rebuilt with a new design. Grimshaw Architects The plan also calls for replacing a grocery store that is currently in the northwest corner of the site with a playground. As a result, the site would gain 8,000 square feet of public space under the tower proposal, according to an NYU spokesman. NYU considers the new tower a crucial component of its ambitious expansion plans to add six million square feet to the campus by 2031—including proposed sites in Brooklyn, Governors Island and possibly the World Trade Center site—in an effort to increase its current student population of about 40,000 by 5,500. The tower is also one of the most contentious parts of the plan because the University Village site received landmark status in 2008 and is home to a Pablo Picasso statue. The three existing towers, including one dedicated to affordable public housing, were designed by Mr. Pei in the 1960s. The 30-story cast-concrete structures are considered a classic example of modernism. Grimshaw Architects, the New York firm that designed the proposed tower, says it wants the new structure to complement Mr. Pei's work. "It would be built with a sensitivity to the existing buildings," says Mark Husser, a Grimshaw partner. "It is meant to relate to the towers but also be contemporary." Grimshaw Architects NYU says the planned building, at center of rendering above, would relate to current towers. He said the new tower would use similar materials to the Pei structures and would be positioned at the site in a way not to cut off views from the existing buildings. Little of this news is likely to pacify local opposition. "A fourth tower would utterly change Pei's design," says Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. He says that Mr. Pei designed a number of plans about the same time that similarly featured three towers around open space, such as the Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia. Watch a video showing a rendering of New York University's proposed 38-story tower, one of the most ambitious projects in the university's vast 2031 expansion plan. The tower would be located near Bleecker Street in Manhattan. Video courtesy of Grimshaw Architects. Residents say they fear that the new tower would bring years of construction and reduce green spaces and trees. "We are oversaturated with NYU buildings," says Sylvia Rackow, who lives in the tower for public housing. "They have a lot of other options, like in the financial district, but they are just greedy." NYU will have to win permission from the city's Landmark Commission before it can proceed. This process begins on Monday when NYU makes a preliminary presentation to the local community board. Jason Andrew for the Wall Street Journal NYU is 'just greedy,' says Sylvia Rackow, seen in her apartment. Grimshaw. While the commission typically designates a particular district or building, University Village is unusual in that it granted landmark status to a site and the surrounding landscaping, making it harder to predict how the commission may respond. NYU also would need to get commercial zoning approval to build a hotel in an area designated as residential. And the university would have to get approval to purchase small strips of land on the site from the city. If the university is tripped up in getting required approvals, it has a backup plan to build a tower on the site currently occupied by a grocery store at Bleecker and LaGuardia, which would have a size similar to the proposed tower of 270,000 square feet. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704198004575311161334409470.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth
  2. http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/actualites-en-societe/395336/le-fosse-se-creuse-avec-les-marginaux <header style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Centres-villes de Montréal et de Québec - Le fossé se creuse avec les marginaux </header>16 décembre 2013 | Brian Myles | Actualités en société <figure class="photo_paysage" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.846em; line-height: 1.2em; padding: 2px 0px;">Photo : Jacques Nadeau - Le DevoirL’équipe de Michel Parazelli a noté huit attitudes envers les marginaux et les itinérants. Elles vont de l’expulsion pure et simple (au pire), jusqu’à la négociation des normes d’occupation de l’espace (au mieux).</figcaption></figure> La nouvelle « image de marque » des centres-villes comme destinations touristiques et milieux de vie accueillants laisse de moins en moins de place aux itinérants et aux marginaux. C’est l’un des principaux constats d’une recherche coordonnée par Michel Parazelli, professeur à l’École de travail social de l’UQAM. Le Devoir a obtenu en primeur les résultats de cette étude d’envergure. Pendant quatre ans, M. Parazelli et son équipe ont étudié les enjeux relatifs au partage de l’espace public à Montréal (quartier des spectacles) et à Québec (nouveau Saint-Roch). «Ce n’est pas tout d’un coup que les policiers sont devenus moins tolérants envers les itinérants. C’est parce qu’il y avait une demande. Le grand angle des politiques publiques, c’est la revitalisation des centres urbains à des fins touristiques. C’est nécessaire d’en faire des milieux accueillants, sécuritaires et de se classer dans le palmarès des destinations internationales, explique M. Parazelli en entrevue. L’espace public joue un rôle important parce que c’est comme une vitrine. […] Tu ne peux pas être plus “déviant” que ce qui est toléré dans ce nouvel environnement.» Le terme de la « cohabitation » est très à la mode, mais il est souvent vidé de son sens, constate-t-il. «Tout le monde parle de cette cohabitation, mais c’est une drôle de cohabitation, car seulement deux groupes en définissent les termes: les résidants et les commerçants», observe-t-il. Les chercheurs ont rencontré des politiciens, des fonctionnaires municipaux, des travailleurs communautaires, des itinérants et marginaux, des commerçants et des résidants pour obtenir leurs points de vue. Appropriation de l’espace public À partir d’entretiens semi-dirigés et d’une analyse des politiques publiques et du discours médiatique, l’équipe de M. Parazelli a noté huit attitudes envers les marginaux et les itinérants. Elles vont de l’expulsion pure et simple (au pire), jusqu’à la négociation des normes d’occupation de l’espace (au mieux). Les groupes les plus volubiles (citoyens et résidants) «trouvent qu’il y a trop d’itinérants et de marginaux. Ils se sentent victimes. Ils ont l’impression qu’on leur enlève leur place dans l’espace public». L’ironie de la situation n’échappe pas au professeur, qui étudie depuis de nombreuses années la marginalité dans l’espace public. Pour récupérer « leur » place, les citoyens et les commerçants font des pressions pour nettoyer les centres-villes. Ces pressions ont entraîné l’adoption de politiques visant à rendre les marginaux et itinérants invisibles, ou le moins visibles possible. Les stratégies les plus courantes sont : l’expulsion: il s’agit de « faire disparaître » les marginaux par la répression et l’imposition de conditions de remise en liberté leur interdisant de fréquenter le quadrilatère du centre-ville; la dispersion: elle vise à éloigner ou à disperser les marginaux et itinérants à la périphérie du centre-ville en déplaçant les ressources communautaires mises à leur disposition; la concentration: il s’agit d’isoler les marginaux pour « faire écran », en leur demandant de libérer les espaces publics et de s’éloigner vers des lieux moins fréquentés, comme le parc Viger; la dilution: c’est l’art d’atténuer la visibilité des marginaux et itinérants en animant les places publiques et en favorisant leur utilisation par d’autres types d’acteurs qui se conforment à la norme. Prise en compte À l’inverse, les itinérants et les marginaux refusent d’être vus comme des obstacles au développement économique et résidentiel. Ils veulent renverser l’image négative qui leur est associée : insécurité, incivilité, insalubrité, toxicomanie. Ils assument leur visibilité par des activités de défense de leurs droits, comme la Nuit des sans-abri, et ils se rassemblent autour de festivals d’expression de la rue. Les conflits d’appropriation de l’espace public ne se résoudront pas par magie si l’on met toujours en opposition la visibilité des marginaux et des sans-abri avec les activités commerciales et la qualité de vie des quartiers ciblés aux fins de l’étude, conclut Michel Parazelli. «C’est très émotif, ce débat, et les positions sont très campées.» Pour briser les barrières, le chercheur et son équipe suggèrent la tenue de forums de discussion avec tous les acteurs qui convoitent l’espace public. Tous, y compris les itinérants et les sans-abri. Selon lui, il faut passer d’un discours de la «prise en charge» des marginaux et itinérants à un discours de «prise en compte». «Il faut les inclure dans le débat. Ça, on ne l’a jamais essayé.»
  3. le 6 novembre 2007 Frank Zampino, président du comité exécutif et responsable des finances à la Ville de Montréal, et Sammy Forcillo, conseiller du district Sainte-Marie–Saint-Jacques et membre du comité exécutif, annoncent la vente du marché Saint-Jacques pour la somme de 2 300 000 $. L’administration municipale avait lancé un appel de propositions à la suite de la décision de relocaliser les services municipaux qui occupaient cet immeuble hébergeant un marché public depuis plus de 75 ans. «Cette transaction amène le nouveau propriétaire à conserver la vocation de marché public en louant la partie extérieure de l’immeuble à la Ville jusqu’en 2022. Cette condition est assortie de cinq options de renouvellement d’une durée de cinq ans chacune, de manière à respecter l’entente intervenue avec la Corporation de gestion des marchés publics de Montréal qui exploite déjà cet espace», a commenté Franck Zampino. «De plus, le propriétaire est tenu de réserver le rez-de-chaussée du bâtiment à des commerces d’alimentation, ce qui permettra de relancer le développement commercial et économique du secteur», a-t-il argumenté. Retombées positives? Pour sa part, Sammy Forcillo a souligné que «la conservation et le renforcement de la vocation de marché alimentaire et public bénéficiera aux résidents du quartier qui profiteront de services d’approvisionnement additionnels. Le marché Saint-Jacques a marqué l’histoire de notre quartier et il fera encore la fierté de ses usagers, j’en suis certain ». Il s’est réjoui que la transaction vise également le maintien du caractère architectural du bâtiment construit en 1931. «Cet édifice de style art déco représente une valeur patrimoniale importante tant pour les résidents du quartier que pour l’ensemble de la population montréalaise», a conclu Sammy Forcillo.
