Planning Place d’Armes (pt 1)

On Wednesday, against my better judgement, I made my way down to Old Montreal to participate in Design Montreal’s student workshop on Place d’Armes. Normally, I would leave urban design to the urban planning and landscape architecture students, but a friend who was involved in organizing the soiree and knew that I am passionate about local public spaces convinced me, a Creative Writing student, to take part. Design Montreal had also invited designers from Berlin and Buenos Aires to work on the official proposals for re-designing Place d’Armes, and they were to be present at the session, adding to my feelings of being out of place and generally inadequate.

I‘m usually reluctant to let city planners lose on our precious public spaces - especially ones with great historical significance like Place d’Armes, which is marked by a fascinating architectural dialogue between French and English powers over nearly 4 centuries (Montreal’s oldest standing building also faces the square, adjacent to the famous Notre Dame Basilica.)

In fact, when I spoke with fellow Montrealer Alison Louder about the project, she voiced alarm that the city was even considering redesigning the place. She spoke sentimentally of detouring through the square on her way to Centaur Theature and worried that the city planners would render it unrecognizable.

However, an afternoon spent in Place d’Armes revealed to me that there is indeed room for improvement in the site’s design. For one thing, the square, with it’s lovely cobblestone, benches, gardens and a monument to city founder de Maisonneuve, is disconnected from the urban fabric, an island lost in a sea of traffic and tour busses. Ironically I also felt that this historical site has also become disconnected from the city’s history: with no present-day function, the site is doomed to remain a moment frozen in time, visited mostly by a constant flux of snap-happy tourists with little stake in the place.

My proposed solutions were simple enough: sandwiches and coffee at the little shop in the square would draw more local office workers on their lunch hours; an exposition space with works by local artists and students projects would allow for a more dynamic dialogue about the site’s history; and requiring tour busses to stop on Rue Saint-Antoine would unclog the streets around the square and allow visitors to walk through a beautiful part of Old Montreal on the way to the site.

Design Montreal called for a Pecha Kucha style presentation, so I spent hours selecting the most concise phrases - cutting syllables when necessary - in order to communicate these problems and solutions in a dozen 25-second spiels. All the while, I fretted that my presentation wouldn’t seem infantile to the surely-more-qualified peers at the design conference.

However, when I finally did see the other students’ presentations they defied even my wildest expectations…

…to be continued.