A New Door to Little Burgundy    

First of all, you have to understand that Little Burgundy has a large local transport desert. The metro stations are located on its outskirts requiring from its center about a few minutes walk, but if we notice the bus stops we notice that certain connector axes such as Saint-Antoine Ouest or even Lionel-Groulx do not have bus stops. even if certain lines cross the sector. Both locals and visitors to the area are therefore inclined to use the metro.

The Georges-Vanier metro station is the one we will visit together. It is a metro from the 60s with modernist features for purely functional purposes and without artifice. Being in a particular area in which little to no businesses are open nor any non-residential spaces are to its direct sight, Metro Georges-Vanier’s setting is a functional space. With no motives to stay or occupy adjacent spaces, the public space is ghostly. Its close connection to direct routes up the coast or to the Lachine Canal, it becomes easy to overlook the neighborhood without exploring it since its borders are major connectors.

It is when deciding to enter Little Burgundy that the major divide created by the Ville-Marie highway is noticeable. The arrival in the neighborhood is not like this one.

Behind Sainte-Antoine Ouest's rowhouses, witnesses of the past, separating the current Georges-Vanier metro station exit and the NCC site, we discover, on the contrary one of the most lively space of the district, the Oscar-Peterson park, a space overflowing with life and colours.

The studio carried out two community workshops during the semester, one of which organized at Youth in Motion, who’s mission is to empower its teenagers to become successful learners, make positive informed life choices and reach their full potential.  During the activity, our questions and contacts demonstrated precisely how this park is a real central hub for the neighborhood. The markings on the map which expressed how the participants of the community move in the area and the points represent attractions where they spend time.

This offered many programmatic hints in additing of discussions regarding the desires of the inhabitants of the neighborhood. The themes of accessibility, interactivity, meaning-fullness were highlighted.

An art-oriented space was in the aspirations of many. Le Bâtiment 7 in Pointe-Saint-Charles was one of many community member’s vision of what a new building for the community could be.

“The Negro Community Centre, for instance, was a community hive and safe space where neighbourhood members gathered and immersed in art and music.”

Centre de mémoire et de documentation, salle de réception, locaux communautaires: Michael Farkas rêve en grand et espère que le nouveau centre perdurera. «C’est pour nos petits-enfants», résume-t-il.

“a place to gather, a place to exchange, a place to learn, a place toteach, share our victories, talk about  the successes and maybe some of the hardships that the community is going through.” 

Centre for Canadian of African descent tasked with developing plans for affordable housing and a culture centre.

A New Door to Little Burgundy suggests a creative and documentation hub. The space offers a plateform to digitally create, document and experiment in space from the rail of the Georges-Vanier metro to its exit embedded in the community. The space’s program is oriented digitally to  equip and offer a learning plateform to the community with tools for the future.

While the transitioning mostly happens underground, the available space in the background of the site is left to the development of social housing from commercial spaces overlooking the street to community-owned businesses.

The neighbourhood’s architecture contributes to the community’s mobility. Combined with preserved subdivisions of the past, the 1960s social apartment block typology and layout, that is, blocks often away from the street and not occupying the entirety of their lot. They deploy a highly porous fabric, both physically and visually. They, thus, participate in a rich and complex set of layered networks. 

The layout of the social housing blocks emerges an important network of sidewalks communicating with each other, the inner courtyards and the street. The network allows the pedestrian to walk around and quickly take shortcuts. The type of scenario is common to the neighbourhood’s housing typology and in the social interventions.

This free circulation opens up the user to many surprises and moments of spontaneity, things appreciated in my adventures in Little Burgundy.

While this fast way of circulating freely is very interesting, however could the passage between the Georges Vanier metro station and Coursol street could be done more slowly to make people discover the activities of this structuring creative passage?

The prototype as been a tool of design to imagine spaces and how they could conciliate a path and a usage simultaneously.

Some have raised interesting qualities such as the absence of edges in a cylinder to use it as an immersive space, or the platform system to offer different dynamic perspectives on the whole space. These spaces which slow down time or which act as a spontaneous distraction for users thus invite them to venture there longer or for a short stop.

The route, whether for the community via its main entrance or for the visitor via the metro, is punctuated by programmatic spaces marked by a distinct materiality and geometry facilitating the practice of activities.

Walking around exposes the user to many perspectives, depths of space inhabited by experiments, performances or activities in themselves. Access to facilities and interaction between local and visitor users is facilitated by the flexibility and varied scale of spaces.

From Métro Georges-Vanier, the public firstly is exposed to the creations, stories and successes of the community through the experimentation spaces all the way to the creation space’s canopy utilizing the experimentation space simultaneously.

Making their way up, the visitor is immerse in the fabrication laboratory where technology wraps people around in shaping and creating. The space is organized almost like an creative indoor street and reaches the digital laboratory which aims to purse this idea of a street, but takes moreover the shape of a public space. The space is rather flexible and open as it encourages gathering in between working pods, meeting rooms or plateforms.

If the desire is to continue towards the digital archive spaces, the path continues by the stairs to reach spaces for short and long term consultations and higher up, spaces for digitally archiving memories and objects precious to us, or that of the community. It is in this space that memories are preserved, that creations are archives to build and preserve Little Burgundy’s history.

The space on the last floor, over the archives, is offered to the community. During everyday life, it can be seen as a meeting, learning, co-working room with the internet offered by the center and more. In the evenings and weekends, this generous space overlooking the neighborhood can accommodate community events, parties, shows or any activities.

The entry, being at the crossroads between the space of archives and spaces of creation becomes a culmination point between local and visitors where a space offering food and drink could accelerate exchanges.

A new door to Little-Burgundy is an attempt to create new dynamic between the City of Montreal and historico-culturally rich Little-Burgundy. The space offers digital creative, documentative and experimental spaces from the plateform of the Georges-Vanier metro to its exit embedded in the community. The transitional space hopes to bring light to the creative minds and contribute to the history of the black community of Montreal, to the community of Little Burgundy and visitors by slowing them down in this journey.