  4. Source: Société immobilière du Canada Location: Montréal Un nouvel appel public de déclaration d’intérêt a été publié à la section des appels d’offres, au sujet de la propriété de la SIC à Longueuil, au Québec. Vous pouvez consulter l’entente de partenariat pour un développement immobilier en cliquant ici. http://www.clc.ca/sites/default/files/Appel_public_de_declaration_dinteret-Longueuil_Quebec.pdf
  5. http://nymag.com/homedesign/urbanliving/2012/hudson-yards/ Atop the 1,300-foot office tower, soon to rise at 33rd Street and Tenth Avenue, by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. Photo: Rendering by Visualhouse From 0 to 12 Million Square Feet In a few weeks, construction begins on New York’s largest development ever. Hudson Yards is handsome, ambitious, and potentially full of life. Should we care that it’s also a giant slab of private property? An exclusive preview. By Justin Davidson Published Oct 7, 2012 ShareThis On a Friday afternoon in September, a conclave of architects and real-estate executives gathers in a hotel conference room to look over plans for Manhattan’s largest remaining chunk of emptiness. Hudson Yards, the railroad depot that stretches from Tenth Avenue to the Hudson River, and from 30th to 33rd Street, barely registers on the mental map of most New Yorkers. Look down from a neighboring window, and you see only a pit full of trains hazed with their diesel fumes. The planners’ view, though, takes in sugarplum dreams of the city’s shiny next wing: an $800 million concrete roof over the yards, and above it the country’s largest and densest real-estate development: 12 million square feet of *offices, shops, movie theaters, gyms, hotel rooms, museum galleries, and open space, and 5,000 apartments, all packed into 26 acres. In the first, $6 billion phase—scheduled for completion by late 2017—the tallest tower will top the Empire State Building, and even the shortest will have a penthouse on the 75th floor. The people in the conference room can visualize that future in high-resolution detail. On the screen, digital couples stroll among trees pruned to cubical perfection. A chain of glowing towers garlands the skyline, and tiny figures stroll onto a deck hanging nearly a quarter-mile in the air. Architects discuss access points, sidewalk widths, ceiling heights, flower beds, and the qualities of crushed-stone pathways. You could almost forget that none of this exists yet—until one architect points to a lozenge-shaped skyscraper and casually, with a twist of his wrist, remarks that he’s thinking of swiveling it 90 degrees. The Related Companies, the main developer of the site, has called this meeting so that the designers of the various buildings can finally talk to each other, instead of just to the client. I’m getting the first look at the details at the same time some of the participants are. Suddenly, after years of desultory negotiations and leisurely design, the project has acquired urgency: Ground-breaking on the first tower will take place in the coming weeks. There’s a high-octane crew in the room: William Pedersen, co-founder of the high-rise titans Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates; David Childs, partner at the juggernaut Skidmore Owings and Merrill; Elizabeth Diller, front woman for the cerebral boutique Diller Scofidio + Renfro; *David Rockwell, a virtuoso of showbiz and restaurant design; Howard Elkus, from the high-end shopping-center specialists Elkus Manfredi; and landscape architect Thomas Woltz, the only member of the group new to New York real-estate politics. Their task is to compose a neighborhood from scratch. The success of Hudson Yards depends on the question: Can a private developer manufacture a complete and authentic high-rise neighborhood in a desolate part of New York? “This isn’t just a project; it’s an extension of the city,” says Stephen Ross, Related’s founder and chairman. New York has always grown in nibbles and crumbs, and only occasionally in such great whale-gulps of real estate. In the richest, most layered sections of the city, each generation’s new buildings spring up among clumps of older ones, so that freshness and tradition coexist. A project of this magnitude, concocted around a conference table, could easily turn out to be a catastrophe. The centrally planned district has its success stories—most famously, Rockefeller Center. Coordinated frenzies of building also produced Park Avenue, Battery Park City, and the current incarnation of Times Square. But this enterprise is even more ambitious than any of those, and more potentially transformative than the ongoing saga of the World Trade Center. New York has no precedent for such a dense and complex neighborhood, covering such a vast range of uses, built in one go. That makes this Ross’s baby. Hundreds of architects, engineers, consultants, planners, and construction workers will contribute to the finished product. Oxford Properties Group has partnered with Related, and the city dictated much of the basic arrangement. But in the end, how tightly the new superblocks are woven into the city fabric, how organic their feel, and how bright their allure will depend on the judgment and taste of a billionaire whose aesthetic ambitions match the site’s expanse, and who slips almost unconsciously from we to I. “We went out and selected great architects and then created a whole five-acre plaza,” Ross says. “People will have never seen such a world-class landscaping project. I can’t tell you what that plaza will look like, but what I visualize is a modern-day Trevi Fountain. It’s going to be classical and unique.” The best clue to what he has in mind isn’t in Rome, but at Columbus Circle. Ross lives and works in the Time Warner Center, which Related built, and if you imagine the complex blown out to five times its size, you begin to get a sense of what’s coming at Hudson Yards: crowds flowing from home to boutique, hotel to subway, office to spa, concert to restaurant—and all that activity threaded around and through a curving plaza equipped with fountains and a very tall monument, as yet unchosen. The Time Warner Center brought profitable liveliness to Columbus Circle, the once moribund, now vibrant hinge between midtown and the Upper West Side. But massive as it is, the Time Warner Center is dainty by comparison. Hudson Yards circa 2017 1. This office tower, by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, will become Coach headquarters. 2. Apartments by Diller Scofidio +Renfro, joined by David Rockwell: condos on top, rentals below. 3. The flagship office building, also by KPF: 1,300 feet high. 4. The curvy multiuse tower by David Childs contains a hotel, condominiums, and a big Equinox gym. 5. The shopping arcade (please don't call it the mall). 6.The Culture Shed: still unrevealed, but a great big space for traveling exhibits and other events. Photo: Rendering by Visualhouse Unnumbered buildings (the western half of the development) have yet to be designed. Photo: Map by Jason Lee The view from the High Line. Photo: Rendering by Visualhouse Photo: Rendering by Visualhouse Photo: Rendering by Visualhouse Photo: Rendering by Visualhouse Photo: Rendering by Visualhouse Start on the High Line, at West 30th Street near Tenth Avenue. At the moment, the landscaped section peters out here, but the old elevated railway continues, forking both east and west to form the southern border of Hudson Yards. Eventually, you’ll be able to continue your stroll beneath the canopy of an office tower housing the headquarters of the leather-goods company Coach. It’s a tricky spot, and the interaction of city street and raised park forces the architecture to perform some fancy steps. The building genuflects toward Tenth Avenue on muscular concrete legs. Coach’s unit reaches out toward the High Line, and the crown greets the skyline at a jaunty tilt. With all its connections and contortions, the tower, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, assembles its identity out of the complexities of city life. “My whole career has been about taking buildings that are inherently autonomous and getting them to become social gestures,” remarks Pedersen. Head up a couple of blocks from Coach’s future headquarters, and at West 33rd Street, another KPF tower tapers from vast hoped-for trading floors to a jagged peak 1,300 feet up. A state-of-the-art office building these days requires huge open layouts and thick bundles of elevator shafts, which tend to give it the natural grace of a hippopotamus thigh. But look up: Here, the design artfully disguises the two towers’ bulk by making them seem dramatically foreshortened, as if they were speeding toward the sky. One slopes toward the river, the other in the direction of midtown, parted like stalks of corn in a breeze. The cone of space between them draws sunlight to the ground and leaves a welcome break in the city’s increasingly crowded skyline. With any luck, you should be able to stand at the foot of these towers and feel sheltered but not squashed. It would have been far easier to wall the development off and let each tower stand in isolated splendor. Instead, planners have tried to soften the borders of their domain. That’s not just civic-mindedness; it’s good business. If Hudson Yards is going to be a truly urban place, it will have to lure people who neither work nor live there but who come because everyone else does. The development will have two major magnets, one for commerce, food, and entertainment, the other for that primal necessity of New York life: culture. Related is pinning a lot of financial optimism on a five-floor, two-block-long retail extravaganza that links the two KPF towers, rather like the Time Warner Center shops, only bigger, busier, sunnier, and more tightly knit to the city. “We don’t want this to feel like a mall,” insists its architect, Howard Elkus. Pedestrian passageways cut through the building, extending the streets indoors, and a succession of great glass walls turn window-shopping into a spectator sport. The liveliness engine is on the fourth floor, where a collection of informal but high-end food outlets curated by Danny Meyer looks out over the central plaza—“Eataly on steroids” is how one Related executive describes it. Above that are more expensive restaurants and a ten-screen multiplex. Stroll out the western side of the shopping center toward the central plaza, walk diagonally across to 30th Street, halfway between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and you come to the most intriguing and mysterious element of Hudson Yards: the Culture Shed. Having set aside a parcel of land for cultural use, the city put out a call for ideas. Elizabeth Diller and David Rockwell answered with an amalgam of architectural and institutional innovations: a flexible gallery complex to accommodate traveling exhibits and nomadic performing events. Together, they designed an enormous trusslike shell that could fit over the galleries or roll out like a shipyard gantry