Within three years, the city of Laval will have a huge multifunctional cultural centre worth some $180 million, including creative spaces, an auditorium, an art gallery, a dance studio and a large library that will ultimately have nothing to envy its big sister in Montreal.
The symbolic groundbreaking ceremony took place Monday morning on a vacant lot in the Montmorency sector, where there is already a hotel, university buildings, a college and a performance hall.
This addition of nearly 25,000 square metres dedicated to culture will include a specialized library for teenagers and another for children, with cabins and even an evocation of Beaver Lake, the artificial basin of Mount Royal, since this high-perched facility will allow you to see the Montreal mountain on the horizon. It will be an oculus piercing three levels of the four-storey building and allowing you to see the children playing on the glass floor.
The architect Manon Asselin, from Atelier TAG, the firm that co-designed the building, came up with the idea. “We wanted to do something more playful and we didn’t want the library to end up stratified in horizontal bands,” she says. “So we proposed this cutout in the floors that means that, from below, we can see the little ones upstairs in their cabins, a space that we interpreted as a nod to the lake.”
The firm won the architectural competition by joining forces in a consortium with NEUF architect(e)s and the contractor Montoni.
The proposal accepted by Laval and the Ministry of Culture after a competition is organized around large wooden drums inserted into a transparent building. “The problem with this new construction is really its scale,” says M.me Asselin. “In a building of this size, it is often difficult to organize. We wanted a space on a human scale with architectural landmarks. So we had this idea of fitting together large wooden drums, which became the programmatic elements of the project, to accommodate the auditorium and the multifunctional or exhibition rooms.”
The circulation spaces between the rigid but circular zones will be very fluid, with smaller and more intimate areas all around. The building will also include a monumental staircase integrating bleachers and a suspended work of art. It will be LEED Gold certified with green roofs, a very energy-efficient envelope, a relaxation roof terrace, rainwater retention and surrounding plantings favoring native plant species.
The largest cultural project in Quebec
The construction of this infrastructure will be the most expensive of the decade in the cultural field in Quebec. The building will cost $150 million, to which must be added about thirty to equip it with all kinds of equipment — computers, scenographic devices and books, of course. Even the museum construction sites for the Riopelle pavilion in Quebec City and the expansion of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal are less financially demanding.
“My wish, with this beautiful installation, is to contribute to the development of citizens, to their well-being,” said Laval Mayor Stéphane Boyer, as he unveiled virtual models of the infrastructure. “Having a library and a cultural centre in a city is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.”
Quebec, represented at the unveiling by the minister responsible for Laval, Christopher Skeete, has provided $44 million for this project in the pipeline since at least 2010, according to the mayor. The Laval region has been one of the least fortunate in cultural investments for decades. Before this year, it received about forty cultural dollars per capita per year, while Montreal and the Capitale-Nationale monopolize 10 times more.
The new planning and project execution department of the city of Laval has chosen to build the complex using a design-build approach. This approach allows for calculating risks and speeding up construction.
The Centre de création artistique professionnelle (CCAP), the major beneficiary of the project along with the library, will be managed by the Regroupement d’organismes culturels et d’artistes lavallois (ROCAL). The CCAP will include creative workshops and performance spaces. “ROCAL recognizes the immense trust placed in it by the City of Laval by entrusting it with the management of the CCAP, an ultramodern cultural facility that will allow artists and professional organizations to create in optimal conditions, promoting the influence of their works on a local, national and international scale,” said ROCAL President Mario Borges, thanking elected officials for the successful completion of this project.
The cultural infrastructure will receive a new name following a competition. The construction site itself will open in a few weeks. The inauguration of the complex is planned for 2027. Attendance projections speak of approximately 125,000 visitors per year.