Winter installation designed to enhance the outdoor winter experience of neighborhood life in Montreal.
Silver Winner : Grands Prix du Design, other architecture categories / Temporary installation
Les voyants
Both urban signals and sculptural furniture, Les voyants are flexible and luminous installations inspired by winter and neighborhood life. Three ephemeral variations are spread throughout the Outremont borough of Montreal.
Winter stations for commercial streets and Montreal neighborhoods
This project is part of the City of Montreal's Stations Hivernales initiative to brighten up Montreal's streets and neighbourhoods.
Approach
Comfort and use, at the heart of the approach, are linked to symbolic, poetic and signage intentions to reinforce the spirit of the place. A seasonal layer, a kind of winter clothing tailored to the needs of the residents, is added to these already frequented and appreciated places. Using the existing facilities and conditions as a starting point, the works become organic, flexible and comfortable extensions of daily habits.
Three sites
Integration is a dynamic of interaction and dialogue with what is already there: the paths/desire lines, the urban furniture, the visual clearances, the sunlight, the landscaping, the occupants, the materiality and the colors.
Raoul-Dandurand Park - Voyant ces voyants!
The curved, folded and smooth volumes evoke the vegetal context of the site. The variations of blue bring back to life the water games of the summer.
Place Kate-McGarrigle - Voyants à voyants
The cubic granite benches in the landscape serve as a support for windproof shells and lampshades. The proximity of the clothing stores on Laurier Avenue suggests that perhaps fabrics are used to wrap passersby.
Place Marcelle-Ferron - Voyants pour les voyants
The greens blend with those of the conifers, the fence, the benches and the street lamps nearby. The colors contrast and animate the place as a point of renewal in the winter space.
Materiality
Soft materials have particular sculptural and structural qualities. The assemblies they create can be both extremely strong and/or fragile. They are the primary strategy of plants.
From the beginning of the project, the EVA (ethylene vinyl acetate) foam sheets imposed themselves by their capacity to provide comfort and to evoke the poetics of winter, being insulating and flexible.
Very early on, full-scale experiments made it possible to verify the behavior of the material. The design was made only with scale models for the research of forms and effects, then with prototypes to validate the apprehended behavior. The balance is delicate between the right thickness of the sheets and the position of the contact points to obtain the acceptable flexibility and sufficient tension for an adequate bearing capacity.
The foam cuts the cold and takes the body temperature quickly. The foam seats isolate the user from the steel structure or granite underneath.
The manufacturing process was carried out in the Nordesco company's workshops in constant collaboration with the architect. The necessary efficiency has been reached by systematizing the assembly details and by repeating the shapes