to enclose a vast performance space. The city refuses to discuss architectural details, how the still-theoretical organization will function, or who would pay to build and operate it. But it’s easy to imagine it being used for film premieres and high-definition broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera or as a permanent home for Fashion Week, which now camps out in tents. The Culture Shed can give Hudson Yards the highbrow legitimacy and cutting-edge cool it needs to become an integral part of New York, and also create a cultural corridor running from the Whitney Museum at Gansevoort Street (now under construction), through Chelsea’s gallery district, and up to Lincoln Center. The project may be in the wishful-thinking stage—it could still get scaled back or dumbed down, or it could vanish altogether. But it does have one crucial booster: the Related Companies. “The Culture Shed is critically important,” says Jay Cross, the executive who is running the Hudson Yards project. “We’re going to be major supporters because we want and need to see it come to fruition.” Hudson Yards is getting much more from the city than just the Culture Shed. While planners keep working out ways to weld the complex to its environs, the West Side has already begun to embrace its coming addition. New rental towers have sprouted in the West Thirties and burly office buildings will soon rise along Ninth and Tenth Avenues. “There are communities around us—Hell’s Kitchen, Midtown South, West Chelsea, New Jersey to the west—that if we do a great job are just naturally going to flow in and populate that space,” says Cross. The site as a whole is a yawning pit, not so much a blank slate as an empty socket, surrounded by amenities and infrastructure just waiting to be plugged in. Hudson River Park runs along the western edge (set off by Twelfth Avenue), the High Line spills in from the south, and the future Hudson Park and Boulevard will swoop down from the north. The No. 7 subway-line extension is on the way to completion, the Javits Center is being overhauled, and maybe one day Moynihan Station will even get built. In all, $3 billion in taxpayer-funded improvements encircle the Related fiefdom—not including city tax abatements. “Where else have you ever seen this kind of public money for infrastructure to service a whole new development, in the heart of the city, with that much land and no obstacles?” Ross asks. His vocal enthusiasm for Mitt Romney and the Republican Party’s small-*government credo evidently hasn’t curbed his appreciation for public support. Although it’s the next mayor who will cut the first ribbon, in the long run Hudson Yards may well be the grandest and most dramatic piece of Michael Bloomberg’s legacy. It’s been on the city’s to-do list for almost a decade, ever since Bloomberg hoped to draw the 2012 Olympics to New York with promises of a West Side stadium. The fact that London won the games was a disappointment to him but a stroke of luck for the West Side, scuttling what would have been a disastrous stadium plan, while at the same time calling attention to the value of the real estate above the tracks. Eager for space to put up high-rises and now prompted by a big hole on Manhattan’s western flank, the city focused on a rezoning that is gradually pulling midtown’s center of gravity westward. There are two ways to conceive such a monster project. One is for a single architectural overlord to shape the whole shebang, as Raymond Hood did at Rockefeller Center. Steven Holl, whose offices overlook Hudson Yards and who has designed two similarly gargantuan complexes in China, submitted an entry that might have resulted in a work of thrilling coherence, with the same sensibility imbuing every detail, from door handles to office blocks. But the auteur development also risks yielding a place of oppressive uniformity, where each aesthetic miscalculation is multiplied many times over. Related chose the second option: recruiting an ensemble of brand-name designers. That approach emulates a sped-up version of New York’s gradual, lot-by-lot evolution; the danger is that it can produce a jumble. “Sometimes architectural vitality leads to messiness, or varying degrees of quality, and we’re trying to avoid that,” acknowledges Cross. “Every building is going to be best in class. That’s the common thread.” But bestness is not actually a unifying concept, and when the city held the competition to award the development rights in 2008, the Related entry failed to wow the city, the public, or the critics. “With a drop-dead list of consultants, contributors, collaborators, and anyone else who could be thrown into the mix … [the company] has covered all possible bases with something dreadful for everybody. This is not planning, it’s pandering,” wrote the critic Ada Louise Huxtable in The Wall Street Journal. None of that mattered: The project originally went to another developer, Tishman Speyer, and when that deal fell through, Related scooped it up. Architecture had nothing to do with it. Yet nearly five years later, with contracts signed and money starting to flow, that gold-plated crew of designers, working in separate studios, with different philosophies and, until recently, little consultation, has nevertheless produced a kind of haphazard harmony. What unites them is their taste for complexity and the deftness with which they maneuver conflicting programs into a single composition. Just past the Culture Shed, on the 30th Street side of the site at Eleventh Avenue, is the eastern half’s only purely residential tower, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with David Rockwell. It’s an architectural griffin, grafting together rectilinear rental units on the lower floors with flower-petal condo layouts up high—about 680 apartments in all. The fantastically idiosyncratic bulges and dimples join in complicated ways that make the glass façade look quilted. Now walk north, back across the plaza and past a still-to-be-designed café pavilion, and you come to another tower with a textured exterior—vertical folds with stone on one side and glass on the other, as if a palazzo had merged with a modernist shaft. Actually, the building is even more hybridized than that. David Childs, the architect of the Time Warner Center and One World Trade Center, had to shoehorn a large Equinox gym plus offices, an orthopedic hospital, a sports emporium, a hotel, and a condominium into a curved base and a slender tube. “Hudson Yards is a city within a city. This tower is a city within a city—within a city,” he says. The most delicate, crucial, and treacherous design problem at Hudson Yards isn’t a building at all but the public space, and especially the five acres in the middle, an expanse about as large as Bryant Park. Done right, it could be the most vibrant gathering spot on the West Side, a New York version of Venice’s Piazza San Marco. Done wrong, it could be a windswept tundra populated only by office workers scuttling between the subway and their desks. It’s worrisome that Ross and his team postponed thinking about that void until so much of the architecture had been designed, but heartening that they are intensely focused on it now. Related has given the job to the talented Thomas Woltz, whose quietly refined restorations of gardens and college campuses may not quite have prepared him for the fierce pressure of shaping New York’s most ample new public space. It’s not just a place for people to mingle but for the relationships between the various buildings to express themselves across the connecting plaza. “One of the paintings I admire most is The School of Athens,” says KPF’s William Pedersen, referring to Raphael’s klatch of bearded philosophers chatting beneath noble vaults. “You have great historical and intellectual figures gathered together in dynamic groups of interchange, gesturing to each other. That’s the architectural assignment for each of us.” David Childs phrases a similar thought in a way that graciously defers to Woltz even while sending the message: Don’t screw this up. “We have an obligation to create great architecture, and all the buildings have to be related to the space in the center,” he says. “The void is the most important part.” Woltz has gotten it wrong once. In his first presentation, he placed a plush lawn at the center of the complex, and Ross nearly kicked him out of the room. What Ross wants is not a place to toss a Frisbee, but a town square alive with purpose and electricity. That’s a spectacular challenge; there are few great models for a European-style piazza within a ring of skyscrapers. For now, Woltz’s solution is a paved ellipse, outlined by a perimeter of trees cultivated with geometric severity—given “the Edward Scissorhands topiary treatment,” as one designer puts it. The idea is to create a verdant transition from the human scale to that of glass-and-steel giants. “In an open space next to 1,000-foot towers, our tallest tree is going to be like an ant next to a tall man’s shoe,” Woltz says. But the most maddening paradox of Woltz’s assignment is that he must tailor an open space to the motley public—in ways that will please a potentate. Like some fairy-tale monarch, Ross has dispatched his counselors to find an artist capable of supplying his modern Trevi Fountain. What he wants is something monumental enough to focus the entire project, a piece that’s not just watery and impressive but so instantly iconic that people will meet by it, shoot photos of it, notice it from three blocks away, and recognize it from the cover of guidebooks. You get the feeling that Ross is hedging his bets: If Woltz can’t deliver a world-class plaza with his trees and pavers, maybe a Jeff Koons or an Anish Kapoor can force it into life with a big honking hunk of sculpture. A giant puppy can’t solve an urban design problem, though. It’s nice that a hardheaded mogul like Ross places so much faith in the civic power of art, but he may be asking it to do too much. The plaza is the node where the site’s conflicting forces reveal themselves: the tension between public and private, between city and campus, between democratic space and commercial real estate. Occupy Wall Street’s takeover of Zuccotti Park last year pointed up the oxymoron inherent in the concept of privately owned public space: You can do anything you like there, as long as the owners deem it okay. Childs hopes that his client’s insistence on premium-brand design won’t make Hudson Yards just the province of privilege. “We want this project to be laced through with public streets, so that everyone has ownership of it, whether you’re arriving in your $100,000 limo or pushing a shopping cart full of your belongings.” The plans include drop-off lanes, so the limos are taken care of. But if the shopping-cart pushers, buskers, protesters, skateboarders, and bongo players start feeling too welcome at Hudson Yards, Related’s security guards will have a ready-made *argument to get them to disperse: This is private property.
