Reconnecting Montreal’s city’s historic neighbourhood with its downtown core, the Place des Montréalaises bridges the sunken Ville-Marie Expressway with through a universally accessible inclined plane of a public plaza. Prominently displaying a floating urban meadow, it offers a tributary bouquet of 21 species of plants which pay homage to 21 women who have shaped Montreal throughout the city’s history.
Creating a poetic and inclusive experience, the names of these women also mark the plane’s staircase, and become the conceptual material of the Place des Montréalaises, where names are fragmented into letters which adorn a central steel cylinder sculpture to include women of the past, present, and future.
Thoughtfully designed to contribute to the health of its city by fostering biodiversity and urban forestry, this living organism that grows and evolves with the seasons, from the meadow to its entryway of a forest. Demonstrating the magic of transdisciplinary design between landscape, architecture and art, the Place des Montréalaises is infused with commemoration and significance, rejoining disconnected districts together in one restorative gesture.
Through its commemorative practices, the Place des Montréalaises represents Montreal as a leading city of representation through placemaking and the development of a new monument to women. A sweeping space of memory, connection and reflection, it gives value and visibility to women—known, unknown, and forgotten—in a boldly public way through greenspace and culture. Each careful detail here stitches in the everlasting importance of women to the growth and character of the city in which it lies.