  6. http://plus.lapresse.ca/screens/859bc2a2-f0ed-470c-862f-943a02746c63%7C_0.html FRANÇOIS CARDINAL LA PRESSE La place Émilie-Gamelin est bien accueillante pour les manifestants, qui s’y donnent rendez-vous ces jours-ci. Mais pour le flâneur urbain, on repassera… C’est un espace hypercentral, dans une ville hypersécuritaire. Un espace auquel on a ajouté de gros jeux d’échecs et des camions de bouffe. Mais personnellement, je ne ferais pas de détour pour y passer un samedi après-midi avec mon fils, disons. Bon, ça prouve peut-être que je suis un papa poule. Mais surtout, que tout ce qui a été tenté au cours des dernières années pour faire de la place Émilie-Gamelin un lieu public accueillant et invitant – pour tous – a cruellement échoué. Cette fois sera-t-elle la bonne ? Je l’espère. J’ai appris qu’on va tenter complètement autre chose, cette année. On va fermer la place pour un mois, à partir de lundi prochain, afin de la transformer en « village » animé jour et soir, tout l’été, avec resto, bar, café, jardins et spectacles. On va aménager un marché public, un jardin communautaire, une terrasse avec tables et parasols, un immense lieu de projections. Bref, on va tenter d’en faire un lieu convivial pour tout le monde. Pas juste les revendeurs de drogue. *** Ça fait maintenant quatre ans que le Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles tente de « renipper » la place Émilie-Gamelin avec des événements ponctuels. Mais rien à faire : dès qu’ils prennent fin, le lieu redevient insécurisant. Changement complet de stratégie, donc. Fini les coups de pinceau et les interventions à la pièce. On a embauché l’organisme derrière le Village éphémère, Pépinière & Co, afin de créer un village semi-permanent, de mai à octobre. « On veut vraiment changer l’allure de la place, et sa réputation par le fait même », précise Pascale Daigle, du Partenariat. Sous l’enseigne lumineuse « Jardins Gamelin », on va donc retrouver de nombreux bancs, des bacs à fleurs, des chaises de type Adirondack, ainsi qu’une scène circulaire où se tiendront des événements programmés et spontanés : spectacles, conférences, animation, yoga matinal. On ajoutera une canopée lumineuse ainsi qu’une « œuvre magistrale illuminée » en suspension. À l’ouest, on ouvrira un restaurant dans une construction de conteneurs où l’on vendra du café tôt le matin, et de la bière tard le soir. On installera une dizaine de tables avec chaises et parasols afin que les gens puissent profiter de leur consommation ou de leur propre lunch. Au sud de la place, on retrouvera de l’agriculture urbaine : jardin de tournesols, production de légumes, plantations diverses, serre, etc. Et à l’est, on installera un marché de fruits et légumes et on se servira de la façade de la Place Dupuis comme toile de projection. « Montréal est une ville d’événements, fait remarquer Jérôme Glad, de Pépinière & Co. Mais l’événementiel est souvent en rupture avec la ville au quotidien : on installe des clôtures et des tentes génériques, puis une fois terminé, on remballe tout. » « Là, on veut inverser la logique : investir le lieu, en faire un canevas cohérent, puis y attirer des événements qui donneront à la place un caractère propre. » *** Est-ce qu’on est dans l’embourgeoisement localisé ? Une façon de repousser ceux qu’on préférerait ne pas voir ? De remplacer ceux qui ont élu domicile dans le parc par des hipsters et leur macchiato ? Le Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles s’en défend. Il assure que son village s’implantera avec l’aide de l’arrondissement et du Service de police de la Ville de Montréal, qui veilleront à maintenir la cohabitation. Comme à l’époque des interventions de l’ATSA. À l’arrondissement de Ville-Marie, on ne cache pas que « les comportements de personnes marginalisées » sont source de préoccupation. Mais le but n’est pas de les faire disparaître, assure la porte-parole Anick de Repentigny. « Il n’est pas question d’exclure qui que ce soit. L’arrondissement souhaite une cohabitation sociale optimale. » De toute façon, renchérit Jérôme Glad, l’idée n’est pas de lisser l’endroit pour en faire une autre place des Festivals. « On a vraiment une approche de quartier, à échelle humaine, ouverte et inclusive. On veut que ça devienne un lieu propice aux rassemblements et aux pique-niques. On veut que ce soit une grande terrasse pour tout le monde. » Pas une autre place des Festivals, donc, mais pas un autre « Village éphémère » non plus, ces événements populaires et branchés qui ont eu lieu ces deux dernières années (bonne nouvelle : une démarche est en cours pour que cet événement revienne au Pied-du-Courant à compter du 19 juin). « On mise plutôt sur une réappropriation d’un lieu public par toutes sortes de monde », affirme Jérôme Glad. Pensons au Marché des ruelles dans la rue Sainte-Catherine, ou au Marché des possibles dans le Mile End. Ne nous contons pas d’histoire. Ce sera tout un défi d’assurer une cohabitation des usagers actuels et futurs. Mais un défi qu’il vaut certainement la peine de tenter de relever. Car s’il ne faut pas chasser les marginalisés, on ne peut chasser non plus les riverains et les commerçants. sent via Tapatalk
  7. mtlurb

    Quartier Concordia

    Quartier Concordia Quartier Concordia will transform the Sir George Williams campus from a collection of scattered buildings into a welcoming and cohesive urban campus in the area bordered generally by Sherbrooke, Guy, René-Lévesque, and Bishop. The goals of the Quartier Concordia project include improving the use of outdoor spaces, stimulating street life, and providing respite for the Concordia community and the public. The project will optimize vehicular and bicycle traffic as well as pedestrian flow, facilitate movement between campus buildings, and ensure the safe interaction of vehicles and pedestrians. Quartier Concordia will also maintain a welcoming environment for the Concordia community and the public, highlight landmarks, improve the use of space, promote the display of artwork and create a distinct campus environment within the downtown core. The project will be carried out over several years by Groupe Cardinal Hardy and in conjunction with the City of Montreal. Facts: A multi-year project Landscape architect: Groupe Cardinal Hardy Location: The area bordered by Sherbrooke, Guy, René-Lévesque, and Bishop The project will promote a distinct, welcoming, and efficient downtown campus
  8. Situé dans l'arrondissement St-Hubert, à côté de l'aéroport. Photos: Construction Vergo
  9. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Barcode Project is a section of the Bjørvika portion of the Fjord City redevelopment on former dock and industrial land in central Oslo. It consists of a row of new multi-purpose high-rise buildings, due to be completed in 2014. The developer is marketing the project as "The Opera Quarter." There has been intense public debate about the height and shape of the buildings. video from Kristian Larsen
  10. http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=5798,42657625&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&id=19271&ret=http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/url/page/prt_vdm_fr/rep_annonces_ville/rep_communiques/communiques Dévoilement des finalistes du concours visant l'intégration d'une œuvre d'art public sur la promenade Jeanne-Mance 16 juillet 2012 Montréal, le 16 juillet 2012 -La responsable de la culture, du patrimoine, du design et de la condition féminine au comité exécutif de la Ville de Montréal, Mme Helen Fotopulos, a le plaisir d'annoncer le nom des six finalistes du concours en art public qui a été lancé afin d'intégrer une œuvre en cinq temps à la future promenade Jeanne-Mance, au cœur du Quartier des spectacles. Il s'agit de David Armstrong-Six, Valérie Blass, Michel de Broin, Valérie Kolakis, Stephen Schofield et Louise Viger. « Les travaux d'aménagement des espaces publics dans cette partie du Quartier des spectacles représentent une belle occasion de faire une place importante à l'art public. L'intégration d'une œuvre fragmentée en cinq éléments distincts permettra aux passants d'en faire une lecture séquentielle et ce parcours véhiculera très certainement l'identité unique de cet espace qui constitue le cœur culturel de la métropole. En tenant un concours visant l'intégration d'une nouvelle œuvre d'envergure, nous réaffirmons notre engagement à favoriser l'accès à l'art public aux quatre coins de la ville et je tiens à féliciter les six finalistes qui, par leur parcours et leur créativité, ont su se démarquer auprès des membres du jury », a déclaré Mme Fotopulos. L'œuvre fragmentée qui découlera de ce concours s'intégrera aux cinq plateformes qui seront aménagées prochainement sur le côté est de la rue Jeanne-Mance, entre la rue Sainte-Catherine et le boulevard René-Lévesque. Les cinq éléments qui constitueront l'œuvre permettront aux passants de faire une lecture narrative de l'œuvre ainsi que de l'espace qui l'accueille et contribueront grandement à mettre en valeur l'art public dans le Quartier des spectacles. Clin d'œil à ce haut-lieu du divertissement culturel, l'œuvre devra témoigner de la nouvelle identité de ce secteur, véritable témoin de la créativité et de la diversité culturelle montréalaise. Rappelons que ce projet sera réalisé dans le cadre de la Politique d'intégration des arts à l'architecture et à l'environnement des bâtiments et des sites gouvernementaux publics du gouvernement du Québec. En outre, dans son cadre d'intervention en art public adopté en juin 2010, la Ville s'est engagée à intégrer l'art public dans tous les grands projets d'aménagement urbain sous sa responsabilité et à inciter chacun des arrondissements à se doter d'un plan d'intervention dans ce domaine. À propos des finalistes David Armstrong-Six est représenté à Montréal par la Parisian Laundry. Ses œuvres ont été présentées notamment à la Kunstlerhaus Bethanien à Berlin (2012), à la Biennale de Montréal (2011) et au Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2008). Valérie Blass est représentée à Montréal par la Parisian Laundry. Elle a remporté le Prix Louis-Comptois de la Ville de Montréal en 2010 et le Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal lui a consacré une exposition solo en 2012. Michel de Broin est représenté à Barcelone par la Galerie Toni Tàpies. Il a réalisé plusieurs œuvres d'art public tant au pays qu'à l'étranger, notamment Révolutions et L'arc qui font partie de la collection municipale. Il présentera une rétrospective de son travail au Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal en 2013. Valérie Kolakis est représentée à Montréal par la Galerie Donald Browne. Récemment, ses œuvres ont été présentées à l'Œil de poisson à Québec (2012), à Plein Sud (2011) et à la Triennale québécoise au Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2011). Stephen Schofield est représenté à Montréal par la Galerie Joyce Yahouda. Ses sculptures ont fait l'objet d'une exposition à la New-Jersey City University (2011) et au Textile Museum of Canada à Toronto (2010). Il est récipiendaire du Prix Louis-Comptois de la Ville de Montréal (2005) et a réalisé deux œuvres d'art intégrées à l'architecture en 2012. Louise Viger a présenté ses œuvres au Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec (2010 et 2011) et au Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2000). Elle a réalisé plusieurs œuvres d'art public dont Des lauriers pour mémoire-Jean-Duceppe (1923-1990) qui fait partie de la collection municipale.
  11. <header id="page-header"> 23/11/2016 Mise à jour : 23 novembre 2016 | 16:25 Une grande exposition d’art public sur la rue Sherbrooke pour le 375e de Montréal Par Rédaction Métro </header> <figure class="current-photo"> <figcaption> La balade pour la paix Gracieuseté <nav> Previous photo Next photo </nav> </figcaption> </figure> <figure> </figure> <figure> </figure> Dans le cadre du 375e anniversaire de Montréal, du 50e anniversaire d’Expo 67 et du 150e anniversaire du Canada, une grande exposition d’art public prendra forme sur la rue Sherbrooke à Montréal en 2017. La Balade pour la Paix, un musée à ciel ouvert sera une exposition d’envergure internationale conçue et réalisée par le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, le musée McCord et les universités Concordia et McGill. Elle fera un kilomètre de long sur la rue Sherbrooke, traçant un itinéraire entre le musée McCord et le nouveau Pavillon pour la Paix Michal et Renata Hornstein du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Tout au long de ce kilomètre, les visiteurs pourront admirer 29 sculptures et installations d’artistes canadiens et étrangers ainsi qu’une quarantaine de photographies d’artistes montréalais. De plus, les drapeaux de quelque 200 pays du monde et des 13 provinces et territoires du Canada flotteront au vent au-dessus de la rue Sherbrooke, le tout rappelant le Place des Nations d’Expo 67. La Balade sera ouverte du 29 mai au 27 octobre prochain, soit pendant cinq mois. Une grande exposition d’art public sur la rue Sherbrooke pour le 375e de Montreal | Metro
  12. <header id="page-header"> 24/10/2016 Mise à jour : 24 octobre 2016 | 19:48 Ajuster la taille du texte [h=1]KM3: un parcours d’une vingtaine d’œuvres d’art public pour le 375e[/h] Par Laurence Houde-Roy Métro </header> <figure> <figcaption> Paquet de lumière, de Gilles Mihalcean, est l'une des deux œuvres d'art permanentes du parcours KM3. Elle sera installée en face de la Maison symphonique de Montréal au coût de 672 603$. </figcaption> </figure> Un parcours d’une vingtaine d’œuvres d’art public temporaires et permanentes intitulé KM3 sera créé à l’automne prochain et installé sur l’ensemble du territoire du Quartier des spectacles, à l’occasion du 375e anniversaire de Montréal. Ces créations, principalement installées autour de l’axe de la rue Sainte-Catherine, seront sur la place publique du 31 août au 15 octobre 2017. Décrit comme le «plus important événement d’art public temporaire extérieur à Montréal», le projet orchestré par le Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles invitera des créateurs québécois «reconnus pour leur contribution dans le domaine de l’art public, mais aussi des créateurs qui auront la possibilité de s’exprimer pour la première fois dans l’espace public» à créer ces oeuvres. L’appel à ces créateurs et les commandes seront passés au courant de la prochaine année. <aside class="related-articles"> </aside> «L’événement mettra en valeur les arts visuels, l’art urbain, l’art numérique, le design et l’architecture en occupant des murs d’édifices, des places publiques et des lieux inusités», indique le Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles. Paquet de lumière, de Gilles Mihalcean, sera installée en face de la Maison symphonique de Montréal Seulement deux oeuvres de ce parcours ont été dévoilées lundi. Contrairement au reste des oeuvres, celles-ci seront permanentes et seront acquises par la Ville de Montréal. Elles seront situées sur la rue Émery, en face du cinéma Quartier Latin, et sur le Parterre, en face de la Maison symphonique de Montréal. Une troisième oeuvre permanente sera dévoilée. À la fin de cette édition, les installations artistiques iront rejoindre la collection permanente du Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles et pourront être présentées ailleurs dans le monde. Lux Obscura, de Jonathan Villeneuve, sera installée sur la rue Emery, en face du cinéma Quartier Latin Le Quartier des spectacles souhaite faire de KM3 un événement bisannuel et en faire une offre touristique importante. La scénographie de cette première édition a été confiée à Melissa Mongiat et Mouna Andraos, à qui l’on doit notamment les fameuses 21 Balançoires. <aside class="stat-highlight"> 2,5M$ L’aide financière de 2,5 M$ provenant de la Ville de Montréal et le gouvernement du Québec permettra la réalisation de plusieurs oeuvres temporaires (1,5 M$), puis la création de deux nouvelles oeuvres d’art public permanentes (1 M$) acquises par la Ville de Montréal. </aside> KM3: un parcours d’une vingtaine d’œuvres d’art public pour le 375e | Metro
  13. Opinion: The pros and cons of life in Montreal A newcomer finds that compared with Toronto, this city has lower rents, but higher taxes; better cycling lanes, but worse roads By Chris Riddell, Special to The Gazette September 2, 2014 4:42 PM MONTREAL — To an outsider, Montreal might seem like the perfect place to live. It has the lowest rents of all the major cities in Canada, it’s the nation’s epicentre of art and culture, and there are more restaurants and cafés than you can visit in a year. When I moved here from Toronto last year, it was mostly for the lower cost of living, but also for the enriching experience of a new culture so different from my own. In Montreal, I could theoretically have a better quality of life than I did in Hogtown, where the rents are some of the highest in the country. But is living in Montreal really all it’s cracked up to be? I hit the streets, speaking to everyday citizens about why they moved to Montreal, and tried to nail down some of the advantages and disadvantages of living here. What I found was interesting. Jesse Legallais, a 31-year-old musician, moved to Montreal from Toronto 10 years ago and hasn’t looked back. Sitting on a bench outside Café Social on a sunny Friday afternoon, he says: “It’s a bit of a slower pace than some of the other major cities and there is a diverse community here. There are a lot of talented people, so you’re kind of kept on your toes, but you don’t have to constantly scrape for work as hard as, say, New York or Toronto or L.A.” Montreal turned out to be the perfect place to nurture his craft as a musician. The cheaper cost of living was one of the main factors drawing him here, along with the bilingual nature of the city. Some people come to Montreal and find it’s a great place to open a business. Take Andre Levert, for example. Originally from St. Catharines, Ont., he moved to Montreal in 2000. Today, he and his wife own a head shop on Prince Arthur St. E. called Psychonaut. “I found that because commercial space and the cost of living is cheaper in Montreal, for starting a business it was less risk in the beginning,” he says. “I went and checked the rent for stores like mine in Ottawa, and it was way more expensive.” Levert stresses that it really is the people that make the city such a great place to live. Many other aspects of Montreal are lacking: language laws and infrastructure are problems that need to be addressed, and the city has its work cut out for it in those areas. It certainly isn’t all sunshine and roses in Montreal. While there are some great advantages to living here, there are also a number of drawbacks. Here is what I’ve noticed. Pro: Cheap rent. I can definitely say that I am not the only person who moved to Montreal from Toronto at least partly for the cheaper rents. According to Numbeo.com, the average rent in Montreal for a one-bedroom apartment in the city centre is $877. In Toronto, a one-bedroom apartment in the city centre goes for an average of $1,463. If you came to Montreal more than 10 years ago, you would have paid even less. “After the referendum they were just giving them away here,” says Legallais. “Especially up in this neighbourhood (Mile End) before it became so trendy. You’d get 6½s, first month free, for $400 or $500.” Con: Taxes are higher. Although the cost of living might be lower here, you are also paying some of the highest taxes in the country. In Quebec we pay 16 per cent provincial income tax on amounts up to $41,095. Add that into the federal rate for the same bracket (15 per cent), and you’re losing almost a third of your paycheque in taxes. Sales tax is also high. Here you pay five per cent goods and services tax and also 9.975 per cent provincial sales tax. This, along with the high income tax rate, could be enough to offset any savings you might enjoy from the cheap rents. Pro: Dépanneurs. Since I’m from a province where the sale and distribution of alcohol is extremely regulated, I think the ability to buy beer at my local corner store is amazing. No matter where you are in Montreal, you’re never too far from an ice cold case of Boréale. Some dépanneurs take it a notch higher by adding extras like sushi bars, craft beer rooms and sandwich shops. Con: The SAQ. I have often said that Montreal is a kind of purgatory for scotch or bourbon drinkers. Finding a bottle of Wild Turkey involved looking up online which SAQ store to go to, and then travelling across town to buy it before the store closed at 6 p.m. Ally Baker, an arts student at Concordia, agrees. She hails from Edmonton and has been living in Montreal for 2½ years. “Coming from a province where it’s not government regulated, I find the selection is a lot less, you’re paying a lot more for whatever you’re getting, and you have to travel a lot more to get to different stores. The hours aren’t that great as well,” she says. Pro: Great parks and cycling lanes. In 2013, Copenhagenize rated Montreal the best city in North America for cycling, and it’s no wonder why. The bike-lane network is excellent, and I have been taking a great deal of time this summer to make effective use of it. The separated lanes especially are fun and make you feel safe. Coming from Toronto, a city with a terrible bike network, this is a very attractive feature for an avid cyclist. The parks in this city are second to none. There are tons of green space to spend time in when the weather is nice, and many of the large parks have facilities for just about every sport you can think of. You are also allowed to drink in public (as long as you have some food), so picnicking is always a popular summer activity. There is certainly no shortage of things to keep you busy in Montreal once the weather warms up. But of course that means ... Con: Cold and snowy winters. Montreal is notorious for long, cold, snowy winters. This past winter was especially brutal, and many Montrealers would agree with me. During these cold months, the city is comparatively dead. This doesn’t mean there is nothing to do, however. There are still events like Igloofest, for example, if you know where to look. But if you expect to survive the season, you will need to adapt. “I’m coming from Michigan, so it wasn’t so much of a shock for me,” says Rochie Cohen, a mother of four in the Côte-des-Neiges area. She has been living in Montreal for 12 years. “We just have to leave the house a half an hour earlier. There is a lot of bundling up: coats, scarves, gloves and boots. It takes a lot longer.” Pro: A world-class cultural scene and laid-back attitude. Montreal is a magnet for young artists looking for a place to develop their craft and connect with like-minded people. Numerous artists, writers and musicians of renown were born here. Not only that, the citizenry is much more laid-back than elsewhere in Canada. “My brother asked me, ‘What can you do in Montreal that you can’t do in Ottawa?’ and I told him basically nothing, but everything you do in Montreal is more entertaining,” says Levert. He adds: “You go to a grocery store and shoot a few jokes with the people in line. It’s a joie de vivre that you don’t get anywhere else.” Con: Language barriers. Language issues have been in the spotlight for a long time in Montreal. It’s virtually impossible to get a decent job if you aren’t bilingual, and it can also be isolating for some people. This is true for anglophones who don’t speak French, but it also goes the other way. Aurore Trusewicz is a freelance translator from Belgium. She came to Montreal to attend McGill University in 2007, and French is her first language. “Even though I was attending an English university, I was just listening to English all the time and not really speaking it,” she says. “I was concerned about that because I knew that in Montreal a lot of people speak English, and I was intimidated about how I would speak with (the customers at work).” Although it was intimidating at first, she stuck with it and polished her English skills with diligent practice. The same can be said for learning French. It can be scary to practise speaking it when you aren’t good at it yet. But if you show a genuine effort, you’ll find there are many people out there willing to help. Pro: Affordable public transit. When I moved here, I looked forward to using Montreal’s affordable and extensive transit system. The cost of a monthly pass is much lower than in Toronto, and the métro covers more of the city, so it’s easy to get around. The stations are also designed with better esthetics than the system of my hometown. “The public transportation system is quite nice compared to other places,” says Trusewicz. “Last year I had the chance to go to Miami, and really, you can’t do anything without a car over there. It’s nice to have a métro and buses, even in the middle of the night, to go wherever you want to go.” Con: Traffic and infrastructure problems. This city is disintegrating around us. After riding my bike around these streets, it’s plain to see that some of the roads are in a pitiful condition. After driving here, it’s also plain to see that the design of some of the highways and intersections is very confusing to someone who hasn’t been living here all his life. Combine this with the heavy amounts of roadwork and construction going on, and you’ve got some very bad traffic problems. The roads and sewers have been neglected for years, and now the city has a tremendous amount of work to do with upgrading its ailing infrastructure. City hall is also hard pressed to find the financing to pay for it. It seems this is one problem that Montrealers are going to have to suffer through for years to come. - - - For and against relocating to Montreal The good: Universities have the lowest tuition rates in the country, making Montreal a popular city for students. Residents enjoy the cheapest electricity in Canada, thanks to Hydro-Québec. Daycare is affordable, due to the reduced-contribution spaces for children 5 or younger; parents pay $7 per day. Operational costs for running a business are the lowest in North America, according to a 2013 KPMG survey. Approximately 2,000 hectares of public parks are spread across 17 large parks and 1,160 small neighbourhood parks. The bad: Many people leave Quebec each year for better job prospects in the rest of Canada (28,439 people left from January to September in 2013). Political corruption and allegations of ties to the Mob have besmirched the city’s image. Montreal has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country. It seems essential to be bilingual in order to build a life here; that can be hard for newcomers. Part of the city’s water system is well over 100 years old and prone to leaks. Boil-water advisories have been issued in the past. Chris Riddell is a freelance journalist and copywriter who lives in Côte-des-Neiges.
  14. http://www.icisource.ca/commercial_real_estate_news/ When NIMBYism is warranted, and when it isn’t Of course, the question is whether a proposed development, infill project or new infrastructure build really does pose a risk to these cherished things. Developers and urban planners must always be cognizant of the fact that there is a segment of the population, a fringe element, who will object to just about anything “new” as a matter of principle. I’ve been to many open houses and public consultations for one proposed project or another over the years. There is almost always that contingent of dogged objectors who invariably fixate on the same things: Parking – Will there be enough if the development increases the population density of the neighbourhood or draws more shoppers/workers from elsewhere? Traffic – Will streets become unsafe and congested due to more cars on the road? Transit – Will this mean more busses on the road, increasing the safety hazard on residential streets, or conversely will there be a need for more? Shadowing – is the new build going to leave parts of the neighbourhood stuck in the shade of a skyscraper? These are all legitimate concerns, depending on the nature of the project in question. They are also easy targets for the activist obstructionist. Full and honest disclosure is the best defence Why? Because I see, time and again, some developers and urban planners who should know better fail to be prepared for objections rooted on any of these points. With any new development or infrastructure project, there has to be, as a simple matter of sound public policy, studies that examine and seek to mitigate impacts and effects related to parking, traffic, shadowing, transit and other considerations. It therefore only makes sense, during a public consult or open house, to address the most likely opposition head on by presenting the findings and recommendations of these studies up front in a clear and obvious manner. But too often, this isn’t done. I’ve was at an open house a few years ago where, when asked about traffic impact, the developer said there wouldn’t be any. Excuse me? If your project adds even one car to the street, there’s an impact. I expect he meant there would be only minimal impact, but that’s not what he said. The obstructionists had a field day with that – another greedy developer, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of honest residents. This is a marketing exercise – treat it like one This is ultimately a marketing exercise – you have to sell residents on the value and need of the development. Take another example – a retirement residence. With an aging population, we are obviously going to need more assisted living facilities in the years to come. But in this case, the developer, speaking to an audience full of grey hairs, didn’t even make the point that the new residence would give people a quality assisted-living option, without having to leave their community, when they were no longer able to live on their own. I also hear people who object to infill projects because they think their tax dollars have paid for infrastructure that a developer is now going to take advantage of – they think the developer is somehow getting a free ride. And yet, that developer must pay development charges to the city to proceed with construction. The new build will also pay its full utility costs and property taxes like the rest of the street. City hall gets more revenue for infrastructure that has already been paid for, and these additional development charges fund municipal projects throughout the city. Another point, often overlooked – when you take an underperforming property and redevelop it, its assessed value goes up, and its tax bill goes up. The local assessment base has just grown. City hall isn’t in the business of making a profit, just collecting enough property tax to cover the bills. The more properties there are in your neighbourhood, the further that tax burden is spread. In other words, that infill project will give everyone else a marginal reduction on their tax bill. It likely isn’t much, but still, it’s something. Developers must use the facts to defuse criticism Bottom line, development is necessary and good most of the time. If we didn’t have good regulated development, we would be living in horrid medieval conditions. Over the last century and a bit, ever growing regulation have given us safer communities, with more reliable utilities and key services such as policing and fire. Yes, there are examples of bad development, but if we had none, as some people seem to want, no one would have a decent place to live. It just astonishes me that developers and urban planners don’t make better use of the facts available to them to defuse criticism. It’s so easy to do it in the right way. Proper preparation for new development public information sessions is the proponent’s one opportunity to tell their story, and should not be wasted by failing to get the facts out and explaining why a project is a good idea. To discuss this or any other valuation topic in the context of your property, please contact me at jclark@regionalgroup.com. I am also interested in your feedback and suggestions for future articles. The post Why do public planning projects go off the rails? appeared first on Real Estate News Exchange (RENX). sent via Tapatalk
  15. Revitalisation de la rue Saint-Viateur: des bancs œuvres d’art à 5000 $ MONTRÉAL – Alors qu’un nouveau banc public coûte généralement entre 1000 $ et 1700 $, l’arrondissement du Plateau Mont-Royal fera l’achat de 13 bancs à 5000 $ chacun pour revitaliser la rue Saint-Viateur. «Ces bancs sont des œuvres d’art en bois, alors oui c’est cher pour un banc, mais ce n’est pas cher pour une œuvre d’art, lorsqu’on commande une œuvre au Bureau d’Art Public, c’est environ 150 000 $», s’est défendu Luc Ferrandez, maire de l’arrondissement du Plateau Mont-Royal, lundi soir au conseil d’arrondissement, interpelé par Suzanne Craig, une résidente. «Je trouve que c’est nettement exagéré surtout dans une période d’austérité et alors que Saint-Denis, Saint-Laurent et Mont-Royal sont beaucoup plus en demande», a souligné la citoyenne qui vit dans le quartier depuis 35 ans. Style bohème Dans l’ordre du jour, le nouveau mobilier y est décrit comme ayant «un style de la clientèle d'artistes et de bohème de cette partie du quartier». «Ce sont des pièces sculptées à la main, à même une seule bille de bois», a ajouté Jean-François Éthier, artisan-ébéniste de Brun Bois qui a obtenu le contrat. «Ce sera une finition au shou sugi ban, ce qui permet une meilleure résistance à l’extérieur», a poursuivi l’artisan connu pour ses participations aux émissions «Méchant changement» à VRAK TV et de «Sauvez les meubles!» à Canal Vie. Créer une signature En misant sur des œuvres d’art plutôt que sur du mobilier traditionnel, l’arrondissement espère revitaliser et donner une signature au coin de la rue Saint-Viateur et de l’avenue de l’Esplanade, où les 13 bancs seront installés à partir de mai. En été 2013, des bancs d’art public avaient aussi été installés au coin des rues Fairmount et Clark, une dépense d’environ 3000 $ l’unité, mais surtout un vrai succès, selon le maire. «L’impact commercial est gigantesque et l’achalandage touristique énorme, a mentionné M. Ferrandez. Notre pari c’est que oui, il y aura le même impact sur Saint-Viateur.» Moins cher dans Rosemont L’été dernier, Rosemont a aussi misé sur son mobilier urbain pour animer une artère commerciale, avec la transformation de trois bancs sur la rue Masson. Mais l’arrondissement n’a pas déboursé d’argent, en procédant plutôt au remplacement des bancs en résine pour des bancs en bois, qui ont été peints par un artiste du quartier. La SDC Promenade Masson a pour sa part investi 3000 $ dans le projet. Prix pas définitif Enfin, le contrat de 65 558,75 $ octroyé à Brun Bois pour la fabrication de ces 13 bancs ne serait pas définitif, mais plutôt «maximal» puisque l’arrondissement «entend négocier encore pour réduire le coût». «On fait le choix de l’achat local et durable, c’est normal que ça coute un peu plus cher», a souligné Marianne Giguère, conseillère d’arrondissement pour le district de De Lorimier. L’arrondissement n’a pas souhaité nous fournir des croquis puisqu’ils n’étaient pas finalisés.
  16. http://ici.radio-canada.ca/regions/quebec/2016/04/06/002-marche-public-expocite-gestionnaire.shtml <header style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial, helvetical, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.2px;">ÉCONOMIE Le nouveau marché public d'ExpoCité dévoilé <time datetime="2016-04-06T15:16:37Z" data-datetimelastpublished="2016-04-06T16:52:40Z" style="color: rgb(119, 119, 119); display: block; font-family: arial; font-size: 12px; margin: 15px 0px 10px; text-transform: uppercase;"> </time></header>
  17. via Blouin Art Info : 10 Must-See Warped Public Art Sculptures in Montreal BY Low Lai Chow | March 28, 2016 If cities were people, Montreal would be the rebellious, off-kilter kid who steals all the thunder at a party. Basking in diversity as the lively cultural capital of Canada (Ottawa is Canada's actual capital city, FYI), Montreal has a social calendar that is perpetually packed with events and festivals. Rule of thumb: if there is a party in town, know that there are a hundred more you haven't heard about. With over 315 public artworks in the municipal collection, Montreal also has some incredible public sculptures around town, from parks to libraries. Culture+Travel picks out ten of the most warped public art to seek out in the City of Festivals. See pictures of the artworks here. - Révolutions (2003), Michel de Broin | Rifting on the impossible, Montreal-based sculptor de Broin takes visual inspiration from the ubiquitous outdoor staircases seen throughout the city for this loopy 8.5-meter high Moebius strip out of aluminum and galvanized steel. The artist has said of the enigmatic work, “The staircase makes us think of what returns without repeating, transformed in its cycle. We can all project ourselves into this curved space and enter the game of revolutions.” In short, this work is infinity in poetry. Where: Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier, behind Metro Papineau metro station in Ville-Marie - Le Malheureux Magnifique (1972), Pierre Yves Angers | Cement-covered and huddled over in a humanistic form, Yves Angers' 1972 sculpture is a landmark that marks the entrance of Montreal’s bustling Latin Quarter. First installed in Place Pasteur in 1973, it was moved to the front of Alcide-Chaussée Building in 1991. Angers is said to have been inspired by the works of Rodin; his accompanying art says, "À ceux qui regardent à l'intérieur d'eux-mêmes et franchissent ainsi les frontières du visible” (French for 'To those who look inside themselves and thus cross over the borders of the visible'). Where: 385, Rue Sherbrooke Est, at the intersection of Sherbrooke and Saint-Denis streets in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal - Theatre for Sky Blocks (1992), Linda Covit | Installed on the shore of Lake Saint-Louis, Covit's minimalist work dwells on the environment. It was first exhibited in 1992 at the first Salon international de la sculpture extérieure. With the water and the sky in the background, three monolithic steel columns have a photograph of clouds silk screened on them. It all begs the questions: What is real? What is fictitious? Where: Parc Fort-Rolland in Lachine - Anamorphose D'Une Fenetre, Claude Lamarche | From afar, Claude Lamarche's artwork resembles colorful scribbles that seem to have leapt off the tip of a pen to interact with the exteriors of the Maison de la culture Mercier building in real life. A red arrow-shaped sculpture points at the upper left-hand corner of the wall while a blue arrow twirls one corner of it. A yellow window frame hangs on one wall, while steel rods and tubes prop up the sides. Where: 8105, Rue Hochelaga, at Maison de la culture Mercier in Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve - Monica (1985), Jules Lasalle | Evoking the gigantic head sculptures of Easter Island and excavated archaeological remains, sculptor and modeller Jules Lasalle's larger-than-life 3D portrait of a woman with a smile on her face is deliberately fragmented, denoting the passing of time. Lasalle created the artwork in 1985 at the first Lachine, Carrefour de l’Art et de l’Industrie sculpture symposium. Where: Promenade Père-Marquette in Lachine - From A (1986), Takera Narita | Comprising three parts of a granite and mortar fluted column to reference ancient Greek civilization, this unusual ruins-like sculpture by the late Japanese artist Takera Narita appears to pop up from the ground and sink back into it. It alludes to the cycle of history, with the title hinting at a path between two points as a mathematical formula. Narita created the work for the second Lachine sculpture symposium L’an II – Lachine, carrefour de l’art et de l’industrie in 1986. Where: Parc René-Lévesque in Lachine - La vélocité des lieux (2015), BGL | Completed in 2015 in conjunction with the redevelopment of the Henri-Bourassa–Pie-IX intersection in Montréal-Nord borough is this work by Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, and Nicolas Laverdière of Québec collective BGL. It comprises five bus-like forms on eight steel columns. Denoting the ebbs and flow of human activity and community, the cheerful 19-meter high sculpture looks like a Ferris wheel right out of an amusement park in frenzied motion. In reality, this static artwork doesn't actually move. BGL also recently represented Canada at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. Where: Carrefour Henri-Bourassa–Pie-IX in Montréal-Nord - Le Mélomane (2011), Cooke-Sasseville | Based in Québec City, the creative duo of Jean-François Cooke and Pierre Sasseville has a taste for the absurd. Evidence? This cheeeky bronze sculpture shows an ostrich sticking its head into a gramophone horn, illustrating the stronghold of music and new realities. Where: Parc François-Perrault in Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension - Site/Interlude (1994), David Moore | Shaped like gigantic legs, five steel wire structures filled with large stones stand starkly, deliberately spread out to coerce viewers to walk from one to the next so as to see the full work. Dublin-born and Montréal-based artist David Moore took inspiration from seeing how the legs and feet were often the only vestiges left standing from the ancient statues of Greece's archaeological sites. First displayed in Montréal's Old Port, Moore's work is a reflection on the passage of time and on progress. Where: Parc René-Lévesque in Lachine. - Regard Sur Le Fleuve (1992), Lisette Lemieux | Situated on the shore of Lake St. Louis, Arthabaska-born artist Lisette Lemieux's large billboard-like work includes incisive cutouts of the word 'FLEUVE' (French for 'river') and the word’s reflection in water, so that actual river water appear to fill up the cutout parts. Both a wall that obstructs the river view, as well as announces its existence, the work urges viewers to rediscover the river. Where: Parc Stoney-Point in Lachine
  18. This is a proposed plan for Toronto for the next 15 years. (Courtesy Toronto Star)
  19. via La Voix Pop : 9/01/2016 Mise à jour : 19 janvier 2016 | 7:00 Maison des jeunes de Saint-Henri: 900 000$ pour un nouveau toit Par André Desroches TC Media La maison des jeunes serait construite en face de la caserne de pompiers, sur une partie du terrain occupé présentement par le stationnement public de la Ville de Montréal. André Desroches / TC Media La maison des jeunes La Galerie de Saint-Henri devra déménager dans deux ans. Elle souhaite le faire sur la Place Saint-Henri, dans un bâtiment construit au coût de 900 000$ qui deviendrait l’élément d’un pôle jeunesse dans ce secteur. L’organisme fondé en 1980 devra quitter à l’été 2018 le local qu’il loue depuis plus de trente ans sur la rue Notre-Dame (au 3643). Le propriétaire a d’autres projets pour le bâtiment. La maison des jeunes serait construite en face de la caserne de pompiers, sur une partie du terrain occupé présentement par le stationnement public de la Ville de Montréal. Le bâtiment de deux étages aurait une superficie totale de 467 mètres carrés. Les espaces pour les activités des jeunes seraient aménagés au rez-de-chaussée. À l’étage, il y aurait des bureaux pour le personnel ainsi que des salles pour des réunions et les rencontres d’aide aux devoirs. Les plans prévoient une terrasse sur le toit pour des activités d’agriculture. «Nous visons un toit vert», signale Cathy Anglade. Créer un pôle jeunesse Pour développer le projet, l’organisme bénéficie de l’appui de l’arrondissement du Sud-Ouest, qui souhaite repenser ce lieu névralgique. «Nous voulons revoir les aménagements de la Place Saint-Henri. On voudrait en faire un pôle jeunesse», explique le maire Benoit Dorais, rappelant la présence dans cette zone de l’école secondaire Saint-Henri, des Loisirs Saint-Henri et de l’école primaire Ludger-Duvernay. «Nous voulons faire de la place un pôle public comme quand elle a été créée», ajoute le maire, mentionnant qu’un exercice de réflexion sur l’aménagement de la place ayant réuni des universitaires s’est tenu en 2013. Selon lui, la population en général va y trouver son compte. Campagne de financement Benoit Dorais est en discussion avec la ville-centre afin de conclure un bail de longue durée pour le terrain convoité. «Nous voudrions signer une entente avec la Ville pour une emphytéose. Ça avance», indique-t-il. Mais pour que la Ville puisse voter en faveur du projet, il faut qu’il soit viable financièrement». La maison de jeunes doit recueillir près de 1 M$. Pour y arriver, l’organisme doit dénicher des partenaires majeurs. «Nous allons lancer notre campagne en février auprès des entreprises et des commerces», annonce Cathy Anglade. L’organisme ciblera également les fondations. La population pourra appuyer le projet à sa façon lors d’activités grand public de collecte de fonds. Chaque année, environ 150 jeunes âgés de 11 à 18 ans participent aux activités de la maison La Galerie.
  20. 'Iconic' park will rise from former St-Michel dump Kevin Mio, Montreal Gazette More from Kevin Mio, Montreal Gazette Published on: August 28, 2015 | Last Updated: August 28, 2015 3:32 PM EDT What was once a quarry and garbage dump that has marred the city’s St-Michel district for decades will soon become one of Montreal’s — if not the world’s — most iconic parks, Mayor Denis Coderre said on Friday. The St-Michel Environmental Complex will be transformed into the city’s second-largest park, behind Mount Royal, beginning with several new sections that are to be opened to the public for the first time in 2017, in time for the city’s 375th birthday. The whole project is slated to be completed by 2023, Coderre said. “New York has its Central Park, Paris has its Luxembourg Gardens, London has its Hyde Park. If it is true that the major cities of the world can be recognized by their legendary green spaces, Montreal has certainly not been left out,” the mayor said as he made the announcement standing in front of what will become a 12.5 hectare wooded area and lookout in a few years. “We already have Mount Royal Park, our largest park, and in a few years we will soon have another equally iconic (park) right here,” he said. “This transformation represents one of the most ambitious environmental rehabilitation projects ever undertaken in an urban environment in North America,” Coderre said. “We are building a park out of a site that contains 40 million tonnes of garbage.” The cost of this phase of the project is $33.7 million, which the city is paying for from its capital works budget. The final price tag for the remainder of the work is not known. However, Coderre said whatever money is needed will be made available to complete the project. Once finished, the park will include thousands of trees, a lake, wooded areas, pathways, rest spots, an outdoor theatre and more. Anie Samson, the mayor of the Villeray — Saint-Michel — Park Extension borough and member of the executive committee, said the transformation shows that the impossible is possible. “Today is a big day for us and it is one more step forward toward the realization of our dreams (for St-Michel),” she said. “For the past 20 or 30 years, (residents) had a dump over there. Now it is going to be one of the biggest and nicest parks in the world,” Samson said. By 2017, just over 17 hectares of park space will be open to the public. In all, the park will occupy 153 hectares of the 192-hectare site. “A lot of people are talking about sustainable development, but what does it mean? I think we have a living proof here,” Coderre said. “We are providing today a new definition of how to revitalize an area. Frankly, at the end of the day … a lot of people are inspired by other cities. Trust me, this one will be an inspiration for the rest of the world.” Journalists were given a bus tour of the site Friday morning, which included a drive into the lowest point of the former quarry, which will eventually become the lake. It will be five times as big as Beaver Lake on Mount Royal. The lake will be filled with run-off water from the park and will be treated to make it safe to be used for boating and kayaking, but not for swimming. The second major project is a new entrance way to the park along Papineau Ave. that will include, among other things, a sliding area for winter activities, public spaces and areas where people can rest or play outdoor games such as Frisbee or flying kites. Two other sections already opened to the public will be reconfigured and new entrances constructed. There is already a pathway that rings the entire complex, but this is the first time the public will be allowed onto the landfill site. But how they will get to the park, near the corner of Papineau Ave. and Jarry St., is another question since public transit to the area is far from ideal. Coderre said they are working on a plan to address that issue. “We can have the nicest park, but it has to be accessible,” Coderre said. “We want Montrealers to be able to take advantage of the park so there will be an action plan for public transit, a mobility plan.” One challenge city officials face is how to camouflage the more than 500 wells that dot the site. They serve as monitoring stations for the biogas which is emitted by the buried garbage and the city must find a way to hide them while still allowing them to be accessible to workers for repairs. At the same time, they must prevent vandalism. The biogas is recovered and used as fuel on site by Gazmont, producing enough electricity for 2,000 homes. The company signed a new deal this year to recuperate the gas for 25 years once renovations are completed in 2016. The electricity is sold to Hydro-Québec, with the city getting 11.4 per cent of total sales per year. kmio@montrealgazette.com http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/iconic-park-will-rise-from-former-st-michel-dump
  21. Vanishing Montreal article PDF: ÉNONCÉ D’INTÉRÊT PATRIMONIAL (April 2012) PDF: AVIS DE DEMOLITION (April 2013)
  22. Montréal dévoile la plus coûteuse oeuvre d’art public au Québec Le collectif d’artistes BGL réalisera l’oeuvre de 1,1 million de dollars 30 août 2013 | Isabelle Paré , Frédérique Doyon | Arts visuels <section class="retenir retenir_paysage">Tous nos textes sur l'art public Pour lire notre série Décryptage sur l'art public </section>La Ville de Montréal annoncera ce vendredi matin l’octroi de 1,1 million de dollars au collectif d’artistes BGL art contemporain de Québec pour la réalisation de la plus coûteuse oeuvre d’art public jamais réalisée au Québec. Intitulée « La vélocité des lieux », l’oeuvre monumentale dominera du haut de ses 63 pieds le carrefour réaménagé à l’angle des boulevards Pie-IX et Henri-Bourassa, dans l’arrondissement Montréal-Nord. Le concept du collectif d’artistes, entériné ce mercredi par le comité exécutif, sera dévoilé par le maire de Montréal, Laurent Blanchard, et la conseillère indépendante Hélène Ayotte, responsable de la culture, du patrimoine et du design. Au cours des derniers mois, la question de l’art public, dopée par le débat sur le déplacement de L’homme de Calder, a divisé les divers partis municipaux, devenant un des nombreux enjeux électoraux. Choisie à l’unanimité par le jury le 19 juillet dernier, l’oeuvre de BGL sera la plus imposante jamais réalisée au Québec dans le cadre de concours tenus par le Bureau d’art public de Montréal et par le Bureau d’intégration des arts à l’architecture du ministère de la Culture. Le budget dépasse largement le « 1 % » du budget global de construction normalement dévolu aux oeuvres d’art public. L’installation trônera sur la nouvelle « entrée de ville » du carrefour Pie-IX/Henri-Bourassa, dont la réfection atteindra à terme près de 50 millions (chiffres de 2012) et s’échelonnera jusqu’en 2016. Le comité exécutif soutient que l’oeuvre contribuera à faire de ce carrefour un lieu « identitaire et emblématique » pour Montréal. Le carrefour routier ainsi enjolivé deviendra la plus distinctive des six portes d’entrée du nord de l’Île. Le coût de l’oeuvre est compris dans les 14,5 millions prévus au Programme triennal d’immobilisations 2013-2015 pour la transformation de cet échangeur dangereux, depuis longtemps considéré comme une plaie urbaine. La vélocité des lieux bouleversera la notion d’oeuvre d’art et « développera un nouveau public pour l’art contemporain », indiquent les artistes dans leur descriptif. L’installation doit prendre la forme d’un arc constitué d’autobus, faisant le pont au-dessus d’un groupe d’arbres et de maisons, ajoutent-ils. Le collectif BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère et Nicolas Laverdière) s’est fait remarquer depuis 16ans par ses installations audacieuses qui remettent en question le rapport de l’homme à son environnement et le caractère factice de l’objet. Plusieurs de leurs oeuvres font partie des collections du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal et du Musée d’art contemporain de Toronto. « Championne » toute catégorie des budgets d’art public, La vélocité des lieux, qui sera installée à l’automne 2015, devance de loin le montant record de 723 000 $ attribué le printemps dernier à Sans titre, de Stephen Schofield, qui ornera en 2014 la rue Jeanne-Mance, au sud de la place des Festivals. Troisièmes au palmarès municipal, les sculptures de Melvin Charney, installées en 1992 sur la place Émilie-Gamelin, avaient coûté à l’époque 350 000 $
  23. http://gehlarchitects.com/blog/hurray-for-smart-montrealers/ HURRAY FOR SMART MONTREALERS! Over the last couple of months I have written about the different aspects of smart cities, the pros and cons, the dos and don’ts. The outcome of these musings suggests that we ought to discard the idea of a smart city for the sake of promoting smart communities, in which smartness is a tool for benefitting and improving the local social sustainability. However, within this approach lies a fundamental challenge: how do we actually make communities engage with and take responsibility for the shaping of the public realm, using tools and methods they have never known before? Enter Montreal. Montreal uses pilot projects to kick-start the regeneration of the urban spaces. A vacant parking lot on the outskirts of Downtown was turned into an urban beach thanks to the local organization l’ADUQ. Public Life in Montreal To understand the social life of Montrealers, one must first understand the basic history of the city’s public spaces. During the era of modernisation, more than 1/3 of the downtown core was demolished to make way for massive super-complexes embodying offices, car pars, underground malls and cafes. In the industrial suburbs, thousands of housing units were torn down to allow vehicular traffic an easy access into the city. These “renovations” were carried out in less than two decades, but they still managed to methodically get in the way of public life. Since then, the city has taken a completely different approach to urban planning, superseding even today’s hype for attractive, green and lively metropolises. “My colleagues and I, we based our entire careers around reconstructing the city from where it was left after the 1970’s and 1980’s demolitions (…) we want Montreal to be a network of public spaces.” – Wade Eide, Montreal Urban Planning Department, private interview July 15, 2014 Throughout the year, Montreal hosts hundreds of events that all contribute to a lively and active public life. Today, the effects of Wade Eide and his colleagues’ efforts are absolutely visible in the streets and squares of Montreal, which have indeed been transformed into a coherent experience of activities and life. The most remarkable part of this transformation is the effect that it has had in the mentality of the citizens (or maybe it was the other way around?): in Montreal, the city truly is for its people, and people care for and participate in public matters to a degree that I have rarely seen. I believe, because of this mentality, Montreal has a serious chance of actually fulfilling the vision of a smart city built for and by communities. The steps of Place des Arts serve as a public space, popular with everyone on a sunny day. The Montreal Model Montreal’s outstanding mentality for public participation has – luckily – also been recognized by the current smart Montreal’s front-runners, mayor Denis Coderre and Vice-President of the Smart and Digital Office, Harout Chitilian. In their campaigns for a smarter Montreal, they enthusiastically encourage the citizens to voice their opinions and share their ideas: “This ambitious project of making a smart and digital city will take advantage of new technologies, but above all it will draw on the collective intelligence to create a specific Montreal model. I count on you, Montrealers to give your opinions on the various forums that are available to you. I invite you to participate today. The floor is yours!” – (translated from French) Denis Coderre, Mayor of Montreal, 2014 Focus on citizens is visible in the public space. In this project residents of Montreal share their unique stories in a virtual exhibition. As part of the public participation process, the city has developed a web portal, “Faire MTL” (Make Montreal), where Montrealers are offered the chance to contribute to, comment on, collaborate with and follow 180 tangible projects that are to be implemented over the next couple of years. The ambitious plans also include the creation of physical spaces for innovation and co-creation, along with the use of public spaces as living laboratories for the growing smart communities. The fusion of a genuinely open and inclusive government and the natural participatory spirit of the Montrealers, makes Montreal a key player to follow in the game of defining how future (smart) cities could be shaped and function at the hands of the citizens. Every summer Sainte-Catherine Street (the city’s commercial high street) transforms into a pedestrian street, allowing citizens to walk, shop, eat and enjoy the city life. Find more about Montreal’s projects here. August 25, 2015 __ Camilla Siggaard Andersen sent via Tapatalk
  24. It is a pretty impressive rail system that they are trying to build.
  25. http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/city-to-consult-public-on-overhaul-of-urban-plan sent via Tapatalk
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